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my starting point
when it comes to the consideration of
any issue relating to free speech
is my passionate belief that the second
most precious thing in life
is the right to express yourself freely
the most precious thing in life i think
is food in your mouth
and the third most precious is a roof
over your head
but a fixture for me in the number two
slot is free expression
just below the need to sustain life
itself
that is because i have enjoyed free
expression in this country all my
professional life
and fully expect to continue to do so
personally i suspect highly unlikely to
be arrested
for whatever laws exist to contain free
expression
because of the undoubtedly privileged
position that is afforded
to those of a high public profile
so my concerns are less for myself and
more for those more vulnerable
because of their lower profile like the
man
arrested in oxford for calling a police
horse
gay or the teenager
arrested for calling the church of
scientology
a cult or the cafe owner arrested for
displaying passages from the bible on a
tv screen
when i heard of some of these more
ludicrous offenses and charges
i remembered that i had been here before
in a fictional context i once did a show
called not the nine o'clock news
some years ago and we did a sketch where
griffrey
jones played constable savage
a manifestly racist police officer
to whom i as his station commander is
giving a dressing down
for arresting a black man on a whole
string of ridiculous
trumped up and ludicrous charges the
charges for which council savage
arrested mr winston cadogo
of 55 missed the road were these
walking on the cracks in the pavement
walking in a loud shirt in a built-up
area
during the hours of darkness and one of
my favorites walking around
all over the place he was also arrested
for
urinating in a public convenience
and looking at me in a funny way
who would have thought that we would end
up with a law that would allow
life to imitate art so exactly
i read somewhere a defender of the
status quo claiming that the fact that
the gay horse case was dropped
after the arrested man refused to pay
the uh to pay the fine
and that the scientology case was also
dropped at some point
during the court process was proof that
the law was working well
ignoring the fact that the only reason
these cases were dropped
was because of the publicity that they
had attracted
the police sensed that ridicule was just
around the corner
and withdrew their actions but what
about the
thousands of other cases that did not
enjoy the oxygen of publicity
that weren't quite ludicrous enough
to attract media attention even for
those actions that were withdrawn people
were arrested
questioned taken to court and then
released
you know that isn't a law working
properly that is
sensoriousness of the most intimidating
kind
guaranteed to have as lord dear says the
chilling effect
on free expression and free protest
parliament's joint committee on human
rights summarized as you may know this
whole issue very well by saying
while arresting a protester for using
threatening or abusive speech
may depending on the circumstances be a
proportionate response
we do not think that language or
behavior that is merely
insulting should ever be criminalized in
this way
the clear problem with the outlawing of
insult
is that too many things can be
interpreted as such
criticism is easily construed as
unsolved by certain parties
ridicule easily construed as insult
sarcasm unfavorable
comparison merely stating an alternative
point of view
to the orthodoxy can be interpreted as
insult
and because so many things can be
interpreted as insult it is hardly
surprising
that so many things have been as the
examples i talked about earlier
show although the law under discussion
has been on the statute book for over
25 years it is indicative of a culture
that has taken hold of the programs of
successive governments
that with the reasonable and
well-intentioned ambition
to contain obnoxious elements in society
has created a society of an
extraordinarily authoritarian
and controlling nature that is what you
might call the new
intolerance a new but intense desire to
gag
uncomfortable voices of dissent i am not
intolerant
so many people say many softly spoken
highly educated liberal-minded people
i'm only intolerant of intolerance
and people tend to nod sagely and say
yes wise words wise words and yet if you
think about this supposedly inarguable
statement for longer than five seconds
you realize that all it is advocating is
the replacement of one kind of
intolerance
with another which to me doesn't
represent any kind of progress at all
underlying prejudices injustices or
resentments are not addressed
by arresting people they are addressed
by the issues being aired
argued and dealt with preferably outside
the legal
process for me the best way to increase
society's resistance
to insulting or offensive speech is to
allow a lot more of it
as with childhood diseases you can
better resist those germs to which you
have been exposed
we need to build our immunity to taking
offense
so that we can deal with the issues that
perfectly justified
criticism can raise our priority should
be to deal with the message
not the messenger as president obama
said in an address to the united nations
only a month or so ago
laudable efforts to restrict speech
can become a tool to silence critics or
repress
minorities the strongest weapon against
hateful speech
is not repression it is more speech
and that's the essence of my thesis more
speech
if we want a robust society we need more
robust
dialogue and that must include the right
to insult
or to offend and as even if
as lord dear says you know the freedom
to be inoffensive
is no freedom at all the repeal of this
word in this clause will be only a small
step but it will i hope be a critical
one
in what should be a longer term project
to pause
and slowly rewind the creeping culture
of sensoriousness
it is a small skirmish in the battle in
my opinion
to deal with what sir salman rushdie
refers to as the outrage
industry self-appointed arbiters of the
public good
encouraging media stoked outrage to
which the police feel under terrible
pressure
to react a newspaper rings up scotland
yard someone has said
something slightly insulting on twitter
about someone who we think
a national treasure what are you going
to do about it
the police panic and they scramble
around and then grasp the most
inappropriate lifeline of all
section 5 of the public order act that
thing where you arrest anybody for
saying anything that might be construed
by anyone else as insulting
you know they don't seem to need a real
victim they need only to make the
judgment that somebody could have been
offended
if they had heard or read what has been
said the most
ludicrous degree of latitude
the storms that surround twitter and
facebook comment
have raised some fascinating issues
about free speech which we haven't
really yet come to terms with firstly
that we all have to take responsibility
for what we say
which is quite a good lesson to learn
but secondly
we've learned how appallingly prickly
and intolerant
society has become of even the mildest
adverse comment the law should not be
aiding and abetting
this new intolerance free speech can
only suffer if the law
prevents us from dealing with its
consequences i offer my wholehearted
support
to the reform section 5 campaign thank
you very much
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you