Читать книгу Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? - Mick Hume, Mick Hume - Страница 14

I believe in free speech. You believe in free speech. Everybody with more than two free brain cells to rub together in the free world believes in freedom of speech. Or so they say.

‘Blasphemers’ can be sentenced to death in Islamist states. The internet might be censored to near-death in Communist China. In our civilised Western universe, however, we still enjoy freedom of expression. Or think we do.

Ignoring the disaffected online fans of the ‘Islamic State’, who tend to favour censoring the press by decapitating journalists, it would be hard to find serious voices in the Anglo-American world who publicly reject the principle of free speech as a Good Thing. Any takers out there for the opposing principle of ‘enslaved speech’?

Strange, then, that so many now choose to exercise their freedom of speech in order to tell the rest of us what we can’t say.

This is the dirty secret of the great free-speech fraud. Our politicians and public figures stage displays of support for free speech in principle. Yet in practice they will trash it. When they say they support free speech ‘in principle’ they apparently mean on another planet, rather than in the real world.

Back here on Earth meanwhile the fashion is to support something called ‘free speech-but’, as in: ‘I believe in free speech-but there are limits/-but not for hate speech/-but you cannot offend or insult or upset other people.’ And the buts are getting bigger and wider all the time. As one US commentator had it in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, ‘The “but” in the phrase “I believe in free speech but” is bigger than Kim Kardashian’s [and] has more wiggle-room than Jennifer Lopez’s.’1 Those remarks would probably get him banned from speaking on several campuses for offensive ‘fat-shaming’.

To say that you believe in free speech ‘but’ is not simply to qualify your support, but to dissolve it altogether. Free speech is not something you can sort-of believe in on a scale of 1 to 10.

To imagine that you could believe in free speech ‘but’ not for certain opinions is rather like saying ‘I believe in scientific proof, but that’s no reason to rule out Father Christmas and fairies at the bottom of the garden’; or ‘I believe in the equality of the sexes, but equal pay for women is going too far’; or ‘I believe in same-sex marriage, but not for lesbians’. The b-word does not ‘clarify’ your stated belief, but effectively buts it out of existence.

The predominance of the ‘but’ lobby reflects the underlying ambivalent attitude towards free speech in Anglo-American society. The right to free speech is not only written into the First Amendment to the US Constitution and (with more umming and ahhing) the European Convention on Human Rights, but also apparently into the hearts of the people. In 2014, while the UK’s political elites indulged in another round of breast-beating about ‘British values’, ComRes pollsters asked the British public what they thought the most precious of those values might be. The runaway winner of this popularity contest was old-fashioned red-blooded free speech, with 48 per cent of the vote.2

Yet behind the headline support for the principle of free speech, the UK seems not so sure in practice; one major 2007 survey found that a larger section of the British public (64 per cent) supported the right of people ‘not to be exposed to offensive views’ than supported the right for people to ‘say what they think’ (54 per cent).3 Perhaps more surprisingly, polls suggest that many Americans, too, might not be as certain about free speech as they once were. Washington’s prestigious Newseum Institute conducts an annual survey on attitudes to the First Amendment, which alongside other liberties enshrines freedom of speech and of the press in the US Constitution. Asked whether they think the First Amendment goes ‘too far’ in upholding those freedoms, in 2014 38 per cent of Americans answered ‘yes’ – an increase from 34 per cent in 2013, and a big jump from the mere 13 per cent who said yes in 2012.4

Despite enjoying widespread support in principle, in practice free speech is on the endangered list. Freedom of expression today is like one of those exotic animals that everybody says they love, but that still appear to be heading inexorably towards extinction. The difference is that if we continue to lose the habitat where free speech can flourish, the truly endangered species will be humanity as the free and civilised creation we know, love and sometimes hate.

Yes, we all believe in free speech. And yet … everywhere from the internet to the universities, from the sports stadium to the theatrical stage, from out on the streets to inside our own minds, we are allowing the right to freedom of expression to be reined in and undermined. Free speech is seen as a Good Thing gone bad, increasingly regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility. The freedom that, as the next chapter outlines, was so hard won through history is now in danger of being given away without a fight, or even offered up willingly for sacrifice.

Barely a day seems to pass without news of another knock-back for free speech: a proposed British law against the wrong type of political ideas, another US or UK university ban on the wrong types of joke, pop song or speaker on campus, yet another Twitter shitstorm descending on the head of somebody foolish enough to express the wrong 140-character opinion about rape or abortion law, Islam or immigration, Scots or gay adoption.

A steady drip of outrage is eroding the rock of free speech. The response is even worse. On any day when cartoonists are not being murdered in Europe, few voices are raised to speak up for freedom. We seem to spend far more time discussing the problem with free speech and how to curb it than how to defend, never mind extend it. That’s why the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ placards had not even been cleared from the streets before the discussion turned to the importance of avoiding further offence to anybody. And every little extra curb on one sort of speech encourages mission-creep towards censoring another.

The freedom to think what you like and say what you think has become another empty ritual to which we just pay lip service. Even the lip service stops when somebody dares to think it is real and says something beyond the pale or the bland. People might oppose outright censorship, but a self-censoring muted conformism is the order of the day.

What’s going on? There is nothing new about free speech being threatened. The modern right to freedom of speech has been under threat since the moment it was first won. It would always be true to say that ‘free speech is in danger’. But there is something different happening today.

The danger to free speech in the West now comes not only from such traditional enemies as the little Hitlers and aspiring ayatollahs who disdain to conceal their contempt for liberty. More important today is the challenge from those who claim to support that freedom, yet seek to restrict it in practice. This is the new threat: the silent war on free speech.

It is a silent war, but not because its proponents are quiet – they are anything but. This is a silent war because nobody who expects to be taken seriously will admit that they are fundamentally against the right to free speech. To oppose freedom of expression has historically meant being in favour of fascism, totalitarianism and the burning of heretical books if not of actual heretics. Few want to be seen goose-stepping out in such company today.

Instead we have a silent war on free speech; a war that will not speak its name, fought by wannabe censors who claim that they are nothing of the sort. The result is not violent repression and brute censorship, but the demonising of dissident opinions in a crusade for conformism.

The silent war is not ostensibly aimed against free speech at all. It is posed instead as a worthy assault on the evils of hate speech and incitement. It is presented, not as a blow against liberty, but as a defence of rights: the right to protection from offensive and hateful words and images; freedom from media harassment and internet ‘trolling’; the right of students to feel ‘comfortable’ on campus.

In order to confront these new lines of attack on free speech, it is necessary first to crack the code that is being used to infiltrate our lines. You will rarely hear anybody admit that they hate free speech. Instead the crusaders come up with a coded way to get that message across, and their codes can change as fast as if controlled by an Enigma machine (rather than by a student union committee meeting). You might be accused of hate speech, or told to go and ‘check your privilege’ (e.g. make sure you are not a white person talking about racism); or you could be accused of ‘mansplaining’ an issue to women, or of committing ‘micro-aggressions’ in your speech. All very confusing no doubt, and easy for even a sympathetic speaker to get caught out and left behind the fast-changing tide.

But whatever coded form of words they deploy, the crusaders are really saying one of two things: either ‘You-Can’t-Say-THAT!’, if you’re attacked for what is said; or ‘YOU-Can’t-Say-That!’ if the attack is on who said it. Or possibly, both.

But no, no, we must understand, those demanding restrictions on what others can say today are not against free speech. They are simply in favour of freedom from words that may upset or do harm. Who could disagree with such humane sentiments or fail to empathise with those facing what they deem offensive, harmful speech?

You don’t have to be a Bambi-shooting bigot to defend unfettered free speech. Quite the opposite. Free speech is the lifeblood of any modern, liberal-minded society. It follows that any attempt to restrict free speech, however worthy the case might sound, imperils a liberty that has helped to make all our other rights possible.

In today’s intellectual climate it can sometimes seem as if offending others is the worst offence of all. What are presented as progressive attempts to protect people from harmful words have become coded ways to insist that there is too much freedom of expression. It might sound a nice idea to live in a warm, womblike world of inoffensive insipidity. The problem is that to demand the right not to be offended is to deny everybody’s freedom to offend against the accepted ethics and opinions of the age. And without that subversive freedom to question the unquestionable – the right to be offensive – society might never have advanced to a point where anti-racism or LGBT rights became acceptable subjects for public debate in the first place.

Never mind the lip service paid to it ‘in principle’ by the free-speech fraudsters today. Underlying attitudes to that freedom have not simply altered in recent times. They have been turned on their head.

We are living in the age of the reverse-Voltaires. The revolutionary writer François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a pioneer of free speech in eighteenth-century Enlightenment France. Voltaire is credited with one of the great historical sayings on the subject: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ (In fact those words that resound down the years were not written by Voltaire, but by his biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall. More than a century after his death, she pithily captured the spirit of his writings for an English-speaking audience.)5

Voltaire’s principle is a clear statement of the attitude to tolerance and free speech that characterised the Enlightenment. Some might prefer the updated version credited to Oscar Wilde – ‘I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself’ – though the spirit remains much the same. It recognises that free speech is something more than a personal possession, something bigger than a personal opinion. Free speech is too important to be restricted, however it might be used and abused. It is a test of any free society that, with Voltaire, we allow open debate and freedom for the thought that we disagree with or even detest.

Now, however, we have the rise of the reverse-Voltaires. The cri de coeur of today’s hardcore offence-takers turns his principle inside out: ‘I know I’ll detest and be offended by what you say, and I will defend to the end of free speech my right to stop you saying it.’ The reverse-Voltaires do not wish to dispute ideas or arguments that offend them. They would deny the other person’s right to say it in the first place.*

For the reverse-Voltaires, nothing can be more important than their personal emotions, nothing is bigger than their ego or identity. The only test of whether something should be allowed is how it makes them feel (and most important, how it makes them feel about themselves). Reverse-Voltaires cannot tolerate having their opinions challenged, prejudices questioned, self-image disrespected or toes stepped on. The result is a demand to limit free speech in the name of their right to be protected from words.

