Abolish the speech laws – spiked

One racist tweet wouldn’t ordinarily generate so much discussion. On Elon Musk’s X, they’re now 10 a penny. But Northampton childminder Lucy Connolly and the 51 words she posted in the wake of the Southport killings last summer – in which she said ‘set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards [meaning migrants] for all I care’ – have become a key test in our commitment to freedom of speech, which far too many are failing.

She was given 31 months in prison for that post, for the crime of ‘inciting racial hatred’. This was a longer sentence than some received for actually rioting in Southport. Apparently, saying despicable things can be worse – as far as our justice system is concerned – than doing despicable things. Jabbering darkly about hotels in flames can be punished more harshly than menacing a mosque. (This week, Connolly lost her appeal, to the surprise of no one.)

Two things should go without saying here. But here goes anyway. First, what Connolly said was contemptible; you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees. Second, 31 months in prison for a single bigoted tweet is insane, by any humane, liberal standard. Short of direct incitement – speech both likely and intended to result in imminent violence – words alone should never land you in a prison cell, and certainly not for longer than throwing bricks at police.

But the second of those two things has been typically tricky for commentators and activists to digest. Not only do centrists and wokesters back Connolly’s conviction, they are shocked anyone could possibly defend her. Dan Hodges is ostentatiously flabbergasted, as is his wont. Dr Shola thinks Connolly’s defenders are racist, naturally. The notion that a higher principle – of free speech or simple proportion – might override our disgust at what she said is apparently lost on the pundits.

In a way, you can hardly blame them. We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.

Well, the results are in, and Britain’s crusade against ‘hate speech’ has fuelled censorship while noticeably failing to rid these islands of all hatred. Connolly’s case is almost unusual by recent standards, given what she said was genuinely hateful. Thanks to the expansion of our hate-speech and communications laws, you can now be arrested for criticising your daughter’s school too vigorously, calling a man a man on the street or on social media, or telling a policewoman she resembles your lesbian grandmother. The UK is now comfortably arresting more people for speech today than the US did during the First Red Scare. We free-speechers and our ‘slippery-slope fallacy’ turned out to be right after all.

The case for doing away with our speech laws is now overwhelming. Even The Economist has taken notice, publishing a brow-furrowing editorial about the UK’s free-speech crisis last week, more than a decade after it began in earnest. We need to abolish the offence of ‘incitement to racial hatred’, a nebulous phrase that emboldens the state to define and punish ‘hate’. We need to take the red pen to the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, which together are leading to at least 30 arrests a day for ‘offensive’ speech online – which of course is never in short supply. Indeed, these laws, combined with the rise of the social-media age, have led to an absurd situation in which teenagers are routinely arrested, even jailed, for saying idiotic things on the internet, often while under the influence. If we really want to criminalise being stupid and 19 we’re going to need bigger prisons.

But here’s the thing. If we are going to fight for freedom of speech, we desperately need to be consistent. The critics have a point when they cry ‘hypocrisy’ at some right-wingers, even if their own approach to free speech is also unashamedly selective. Certainly, the principles of some self-dubbed free-speech warriors can suddenly evaporate when faced with views or statements that they find distasteful – whether that’s trag-rap trio Kneecap wailing ‘Ooh, ah, Hezbollah’ or the ‘paraglider girls’ marching through London with stickers on their backs lionising the airborne butchers of Hamas.

So let’s abolish the speech laws. Not because we sympathise with any particular case, but because we recognise that free speech is an indivisible liberty that should not be denied to anyone, no matter how odious their views. Free speech is about others airing their nonsense precisely so that we can challenge them. This is the only way we can truly fight for what is right and true. Free speech is for Lucy Connolly, Kneecap, hate marchers, very Brexity things, woke identitarians, fash identitarians, street preachers, drill rappers, Islamists, ‘Islamophobes’. Don’t be a hypocrite. Never catch yourself saying, ‘I believe in free speech, but…’. Oppose all censorship, or expect more of it. That’s the lesson that Britain is stubbornly refusing to learn.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater