‘Roll back LGBTQ+ hate speech laws to secure a US trade deal’, UK government reportedly told

US vice president JD Vance has reportedly told the UK government that it must roll back its LGBTQ+ hate speech laws to get a trade deal over the line.As markets across the globe reel from Donald Trump’s unprecedented tariffs, Vance said a trade deal between the two nations is close to being agreed with the vice-president saying to UnHerd “there’s a good chance” there will be an agreement “that’s in the best interest of both countries”. However, according to an anonymous senior Washington figure who is familiar with the deal negotiations, Vance is pressuring the UK government to roll back its hate speech laws – including abuse targeting LGBTQ+ groups or other minorities – as a condition of a deal.

Speaking to The Independent the anonymous source said Vance is “obsessed by the fall of Western civilisation”. “The vice-president expressing optimism [on a trade deal] is a way of putting further pressure on the UK over free speech. If a deal does not go through, it makes Labour look bad,” the source said.



“No free speech, no deal. It is as simple as that.”A source from Downing Street, however, denied the repealing of hate speech laws is part of the trade discussions, saying they are “not a feature of the talks.

”A recent speech by Vance at an event in Munich for the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation also highlighted his views on free speech and democracy. At the February event, Vance said: “We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security.

I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. “But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence – the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. “What I worry about is the threat from within.

The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.He went on to say he looks “most concerningly” at the UK where he alleged “the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs”. JD Vance (Getty)He continued later on: “Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.

“Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.” Since Trump returned to office in January, his administration has signed several executive orders targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including declaring the official policy of the US is that there are “only two sexes”, banning trans men and women from the armed forces, restricting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youngsters under the age 19, stopping trans women from taking part in female sports and purging DEI polices from federal government, military and educational institutions.

Despite the administration’s apparent passion for free speech, government workers were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures and the administration said it would not respond to journalists who have their pronouns listed publicly. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The New York Times that it was a “matter of policy” that press aides did not respond to queries from journalists with “pronouns in their bios”.Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.

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