The reverse-Voltaires are as intolerant of dissent as any old-time religionists. But where the priests of yore based their intolerance on the supposedly objective authority of a supreme God above, today’s would-be censors base theirs on the subjective wishes of their personal idol within. They are often self-regarding narcissists; except that where Narcissus fell in love with his placidly beautiful image reflected in a pool of water, they are in love with their angry image of permanently outraged self-righteousness, reflected in the murky pool of social media.

The champion of free speech Voltaire said (in his own words this time): ‘Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.’ The mantra of the reverse-Voltaires is more like: ‘Think of yourself and don’t let others enjoy the privilege of thinking any differently.’

The rise of the reverse-Voltaires, who insist on their right to stop the speech of others, marks a counter-revolution in Western attitudes to free speech.

In the next chapter, we take a whistle-stop tour of the history of how free speech was won in the West. Until a few hundred years ago intolerance was the accepted orthodoxy of the ruling elites in a straitjacketed European society. The belief in free speech first emerged in modern Europe and then America not as an abstract ideal, but as the expression of a newly envisioned freedom in society.

Freedom of speech was conceived as a way for individuals, groups and entire nations to defend their interests against overbearing political or religious authority. It was not only about people having the right to express themselves. It was also about exposing the use and abuse of power, and holding the powerful to account.

That was why the demand for free speech and a free press was at the heart of the movements for democratic government first in England, then in America, then continental Europe. It was why free speech was spoken of in terms of a battlefield defence – as a ‘bulwark’ or a ‘fortress’ in the fight against tyranny. Free speech became the weapon that men (and later, women) would wield to defy and even to help defeat the authoritarian power of states.

That was then. This is now – a time when, rather than embracing the demand for free speech as a defence against the power of the state, many demand that the authorities use their powers to suppress the ‘offensive’ or ‘harmful’ speech of other people. Voltaire the free-speaking revolutionary has been replaced by reverse-Voltaire, the radical crusader against excess of freedom. Where once the danger was seen as the state’s control of speech, now free speech running wild is the threat proclaimed.

How have we come to this? It is not that free speech has really declined in importance. Freedom of expression remains the most important of freedoms, the voice of a free society.

The real change is one of perceptions. Not just in what we think of words, but in what we think of one another. Attitudes to free speech almost always reflect our attitudes to people, and how much freedom we believe they should have. The growing mistrust of free speech partly reflects the declining faith we hold in humanity. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that hell is other people. To update Sartre for today, some fashionably misanthropic philosopher might declare that hell is other people’s opinions.

These changes in attitude towards words and one another are underpinned by wider cultural shifts that are beyond the scope of an argument about free speech. The consequences, however, should be clear enough. In Anglo-American society today a therapeutic concern with protecting emotions is often seen as more important than a clash of ideas. People are perceived and often perceive themselves as vulnerable, capable of being either harmed or incited to harm others by words alone. The view of humanity as vulnerable, thin-skinned and ultra-sensitive makes free speech appear more dangerous today. In the twenty-first century you can draw moral authority from your status not only as an old-fashioned warrior or a leader, but more often from claiming public recognition as a victim. That elevation of vulnerability into a virtue has clear implications for attitudes towards the liberty of others to indulge in offensive speech.

As people become more wary of one another, free speech has become something to fear, an unpredictable spark that could start a conflagration. The worries about too many words roaming around freely without constraint is really a fear of people being allowed to say and hear what they choose without the guiding hand of a parental figure or policeman.

The reverse-Voltaires are demanding the right to be cocooned against the discomfort caused by other people’s words running riot. And they are quite prepared to use official or unofficial forms of censorship to get their way.

We might think that we live in an age when, at least in Western societies, there is less repressive government censorship than at any time in recent memory. Yet as one critic, Philip Johnston, notes, the reality is that in the non-censoring UK, ‘more people are being jailed or arrested in Britain today for what they think, believe and say than at any time since the eighteenth century’.6

Laws That Make Offensive Speech a Criminal Offence

Despite the UK’s proud boast to be the historic home of freedom since the Magna Carta, dozens of laws impinge on our right to free speech. Here are just a few of the more recent ones that can criminalise speech which some might find offensive.

 Sections 4A and 5 of the Public Order Act (POA) 1986 make it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress. This means it can be a crime to say something which might upset a hypothetical other, if they were to hear it. The scope of the law is further broadened by equating ‘words or behaviour’, as if words were the same as deeds. (The word ‘insulting’ has now been removed from Section 5, but only after police and prosecutors assured the politicians that they could arrest and prosecute the same people for using ‘abusive’ words anyway.)

 Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to send a message by means of a public electronic communications network that is grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character. This is a remarkably sweeping offence – who is to say what is or is not ‘grossly offensive’? It has been used to prosecute and imprison people for the crime of making bad jokes and tasteless remarks on social media, or swapping online insults with other football fans.

