Free speech − that old chestnut. Again
FREE SPEECH - THAT OLD CHESTNUT. AGAIN
Free speech and its somewhat more expansive cousin, free expression, are slippery beasts (as we know). Laws erected to protect them are not impermeable − imprecise and tortured definitions of exceptions like “hate speech” and “incitement to violence” poke holes in any edifices that well-meaning legislators try to build.
A couple of weeks ago, 20 policemen with tasers forced their way into Quaker House in Westminster, London. The Quakers are a famously non-violent organisation, but one of their rooms was being used by a similarly non-violent political activist group, Youth Demand, known for acts of civil disobedience around climate change and arms sales to Israel and such. Like blocking roads and swarming − not violent, but annoying.
In the room they found six bewildered women who were immediately detained. The Quakers who own the building were, unsurprisingly, outraged (it is a place of worship). As were sections of the press and public. The women were released sometime later, after being charged with “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” under the Public Order Act of 2023.
Excuse me for making light of a serious matter, but it had echoes of the old Not the Nine O’Clock News skit in which a Constable Savage is berated by Rowan Atkinson for arresting a man for “wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area”. Or perhaps closer to the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, a piece of science fiction in which criminals are arrested before committing a crime for merely thinking about doing it.
In any event, there seems to be quite a bit of this going around, especially in the UK. On 29 January, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested in front of their nine-year-old daughter after criticising the hiring process at their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. Six police officers detained them on charges of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a nuisance on school property. They were fingerprinted, searched, and held in a cell for eight hours.
Guess who got arrested?
In September last year there was a pro-Hamas march in London (yes, there are actually such marches in Western democracies), replete with antisemitic and otherwise violent exhortations to destroy Israel written on signs being carried by protesters. Two counter-protesters (including Iranian Niyak Ghorbani) held a sign that said, “Hamas is Terrorist.” Guess who got arrested? Nobody who was supporting the death cult Hamas and calling for the extermination of a country was bothered. But the two counter-protesters were taken into custody.
At least two UK reports place the number of free-speech-related offences at 12,000 arrests annually (33 per day), mainly of people saying very nasty things on social media. Like Jordan Parlour (“inciting racial hatred online”), Darren Brady (“malicious communications” − he shared a meme of Gay Pride flags in the shape of a swastika), Lucy Connolley (“stirring up racial hatred and false communications”).
Compare this to the toxic brew that is X, now welcoming the most graphic and violent incitements and hate drawn from the dregs of humanity and welcomed under the banner “free speech absolutism”.
Here in South Africa, there are similar tensions. Anyone using racial pejoratives from the apartheid era will find themselves in deep trouble. Vicky Momberg, a white real estate agent, was sentenced to prison for her injudicious use of a racist and ugly word to describe black citizens. On the other hand, the anti-apartheid song “Kill the Boer” (Afrikaans farmer), as transparent an incitement to violence as one can imagine, is given free rein by the Constitutional Court under some twisted logic about its being a traditional struggle song, to be protected for posterity and not meant to be taken literally (yeah, right).
Raged for decades
These debates − what is acceptable or not in the public domain − have raged for decades but suddenly seem to be big news again. Perhaps the rise of the right and the retreat of “wokeism” in many countries is the cause, perhaps it is simply the emergence of scapegoating as the relative peace of the past 75 years finds itself shattered under the boot of vicious wars, nationalism, religious strife and the emergence of extremism and populism as a new political normal.
But hypocrisy can be found everywhere. After years of horror watching liberal universities deplatforming right-wing voices in the US and UK, we now have the extraordinary spectacle of the Trump administration (who used the free speech suppression of the Democrats to great effect in their 2024 campaign) turning their weapons against every critical voice they can find, from media (AP News, NPR, Voice of America) to brutal deportations of students with “undesirable” opinions to law firms defending clients whose opinions they don’t like.
No matter where you sit in this debate, from the free speech absolutism of Musk to the excesses of the current government in the UK, there is now a very clear trend globally.
The Swedish-based V-Dem Institute is one of the largest social science data collection projects on democracy in the world. It “distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles, maintaining and updating a database from year to year”.
State of freedom of expression
The 2025 report has just been released. It is titled “25 Years of Autocratization — Democracy Trumped”. Here is their sombre reflection on the state of freedom of expression (and this data was collected before Trump 2.0):
“For more than a decade, Freedom of Expression has been the worst affected aspect of democracy. In 2024, the loss of freedom of expression is truly alarming. It is deteriorating in 44 countries − a quarter of all countries in the world. Not only is this a new record but it is also a substantial increase from 35 countries reported in last year’s Democracy Report. Conversely, freedom of expression is improving in only eight countries by 2024, while last year’s report found that it was still improving in eleven countries.
Deteriorations in Freedom of Expression include declines in various aspects of media freedom, safety of journalists, freedom of citizens to discuss political issues, as well as freedom of academic and cultural expression. Compared to the situation in 2014, the losses are staggering.”
No matter our political preferences, we ignore this at our peril.
[Image: reve.art]
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This article was first published on the Daily Friend.
