Drill rappers should be allowed to say whatever they damn well want in their lyrics. It's called free speech and it's important.

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”.

“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.”

All this comes on top of Humberside Police checking the speech of a man who questioned the ideology of transgenderism (and retweeted a limerick).

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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