Your speech is under threat:
Sheltering from a sudden downpour in a parked car just off Brixton Road, London, are two of British music’s greatest new talents, and now biggest outlaws: Skengdo and AM. A fortnight ago, the Metropolitan police announced they had secured a sentence of nine months in prison for the two 21-year-old drill rappers, suspended for two years, for breaching a gang injunction issued in August last year.I'm not going to pass comment on whether this pair of drill rappers are "two of British music's greatest new talents" but it is deeply concerning that they have been given a criminal record for singing a song. Let's be clear - if it is an attack on free expression to prosecute a bloke who taught his girlfriend's pug a Nazi salute then it is certainly an attack on that essential liberty to punish Skengdo and AM for a song, however edgy its lyrics might be.
There is an insidious tendency for the police, supported by politicians and the wider justice system, to use a variety of laws to target speech that they think presents some sort of risk. Tim Newman present a couple of examples - both attacks on speech by the police - on his blog recently:
Andy Mayfield, 53, was held in custody for 12 hours and strip searched under anti-terror laws after he started filming the cops, who were parked illegally outside their own police station in Ashton-on-Ribble, Lancashire in January. He was detained under the Terrorism Act and submitted to a rigorous questioning at the Newton Heath terrorism centre in Manchester before eventually being released.And just today we hear that the police arrested and fined a man for covering his face while passing a trial of facial recognition technology:
She said they demanded to see the man’s identification, which he gave them, and became “accusatory and aggressive”.All this comes on top of Humberside Police checking the speech of a man who questioned the ideology of transgenderism (and retweeted a limerick).
“The guy told them to p*** off and then they gave him the £90 public order fine for swearing,” Ms Carlo added. “He was really angry.”
It is a terrible idea that, because a group of musicians come from the same milieu as gangsters (and use their experiences in that environment as the narrative for their music) they should be classified as a "gang" thereby allowing the police to silence them via injunction:
The Met nevertheless decided to classify 410 as a gang, with the injunction declaring that 410’s activities, “including but not limited to the production of drill music videos … have amounted to gang-related violence”.The use of gang definitions to target musicians (and their fans) has been shipped over from the USA (as Juggalos will tell you). One does wonder how they'd have dealt with the Rat Pack had they had these powers back in the 1940s?
The problem here is that, just as with Nazi pugs or Islamist "hate preachers", there are very few people prepared to defend people's right to speak when what they're saying is (in the eyes of many) distasteful, upsetting or incendiary. So I'll say it - Anjem Choudry shouldn't have been jailed for preaching, Count Dankula is a prat but that shouldn't be a crime, and Skengdo, AM and the 410 crew should be allowed to sing whatever they damn well want in their lyrics.
The reason for saying this isn't just because I want to be edgy but because giving the police and courts license to target these sorts of speakers allows them the same license to hound less notable members of the public - like the examples Tim Newman gave - for nothing more than giving a cop some lip or trying to hold them to account.
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6 comments:
Quite right. It'll be thoughtcrime next. We have speechcrime already
But speech has never been utterly free, nor should it be.
It is rightly unlawful to urge others to commit crimes, and to defame. Without referring to what was actually said, in the examples that you cite, it's not possible to assess whether the authorities have acted justly or not in each case.
I appreciate your libertarian outlook. But cultural artefacts that (? intend to) influence the susceptible might be subject to restrictions as for advertising?
The difficulty with libertarianism is its assumption that everyone is entirely under rational self-control; which is why Sartre hated Freud's theory of the unconscious mind. It just ain't so and the best of us struggle against our worst impulses.
Not wishing to wave a red rag (but willing to risk it), I'd remark that the prophet Mohammed said that the greater struggle was the fight of a man against himself; just as Jesus said that defilement came from within.
indeed, Sackerson.
That is why what is happening in various countries today is so alarming.
After WWII, unsurprisingly, there was general agreement, that no politician should ever appeal to the primitive, dark-hearted beast, which lurks inside every one of us. The reprehensible low-life, who now crave power at any price, have rediscovered this trick, however, and they just cannot believe their luck. We have seen to where this leads throughout history, and it seems that some people are just going to have to learn the hard way, all over again.
@Etu: "After WWII, unsurprisingly, there was general agreement, that no politician, etc." - are you thinking of something specific here?
No, Sackerson, just a reality-based, public consensus, brought about by a shared, close-up experience of utter horror.
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