If you would go by "what the majority wants", you could completely forget free speech, and the rights of most minorities too (and I'm not only referring to the UK, but to most of the world).

Like most contemporary free speech advocates, the current conservative government only advocates for free speech for those whose views align with their own.

They’ve been enacting laws to restrict protest and strikes, stripping funding from media organisations that dare to criticise it and making it harder for young people to vote.

Not everyone shares the views on freedom of speech that the US has. For example holocaust denial in Germany, or corporate donations, attack adverts, libel laws, Nor do many countries share the view on the same limits that the US does.

Theres a somewhat arrogant view amongst Americans that their view on what does and dies not count as freedom of speech is the only view.

Picketing funerals with hate speech is not wanted in many counties for example. Waving the flags of terrorist groups and calling for the extermination of a people isn’t wanted in many countries.

American here, I think you might be slightly off. The views of Americans as to what constitutes free speech are different than what the 1st Amendment actually says and what SCOTUS is willing to extend it to. There are very few people who look at the reasoning in, say, McCutcheon v. FEC, and say "yes, this totally improves free speech". They look at it and say "this is legalizing bribery and calling it free speech".

Donald Trump literally campaigned on "opening up our libel laws" so he could sue the shit out of anyone who accurately reported his net wealth. The crowd ate it up.

People like the Westboro Baptist Church aren't exactly loved either. In fact, they're a meme. We make fun of them. I'm sure there's a lot of Americans who would love the idea of banning them, and there's groups of bikers who go around running their bikes to shout over them and thus censor them.

America's reputation for free speech extremism comes from the ACLU, which up until recently was the sort of legal nonprofit that would literally sue for the free speech rights of Nazis, a group of people who explicitly reject freedom of speech. They've backed off on this only because it blew up in their faces with the Unite the Right rally.

My personal belief, probably not shared by all Americans and definitely not shared by HN, is that Germany's laws banning Holocaust denial actually improve freedom of speech. More generally, political speech that calls for censorship needs to be treated the same as actual laws that ban speech - i.e. we need to censor them. I mention HN because a lot of tech enthusiast viewpoints are influenced by the EFF, which is run by people who think censorship is just spicy packet loss. Those viewpoints here are actually rather extreme even by American standards.