 The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act amended the Public Order Act to make it an offence punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment to use threatening words or behaviour intended to stir up religious hatred. The 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act further amended the POA to add an offence of using threatening words or behaviour intended to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. (Note the characteristic equation of ‘words and behaviour’.) These are potentially wide-ranging laws given, for example, that a racist incident is now defined as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’.

 The Terrorism Act 2006 criminalises ‘encouragement of terrorism’, punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment. The offence is defined so broadly that it includes making statements which are deemed to ‘glorify’ terrorism, even if that was not the intention of those making the statement. The sweeping law could be used to prosecute not just supporters of Islamic State, but also of, say, Kurdish groups fighting against IS.

 The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012 creates two new offences specifically aimed at football fans, at matches and online. The law makes it a crime to use words and gestures around football that would be legal elsewhere. It has been used to arrest, prosecute and even imprison fans for singing offensive football songs – an extraordinary act of authoritarian control in an allegedly free society.

None of these laws would last long if passed by American politicians, since the First Amendment to the US Constitution enshrines the rule that ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’.

Source of legal facts: Liberty

How can there simultaneously be both less censorship and more punishment of words? Because, the UK authorities will insist, the legal crackdown on what people say, especially online, is not state censorship of free speech at all. It is simply a positive attempt to protect people from harmful and offensive words. For example, official figures suggest that on average there are 25,000 proceedings in the UK each year for speech offences under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 alone, with around half ending in convictions. But in the eyes of officialdom that’s not censorship, since those arrests were for using words or behaviour the courts considered threatening or abusive.7

In the USA, we are assured, there can be no state censorship of speech, thanks to the protection given by the First Amendment. But that does not stop the politicians trying, in the cause of protecting citizens from harmful words. In May 2014 the New York court of appeals finally struck down as unconstitutional the state’s 1965 ‘aggravated harassment’ statute, which made speech deemed ‘annoying and alarming’ a criminal offence. Weeks later, however, New York state’s highest court had to strike down a remarkably far-reaching new law on cyberbullying passed by Albany County, which sought to criminalise any electronic communication posted ‘with the intent to harass, annoy, threaten, abuse, taunt, intimidate, torment, humiliate, or otherwise inflict significant emotional harm on another person’. The notion that it could be an offence not simply to threaten but to ‘annoy’ somebody online was judged to infringe the First Amendment protection of free speech.8 Yet other US districts still enforce apparently constitutional laws against ‘annoying’ people with words.

No politician or official in the West, it seems, is publicly in favour of censorship today. A ban, however, by any other name still smells the same. The way that state curbs on speech can now be presented as positive, even liberating, measures is a sign of changing times. But it should not alter our attitude to censorship.

In the UK, once we had to deal with an authoritative nation state that might rarely but unashamedly impose political censorship in the name of defending the ‘national interest’. Now we have something more like the ‘indignation state’, which promiscuously bans words and punishes speakers as a form of therapy, to protect individuals from offensive and outrageous speech. Official censorship today presents a far softer, more people-friendly face. But it is none the better for that.

The UK state now lacks the authority boldly to censor in its own name, using the traditional excuse of ‘national security’. When it tries to do so, as with the recent attempts to outlaw ‘extremism’, it runs into trouble and opposition. More often today the authorities claim to issue bans and pass laws on behalf of others. They insist that they are not attacking free speech, but simply protecting the vulnerable from harmful words. The state censors reluctantly, not because it hates freedom, but only because it is outraged by what it deems offensive hate speech. As Boris Johnson, the Conservative Mayor of London, declared when banning a ridiculous Christian advert about ‘curing’ homosexuality from the capital’s buses, we must be ‘intolerant of intolerance’.9 But then we end up with the even more ridiculous notion of banning the expression of opinions in the cause of freedom.

In the USA the indignation state might be frustrated in its desire to pass laws against offensive hate speech by the pesky First Amendment (although polls claim growing support among Americans for anti-hate-speech legislation). But the US authorities are prepared to go down the route of informal censorship to achieve the same ends. In 2011, as the fifty-six Muslim states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference pushed for an international law prohibiting blasphemy, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought to reassure them that the Obama administration was onside. Clinton told the OIC that, although the First Amendment meant Washington could not ban anti-Islamic speech, rather than stand up for free speech the administration could still apply ‘some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming so that people don’t feel they have the support to do what we abhor.’10 Arm-twisting and embarrassment, the ‘old-fashioned techniques’ of the school playground, appear to be the US state’s preferred methods to stop the naughty citizens talking out of turn. Where could these Islamists have got the idea that it was legitimate to force blasphemers into silence?

Yet the official censors of our Western governments and courts are rarely the driving force behind censorship today. The authorities more often take their lead from the army of unofficial censors demanding action against allegedly dangerous speech.

These lobby groups, individual politicians, media figures and student activists are the leading reverse-Voltaires of public life. They are often full-time offence-takers, whose default emotion (and emotions count more than ideas now) is outrage. Theirs is a free-floating sense of outrage which, while apparently reflecting a deeply held moral conviction about an issue, can quickly detach itself and move on to the next free-speech scandal.

Among the preferred tools of these crusading reverse-Voltaires are the online petition and the twitterstorm, which can create an instant impression of mass outrage with relatively little effort or substance. These unofficial measures are often sufficient to silence the targeted forms of speech. If not, their demands for official censorship will generally find a willing ear among the UK authorities.

So it was that in November 2014 the UK Home Office took the extraordinary step of barring somebody from entering the country solely because of his unpleasant views. Julien Blanc was not an Islamic extremist or a racist demagogue. He was a professional ‘pick-up artist’ who hoped to give young British men the benefit of his dodgy advice on how to seduce women. Stupid and sexist no doubt, but hardly subversive.

Yet for the reverse-Voltaires, this pathetic wordplay was not just objectionable, it was intolerable, and had to be stopped. Having successfully lobbied for Blanc to be denied entry to Australia, they turned their attention to the UK. An online petition demanding that his UK visa be blocked, backed by sound and fury on the twittersphere, effortlessly attracted 160,000 virtual signatures. That is the sort of language that the authorities understand, easily drowning out any talk of Blanc’s right to free speech. The British government duly banned him. But, they insisted, barring somebody from the country on the basis of his idiotic ideas was not about censorship of opinions. It was because, Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone insisted, his advice on how to pick up women ‘could have led to an increase in sexual violence and harassment’. Alternatively of course, it could have led to nothing more than a few embarrassing moments in the singles bars of Britain. But the new rule is that it’s better to be safe than sorry when policing free speech.11

The perma-outraged, professionally offended reverse-Voltaires are relatively few in number. Yet they punch well above their weight in terms of influencing public policy and debate – as symbolised by the disproportionate importance attached to their favourite playground, Twitter. They have helped to create an atmosphere in which standing up for a fundamental right – free speech – can be seen as extremism. It is not that most people are enthusiastic about official censorship, but many have internalised the idea that it is better not to offend than to express a controversial opinion. These are the self-censoring ‘sorry majority’, symbolised by politicians and public figures who will apologise and withdraw their remarks at the first sign of a wagging finger.

The lugubrious England football manager Roy Hodgson encapsulated the spirit of the sorry majority in November 2014, after he was informed that some England supporters at a match against Scotland in Glasgow had been singing anti-IRA songs. Hodgson assured the media that he had not heard the chants in question, but that did not matter: ‘If anyone was offended,’ declared the England manager, ‘I’m sure the FA [English Football Association] would like to apologise to them.’12 Police confirmed there had been no complaints about the chanting from offended members of the IRA or anybody else, but at the merest mention of the possibility that ‘anyone was offended’, a national figure who had heard nothing felt moved to issue an official apology to the imagined victims. Such is the effect of the silent war on free speech in creating the stultifying atmosphere in which we live and try to breathe today.

The reverse-Voltaires are seeking to overturn some long-established principles of free speech. Nadine Strossen, a professor at the New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, points out that there are two ‘bedrock’ principles of free-speech law in America. The first of these is ‘content neutrality’ or ‘viewpoint neutrality’: ‘It holds that government may never limit speech just because any listener – or even, indeed, the majority of the community – disagrees with or is offended by its content or the viewpoint it conveys.’ The second bedrock principle of US law holds that ‘a restriction on speech can be justified only when necessary to prevent actual or imminent harm to an interest of “compelling” importance, such as violence or injury to others’.13

Twenty years ago, in a book entitled Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights, Strossen demonstrated how the radical feminist campaign for legal bans on pornography in America ‘violates both of these principles’, by demanding that a form of expression be restricted because of its offensive content; in order for that campaign to succeed, she wrote, ‘the very foundation of our free speech structure would have to be torn up’.

The Nineties’ would-be feminist censors might largely have failed. Two decades later, however, the reverse-Voltaires have had considerable success in tearing up the principle of ‘content neutrality’ and getting speech restricted on the ground that they find what it says offensive. They have not managed to rewrite the legal principles of the US First Amendment (not yet, anyway). But they have secured countless bans in practice on US and UK campuses, and shaped the British state’s censoriously interventionist attitude towards offensive speech. As the British conservative commentator John O’Sullivan noted in a Wall Street Journal essay reviewing these changes in both the US and the UK, ‘Today, content is increasingly the explicit justification for restricting speech. The argument used, especially in colleges, is that “words hurt” … In the new climate, hurtful speech is much more likely to be political speech than obscene speech.’14 The success of the reverse-Voltaires in chipping away at those bedrock principles is certainly hurting free speech.

