Boris Johnson We must not allow legislation that would be used to target only one side, writes John McGuirk
It was a bit of a mad week across the water, with Boris Johnson deciding as he did to suspend parliament so that it cannot vote to thwart his Brexit plan. The response to this decision was predictably uproarious, with protestors taking to the streets, and the commentariat on both sides of the Irish Sea launching the verbal equivalent of the artillery barrage at the Battle of the Somme upon Britain’s Prime Minister.
The BBC’s former economics editor, Paul Mason, led the charge. “We’re coming for you, Boris Johnson,” he tweeted. “I promise you, if he seizes power from parliament, we will never have another free election in this country”.
Mr Johnson’s move, declared a major British newspaper in an editorial was a “coup”. Owen Jones, a left-wing commentator, told a rally in London that the public were now at “war” with Mr Johnson, and that it was time to “fight with everything we have got”.
I do not write to defend Mr Johnson by highlighting these comments. It seems to me that his Brexit strategy is roughly akin to driving a car very fast towards a cliff edge, and hoping to goodness that at the last moment, the cliff will jump out of the way.
Britain, however, is not at war. Mr Johnson has not perpetrated a coup. The UK will, indeed, have free elections, probably sooner than anyone thinks.
What I find interesting, though, is the freedom that Mr Johnson’s critics and others on the left feel that they are free to make such comments without, apparently, worrying that anybody will be incited to violence or terrorism. What does “we’re coming for you” mean? What do you do if your country is being taken over in a coup? How do you fight a war? When you tell people that a war must be fought, is there no risk that even one of them will take you at your word?
After all, we are constantly warned by many of these same people that reckless language, inflammatory speech, or even florid expressions of political opposition are responsible for acts of violence. We are mere weeks removed, remember, from a terrorist attack in the United States which was uniformly blamed on President Trump, and his rhetoric on immigration.
Consequences
On August 5 of this year, the Irish Times thundered that “the gunman’s rhetoric carries an echo of Trump’s language”. This week, the same newspaper, in a column by David Robert Grimes, told us that “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”.
“In an era of virulent disinformation on everything from politics to medicine” he wrote, “a tolerance for poisonous fictions comes with a price tag we can no longer afford.”
No less a body than the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance has told the Government that it must swiftly enact new laws here against “hate speech”, a call echoed this week by Shakh Dr Umar Al-Qadri, Chair of the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration council.
The thinking behind such a law is straightforward enough. If I were, for example, to write a column in this newspaper in which I said that immigrants were a threat to Irish society, there is, it is claimed, a reasonable risk that one of you might think my words so persuasive that you would go out, find the nearest immigrant, and beat them to a pulp. Therefore, if I write such a column, I have committed a crime, by inciting hatred.
The problem, of course, is that such laws are only ever applied in one direction. If an Irish newspaper were to run a column saying that Boris Johnson is an existential threat to Ireland, would that be hate speech? After all, it is perfectly possible that a reader could be incited to do violence to Mr Johnson, given the opportunity, on foot of those words.
So, if a TD declares that the Catholic Church is a cancer, or suggests, as a Labour TD did, that Catholic civil servants should have to pass a loyalty test, that is not hate speech”
And what of our friends in the Climate Change movement? In recent weeks we have heard it said that Irish farmers, oil companies, car companies and even airlines are “contributing to the destruction of the planet”. Is it not a perfectly legitimate thing to worry that such rhetoric might lead someone impressionable to do violence against those people? After all, saving the planet is surely worth doing whatever it takes.
The over-riding conceit amongst those who favour hate speech laws is, of course, that they themselves do not need such laws. After all, no left winger would ever hear a speech by President Trump or Nigel Farage and be convinced by it. It is only you, or me, the ordinary plebs, who are too stupid to listen to someone talk about immigration without wanting to physically harm an immigrant. Progressive citizens as they are, they themselves are entirely immune to the human impulses they say the rest of us have. So, if a TD declares that the Catholic Church is a cancer, or suggests, as a Labour TD once did, that Catholic civil servants should have to pass a loyalty test, that is not hate speech.
The left, it believes of itself, is incapable of hate.
Hate speech laws therefore can only apply to rhetoric that is conservative, or worse, right wing. Because in their hearts, our liberal and progressive friends think that you and I, who disagree with them, are fundamentally dangerous, and that society must be protected from us.
Hate speech laws will never be applied equally, for that reason. And that is why they must, at all costs, be opposed.