Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. Mick Hume

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