Chris Street comments are in bright green;
highlights in yellow blockquotes.
Liberty and the state: An assault on free speech is under way: now is the time to defend it
Liberty is not divisible; a society's members do not have it if they have only some of it in some spheres. That is why incremental reductions of aspects of civil liberty regimes are a danger; there quickly comes a point when the claim begins to ring hollow that members of a society have secure margins of freedom in their lives.
The too-true cliché says that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, which is why it is mandatory to resist, and resist vigorously, the early stages of assaults on liberty, not least those made by well-meaning politicians who earnestly, eagerly, sincerely desire to protect us from bad people and from ourselves, for these are the most insidious.
Yet though liberty is indivisible, regimes of liberties have a structure. The keystone of the arch is free speech. Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked.Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which although it always abuses its freedoms in the hunt for profit, is necessary with all its warts, as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary). Without free speech there cannot be a flourishing literature and theatre. Without free speech there are limits to innovation and experiment in any walk of life. In short and in sum, without free speech there is no freedom worth the name in other respects where freedom matters.
All this said, it is also true that there have to be limits to free speech at times. But it is absolutely vital that this be understood scrupulously and carefully, given what has just been said. The standard example of a case where limits to free speech are justified is crying "fire!" in a crowded cinema. What is wrong with doing this, obviously, is gratuitously causing harm (to say "gratuitously" or "irresponsibly" in fact adds nothing because there is no such thing as responsibly causing harm, as such; if harm is caused in achieving a greater good, as when one shouts "fire!" in a crowded cinema when there really is a fire, it is the undesired by-product of intending to achieve good). Allowed too wide a reading, the "fire!" example can justify all manner of unjustifiable restrictions on free speech, as have occurred in our country in recent years ("glorification of terrorism", "incitement to religious hatred"). Restrictions on free speech have to be extremely narrow, extremely specific, case by case, one-off, and only very rarely, on the best justification, prior to the speech itself.
Of course, the principle of freedom of speech promiscuously allows bad free speech, ranging from the stupid to the malicious and dangerous. If it is genuinely dangerous to life, as for example in direct incitement to murder, it invites a case-specific limitation. But generally the remedy for bad free speech is better free speech in response. In the case of libel and slander there is, as an instance of this, the post facto remedy of the courts. True, malicious mud-slinging is damaging even if a libel action is won, but free speech does not come free, and in a mature society we have to recognise that benefits carry costs, and this is one of them.
So vital is free speech to the health and liberty of a society that the plea of "feeling offended" by what people say about one's choices and beliefs is not and can never be a reason for limiting free speech.
Taking offence, followed by infantile demonstrations and infinitely more offensive threats of mayhem and death, has become a stock-in-trade of Muslim activists. This is unacceptable anywhere, but in western liberal democracies especially so, for it strikes at the heart of what makes them both liberal and democracies.
Censorship by coercion and special pleading is as big a threat to liberty in the west today as the actions by our own governments in diminishing our freedoms in the supposed interests of security.
All who choose to come to live in a western liberal democracy should be told that discrimination or insult directed at their age, ethnicity, disability if they have one, and sexuality - the things they cannot choose but to have or be - will not be tolerated; but their opinions and beliefs, the matters over which they have choice, are open season for cartoonists, satirists, and all those who disagree: and they must like it or lump it, or if they are too immature or insecure, or both, to do neither, they are free to leave.
All the above is directed mainly at the restrictions imposed on freedom of speech by our own government in the last few years, in security measures and anti-terrorism laws. That stupid and disgusting girl misnamed the "lyrical terrorist" is an unfortunate example of the wrong-headedness of restrictions on speech; how it sticks in the craw to defend someone who glorifies murderers in a "poem", and yet consistency and principle demands it.
How far we have come from a time, worse in many ways than our own, when one of our judges could resoundingly say, as the 18th-century Lord Mansfield did, "so long as an act remains in bare intention alone it is not punishable by our law". That has changed, for example with conspiracy and allied laws (some introduced in another period of panic, the late 18th and early 19th century scare caused by the French revolution), and now with the proscription of "glorification" of such inglorious things as terrorism; and
our government has even sought to criminalise criticism of religion. The assault on free speech is well under way: it is the time for defence of it to get well under way too.
For more blogs in the Liberty and the state series, click here.
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