The silent war on free speech often appears a remarkably one-sided affair. Where are those voices prepared to speak up for freedom against all the official and unofficial censorship, and wake the sorry majority from their self-censoring slumber? There are relatively few prominent figures today prepared to stand on the shoulders of the heroes of the historic fight for free speech. The Tom Paines, John Wilkeses and J. S. Mills of the twenty-first century are most often noticeable by their absence. The outburst of rhetorical support for free speech immediately after the Charlie Hebdo massacre was striking precisely because it was so out of kilter with what we (don’t) hear the rest of the time.

What has happened to the West’s liberal lobby in defence of free speech? They are still willing to speak up for the rights of repressed dissidents in far-flung places, yet when it comes to battles on the home front, many self-styled liberals have accepted the case for restricting the ‘wrong’ types of speech. It is not just that they are failing to resist the assault. Many have gone over to the other side in the free-speech wars.

This war is not led by the traditional enemies of free speech. It would be easier to defend freedom of expression against old-fashioned bigots and censors. But this silent war is more often prosecuted by liberal politicians, intellectuals, academics, writers, judges and suchlike. And those who might once have been in the front rank of the censorship lobby, from religious conservatives to cranky right-wing politicians, can now find themselves on the receiving end.

This turnaround has even helped to create a situation among progressive-minded students where censorship can appear cool. Once radical youth demanded ‘Ban the Bomb’. Today’s generation of student activists are often more likely to be demanding that the authorities ban the book, the bloke or the boobs.

A refined-looking liberal lobby of cultural high-flyers might seem to make an unlikely mob of book-burners. But consider if you will the strange case of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and the attempt to sanitise Britain’s unruly press.

The issues of press freedom and regulation have been in the front line of the UK’s free-speech wars in recent times.* In the summer of 2011 a scandal exploded over phone-hacking at Britain’s bestselling Sunday tabloid, the News of the World. Revelations that journalists had been listening to the private voicemail messages of celebrities, public figures and high-profile crime victims caused a storm of public and political outrage. The turning point came when the Guardian reported that the News of the World had not only accessed the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a Surrey teenager who was kidnapped and murdered on her way home from school in 2002, but that the paper had also deleted ‘key messages’, thus giving the Dowlers ‘false hope’ that their missing daughter was still alive. This last allegation later turned out not to be true, but the damage was done. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp announced the closure of the News of the World, and prime minister David Cameron announced a major official inquiry to be headed by Lord Justice Leveson.

That was only the beginning, however. The indefensible hacking of Milly Dowler’s messages and other tabloid transgressions were seized upon as the pretext for a broader campaign to purge the tabloid newspapers. Those in UK politics and the liberal media who view the ‘popular’ in popular press as a dirty word sought to use the sympathetic victims of phone hacking as human shields behind which to advance their campaign to tame the despised, dirt-digging tabloids. The Leveson Inquiry was given the power not just to probe the hacking scandal, but to take apart the entire ‘culture, ethics and practice’ of the British media and propose a tough new system of regulation to help sanitise what many in high places looked down upon as the gutter press.

Lord Justice Leveson’s final report in late 2012 called for (alongside other punitive measures) a new regulator backed by law to police the press. Shortly afterwards the leaders of Britain’s major political parties stitched up a late-night deal over pizza with Hacked Off, the lobby group for state regulation fronted by celebrities such as Hugh Grant, to create a new system of press regulation. It would be underpinned by Royal Charter and overseen by Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, an ancient secretive group of senior politicians. This suitably medieval-sounding instrument was the first attempt at state-backed policing of press freedom in Britain since the Crown’s licensing of all publications lapsed in 1695. The twenty-first-century press, unsurprisingly, failed meekly to line up to receive a right royal thrashing.

Regardless of their feelings about phone-hacking or tabloid journalism, anybody with a liberal mindset or a liberty-loving bone in their bodies should surely have risen up against this attempt to police what can be published and read, and declared that the freedom of the press is the pulse of a free society. Or as that old freedom-lover Karl Marx put it more than 150 years earlier, that ‘The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself’.15 That was not quite what happened, however. Instead, many of the UK’s most prominent liberals took up the cudgels in support of the Royal Charter and against excessive press freedom. The leading figure in the UK civil liberties lobby, Shami Chakrabarti of the lobby group Liberty, had sat in judgement on the tabloid press and found it guilty, as a select member of Lord Justice Leveson’s panel at the inquiry that was effectively a show trial of tabloid journalism. Now the rest of the liberal elite demanded the sentence be carried out.

In the spring of 2014 Hacked Off issued a public demand for the press to bend the knee and submit to being regulated by Royal Charter. Rather more remarkably, Hacked Off was soon able to boast that this illiberal demand had been signed by more than 200 of the UK’s ‘leading cultural figures’.

The list of those 200-plus prominent signatories read like a who’s who of the supposedly enlightened world of arts and culture, science and literature, even including some prominent journalists. It was as if the liberal UK had signed its own death warrant.16

One group of signatories which caught my eye included all of the surviving members of Monty Python, then preparing for their big live comeback shows on the London stage. This was a surreal turnaround of the type which bores of a certain age (my age, sadly) might once have called ‘Pythonesque’.

