The Trump administration is working to get the U.K. to drop its hate speech protections – laws that prohibit inciting violence against protected classes – as part of a larger trade deal with the U.S.

Currently, it’s illegal to incite hatred on the basis of sexual orientation in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales, and on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in Scotland. Hate speech laws don’t exist in the U.S. due to a different understanding of free speech, but they are common in other wealthy democracies as an attempt to stop people from inciting violence against historically persecuted groups.

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The Trump administration, though, appears to want to impose the U.S. understanding of free speech on the U.K. The Independent reports that an unnamed source in Washington said that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are putting pressure on U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer (Labour) to repeal the nation’s hate speech laws in order to get a larger trade deal signed.

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The source said that Vance is “obsessed by the fall of Western civilisation” and views hate speech laws in the U.K. as part of the problem. Vance, according to the source, believes that the trade deal “is a way of putting further pressure on the U.K. over free speech. If a deal does not go through, it makes Labour look bad.”

“No free speech, no deal. It is as simple as that,” the source said.

Vance has publicly been quite critical of European countries, saying that they are suppressing free speech.

“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference in February in a speech that was heavily criticized in Europe for downplaying the threat to democracy posed by Russia and China and blaming, instead, Greta Thurnburg, immigrants, and liberals. “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”

The trade deal in question has been part of ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and the U.K. for years. Negotiations started early in the Biden administration, and the trade deal is focused largely on high-tech industries like artificial intelligence and biotech. The U.K. has reportedly offered to drop a tax on digital services but is standing firm on not accepting U.S. meat with certain additives. The goal is to remove tariffs between the countries completely, although the Trump administration’s recent approach to tariffs has worried the Starmer government.

“I don’t support the kind of approach to unilateral tariffs that the U.S. has pursued,” said U.K. Secretary of State for Business and Trade Jonathan Reynolds. “We’ve made that very clear to our U.S. friends and colleagues, but there are issues as to how parts of trading works around the word, and there is a need to look at how we can do that fairly: how we can consider where in some cases countries are not operating to the same rules that we might expect here in the U.K.?”

Vance said in a recent interview that he believes there’s a “good chance” that an agreement can be reached. He also said that such an agreement is likely to happen because of what he sees as ethnic similarities between the U.S. and the U.K.

“There’s a real cultural affinity,” he said. “And, of course, fundamentally, America is an Anglo country.”

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