begin with the dreaded f-word. It often appears to have slipped our Anglo-American society’s mind that free speech is supposed to be Free. That’s free as in ‘free as a bird’, to soar as high as it can and swoop as low as it chooses. Not as in ‘free-range chicken’, at liberty only to scratch in the dirt within a fenced-in pen and en route to the chopping block.
Free means speech should not be shackled by official censorship imposed by governments, police, courts or any other state-licensed pecknose or prodstaff. Nor should it be stymied by unofficial censorship exercised through university speech codes and ‘safe zones’, twitterstorming mobs of online crusaders against offensiveness, or Islamist zealots gunning for blasphemy. And nor should it be sacrificed by the spineless self-censorship of intellectual invertebrates.
If it is to mean anything, free speech has to live up to its name. This is the hardest thing for many who claim to endorse the principle to remember in practice. It means that what others say or write need not conform to what you, I, or anybody else might prefer. Bad taste or good, offensive or attractive, cutting or boring. Just so long as it is free.
Here is the terrible truth about free speech. Anybody can choose to write, blog, tweet, chant, preach, phone a radio programme or shout at a television set. Not all of them will have the purity of soul of Jesus Christ or Joan Rivers, the wisdom of Socrates or Simon Cowell, or the good manners of Prince Harry or Piers Morgan. That’s tough. They still get the same access to free speech as the rest of us, whether we like it or not.
Defending the unfettered Free in free speech is not a question of endorsing whatever objectionable or idiotic things might be written or said. Nobody had to find Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons insightful or hilarious in order to stand by its right to publish them. Nor is it a question of being soft and suffering somebody else’s nonsense in silence. Free speech means you are also free to talk back as you see fit.
The Free in free speech does mean recognising that free speech is for fools, fanatics and the other fellow too – even if they want to use that freedom to argue against it. Like all true liberties, free speech is an indivisible and universal right. We defend it for all or not at all.
Remembering to put the Free in free speech makes clear why we should oppose attempts to outlaw or curtail certain categories of speech. Freedom is, unfortunately, indivisible. You cannot have half-freedom, part-time freedom or fat-free freedom. You cannot abolish slavery but only for white people or celebrities. Similarly you cannot declare your support for free speech, but only defend those parts of it that you like or that meet your preferred set of standards, however high-minded those preferences might appear. If one leg or even one gangrenous toe remains chained to the post, the entire body is still shackled.
In all the talk about free speech today, how often do you hear free speech spoken of as a universal and non-negotiable right? Instead the focus seems always to be on the buts, the exceptions, the limits to freedom. Everybody in public life might insist that they support free speech, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that what many support is not so much free speech as speech on parole.
They want speech that is released from custody only on licence with a promise of good behaviour, preferably wearing a security ankle bracelet to stop it straying from the straight and narrow, having signed the rhetorical offenders’ register. Speech that is free to toe the line, stick to the script and do what it is told. The reinterpretation of freedom to mean liberty-on-licence is a con that the free-speech fraudsters should not be allowed to get away with.
Once you forget the meaning of ‘freedom’ and start cherry-picking which people or what type of speech might deserve it, free speech ceases to be a right. Instead it becomes a privilege, to be extended or withheld to the well- or the not so well-behaved as those in authority see fit. This is the message of all those fashionable sermons about how ‘rights come with responsibilities’. That is just another way of saying that it is not a right at all, but a selective reward for good behaviour. Rights don’t come with buts or provisos.
Today’s free-speech fraudsters will claim to support it firmly in principle, yet equivocate in practice. This often translates as supporting it for those who share your attitudes and opinions – less free speech than ‘me speech’.
To defend free speech ‘in principle’ must mean to defend it for all. Otherwise, once a principle becomes negotiable it ceases to be principled at all (as in the old political joke, ‘We have principles, and if you don’t like them, we have others’).
The indivisibility of the right to free speech is also a very practical matter. Once you make free speech a privilege and not a right, who are you going to trust to make the decision about where to draw that line through free speech? Government ministers? High court judges? Mary Berry and Sharon Osbourne?
This is an old lesson which many, especially on the left, still stubbornly refuse to learn. As far back as the 1930s, the British left campaigned for a ban on marches by Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted British Union of Fascists. They got their wish in the Public Order Act of 1936 – and were quickly astonished to discover that the state used its new powers to ban their right to protest, too. Almost eighty years later, and British anti-fascist crusaders are still apparently outraged to find that, when they ‘win’ a legal ban on a little demonstration by some far-right grouplet, the police will use the same blanket ban to prevent them staging a ‘victory’ march.
This problem is even more acute now, when everything is judged by the subjective standards of ‘offence’ and things can be censored or banned not for threatening public order but for hurting somebody’s feelings and making them feel ‘uncomfortable’. There is no telling where the runaway train of censorship in the name of ‘me speech’ will end – witness the fate of the UK feminist comedians and speakers who have been surprised to find themselves protested against and even banned from campuses for being deemed offensive to some, shortly after they had demanded the same treatment for sexist blokes. Once you say that free speech is only for those who comply and conform and toe a fashionable line, you are asking for trouble.
The other practical problem with ‘me speech’ is that, by restricting the free-speech rights of those you detest, you weaken your own and everybody else’s rights. You deny others the right to listen and to argue, to test the truth and judge for ourselves. You effectively condemn yourself to being locked in your bubble cell, with only your own and similar opinions to listen to, like a solitary prisoner with only one book to read (and even that is his own boring diary).
As Thomas Paine, the English radical who became a key figure in both the American and the French revolutions of the eighteenth century, wrote in the introduction to his classic The Age of Reason (a critique of religion considered so offensive that it was subject to serial prosecutions by the British government): ‘He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.’1 It is not only those directly denied their freedom who are ‘enslaved’ by selectively chaining some forms of speech.
It is important to remember that free speech in the West, as chapter 3, about the history of the issue, argues, was never a gift from the gods or an act of largesse doled out by governments. From the Magna Carta 800 years ago to today, any liberties that are worth the parchment they are written on have been hard-won in a struggle to wrest them from our rulers. Once won, those liberties do not come with any moral commandments. Nobody has to pass through the eye of an ethical needle to qualify for the right to free speech. There should be no official test to pass or licence to obtain before you can express an opinion.
Free speech is not to be rationed out like charity, to only the most deserving cases. A right is a right, and is not limited by any incumbent responsibilities. Liberties do not come with strings attached, any more than freedom can be exercised in leg-irons.
This is not a plea for irresponsible speech. It is to be dearly wished that people exercise their rights responsibly and take responsibility for what they say. We might like to think that taking responsibility would always involve saying what you mean and meaning what you say; expressing the truth as you understand it as clearly as you are able, and