Thirty-five years before, the Pythons had to resist a public crusade led by Mary Whitehouse – Britain’s most prominent 1970s prude – Christian bishops and Tory councillors to have their movie masterwork, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, banned from cinemas as blasphemous. Having seen off the old forces of censorship back then, the Pythons and their successors now appeared to have effectively switched sides and joined a secular crusade for less press freedom. The jokes and sketches in their revival show might have remained the same, but the world outside had clearly changed. The excoriatingly funny anti-censorship campaigners of yesteryear (and their younger duller imitators) have become the po-faced pro-regulation prigs of our times. It might seem reasonable to conclude that open-minded liberalism is a dead parrot – not just resting and definitely not ‘pinin’ for the fjords’, and that a new breed of ‘illiberal liberalism’ now rules the roost.

Shortly after this another symbolic nail was apparently hammered into the coffin of the liberal UK when the actor and former funnyman Steve Coogan – a leading light in the press-bashing Hacked Off lobby, who had declared that ‘press freedom is a lie’ – was announced as a new patron of the charity Index on Censorship. Since the dark days of the Cold War, Index had campaigned for freedom of speech around the world. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a leading Soviet-era dissident still campaigning for human rights in Russia at the age of eighty-six, reacted in horror to the news of Coogan’s sign-up: ‘Index on Censorship is a well-known organisation, and a very important one. There were just a few organisations in the Western world which supported us in Soviet times – and we appreciated it a lot. It is such a pity to hear what is going on with it now.’ She added: ‘Honestly, maybe I have been too idealistic about the situation with freedom of speech in Great Britain. I was always convinced that this was something immovable – and now we see that this is not so. If we do not have any freedom of speech here in Russia, we do want to see it solidly existing somewhere else in the world. And Britain has always been a citadel of media freedom.’17 One might wonder for how much longer, if the illiberal liberals have their way.

In the name of protecting people against offensive and allegedly harmful words and images, we are now witnessing attacks on free speech that reactionary politicians might have baulked at in the past. It is not just that people pretend to support free speech in principle while undermining it in practice. In a sign of how far the free-speech fraud has gone, it has now become acceptable for protesters to demand censorship – and yet claim they are fighting for freedom.

A funny thing happened on the way to the theatre in September 2014. Punters arrived at a south London arts venue, The Vaults, expecting to see a new exhibition about the horrors of colonialism and slavery staged by the prestigious Barbican theatre. Instead they witnessed an exhibition of the horror with which some now behold artistic freedom of expression.

Brett Bailey’s ‘Exhibit B’, based on the ‘human zoos’ that were popular in Europe and America in the age of empire, used black actors in cages to depict the dehumanising effects of racism. It had been exhibited in a dozen European cities before it came to London. But it was apparently deemed unfit to be seen by the public in Europe’s greatest and most diverse cultural capital.

An online petition and protests led by black activists accused Exhibit B of racism and ‘mental terrorism’. One organiser condemned it as ‘in very, very bad taste to our community’ and ‘offensive to the memory of our ancestors’. Barbican management caved in to their stated demand that ‘The Show Must Not Go On’, and cancelled the much-anticipated performance. The demise of ‘Exhibit B’ became Exhibit A in a public showcase of the dangers of a culture that says anybody should have the right to suppress whatever they find offensive.

There could have been several nominations for Most Shocking Performance in this shameful little melodrama. Bad enough was the performance by the self-righteous protesters who took it upon themselves to play the role that had been performed until the 1960s by Britain’s official censor, the Lord Chamberlain, and close a show that they decided, without bothering to see it, was ‘in very, very bad taste’.18

Worse still perhaps was the pathetic performance from the invertebrate theatre authorities (backed by those subtle arbiters of public taste the Metropolitan Police), who effectively hung the white flag from the stage door and allowed the intolerant mob to decide what could be staged in London.

But the award ultimately went to those who argued, apparently with a straight face, that closing down the ‘offensive’ exhibition was actually a triumph over censorship and for free speech. Protest organiser Lee Jasper, a prominent black rights activist and former adviser to London Mayor Ken Livingstone, declared that the Barbican’s attempt to stage ‘Exhibit B’ without consulting people like him symbolised ‘the iniquitous power relations that renders black people [sic] voice inaudible in such debates’. However, Jasper said the protests demanding its closure had shown that they would ‘remain muted and silenced’ no longer. Thus demanding censorship becomes a blow for free speech.19

In February 2015, in England’s leading university city of Oxford, protesters gathered to demand ‘No Platform’ for Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing French Front National, who was speaking at the Oxford Union. As masked protesters tried to get past the police and scale the walls, they chanted: ‘This is free speech – that’s a platform!’ The clear implication being that free speech that night was the exclusive preserve of those demanding that the speaker with whom they disagreed be kicked off the public stage.

Such is the surreal atmosphere surrounding free speech today. A time when almost nobody admits to opposing free speech, and even pro-censorship campaigners can claim to be upholding it. The result, as with the closing of Exhibit B, is that explicit attacks on freedom of expression can go virtually unopposed. As Stella Odunlami, one of the black actors denied a chance to perform in the show, put it, ‘The protesters have censored me and silenced me. The sense of irony here is heavy.’20 It will not be the last time we feel the heavy weight of irony in seeing free speech attacked in the name of defending rights and freedoms.

There are other important barriers, too, now being scaled by the reverse-Voltaires in their silent war on free speech. One of the important gains of the Enlightenment was the drawing of a firm line between the private and public spheres of life. The newly independent autonomous individual would have a public voice, and a private space in which to think and speak, free from the watchful eye of any intolerant inquisitor.

That line is now being seriously blurred. There is no place to hide from the silent war on free speech on either side of the Atlantic – even, it seems, inside your own mind.

In the 2014 sporting year, three high-profile figures – two in the UK and one in the US – were pursued by angry mobs in the media and online, demanding that they be kicked out of their particular game. Nothing unusual about that, you might think, in the always over-emotional world of professional sports. Except that these three were not being hounded for anything that happened on the pitch or anywhere in public. They were nailed to the crossbar for words that they used in private phone calls, emails and text messages.

First up for a battering was Donald Sterling, billionaire owner of the LA Clippers basketball team. The US media got hold of a secretly recorded phone call, in which Sterling told a female friend: ‘It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people’, after she had posted online a photo of herself posing with basketball legend Magic Johnson.21 The nationwide ‘secret racism’ storm that followed blew Sterling out of the Clippers and the National Basketball Association.

Next up was Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the English Premier League and one of the most powerful administrators in football. Scudamore was very nearly knocked off his perch after his PA handed a newspaper private emails between him and a group of old friends and colleagues, in which they chatted among other things about somebody having sex with ‘skinny big-titted broads’ and shared juvenile golf club jokes about ‘fending Edna off my graphite shaft’.22 There followed a huge outcry and demands for Scudamore to be sacked; he survived, at least temporarily, after issuing grovelling public apologies.

Then it was the turn of Scottish football manager Malky Mackay, who had been sacked by Cardiff City. As part of that ongoing business dispute, Cardiff’s owners obtained a court order empowering private investigators to raid the homes of Mackay and his former sidekick at the club, Ian Moody, and seize mobile phones and computers. They trawled through thousands of private text messages, a few of which were somehow leaked to the media, featuring such choice phrases as ‘Fkin chinkys’, ‘He’s a snake. A gay snake’, ‘Go on fat Phil. Nothing like a Jew who sees money slipping through his fingers’, ‘Not many white faces in that lot’ and ‘I bet you’d love a bounce on her falsies’.23 Mackay and Moody were branded ‘vile’ sexists, racists and homophobes, threatened with being banned from football, and both lost their new jobs at another club. When Mackay was subsequently appointed to manage Wigan Athletic, it sparked a repeat row.

None of the words used by the three men were defensible. They were at best stupid and puerile, at worst racist. Yet they should never have had to defend them. None of those offensive words ought to have put Sterling, Scudamore or Mackay in the public stocks, because they were all spoken or written in private conversations.

It has long been accepted that there is a difference between what people think and say in private and their public statements. The notion of interrogating a person’s private thoughts at the point of a hot poker went out with the Inquisition. As the seventeenth-century pioneer of English law Sir Edward Coke made clear, in modern civilised society: ‘No man, ecclesiastical or temporal, should be examined upon the secret thoughts of his heart.’24 And a good thing too. Many of us are quite capable of ranting or ridiculing away in private to an extent we would never dream of doing in public. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes understood, unlike our public speech, ‘The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave and light, without shame, or blame.’25

No longer, it seems. Shaming and blaming men for their ‘secret thoughts’ is now apparently back in style. In recent years the distinction between the public and the private has become as blurred as a muddy touchline. Our voyeuristic political and media class increasingly demands that we be made accountable for what we do in private. Meanwhile exhibitionist public figures have turned their private lives into a profession.

The result of fudging the line between private and public is disastrous for freedom of thought and speech, as one Washington Post columnist spelt out in response to the Donald Sterling scandal: ‘If you don’t want your words broadcast in the public sphere, don’t say them … Such potential exposure forces us to more carefully select our words and edit our thoughts.’26 We are now expected not simply to mind our language, but even to ‘edit’ our private thoughts to make sure they don’t infringe a cultural etiquette.

That ought to be a frightening, unedited, thought. Yet things have now gone so far that there was hardly a word of protest raised against the monstering of those three stooges for their private words. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates felt moved to ask if she was ‘the only person in the US surprised that a private conversation, no matter how ugly, can be the basis for such public recrimination?’ against Sterling. (She wasn’t quite the only one, but the minority was small.) In an article headed ‘End of Free Speech in America’, she asserted the basic truth that in a democratic society we should be free to ‘say anything in private, no matter how stupid, cruel, self-serving or plain wrong, and not be criminalised’. It is a dark sign of the times that those sensible words could themselves now seem shocking to many.27