Recent criticisms of Europe by American politicians like JD Vance have reminded us that there is a profound gulf between American and European conceptions of free speech. The United States comes closer than any other country in the world to absolute free speech. The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech”. No ifs, no buts. Since the early 20th century, this has been held to apply to state legislatures as well. The American courts were eventually persuaded to recognize exceptions for incitement to imminent violence, obscene and defamatory material, child pornography and fraud, but that is all. Even these exceptions have been very narrowly interpreted.

The European model has been very different. Freedom of expression is an important but not an absolute public interest in Europe. In principle, it may be overridden by a wide variety of other public interests if there is a sufficiently compelling case for doing so. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression, but subject to a long list of potential exceptions: national security, territorial integrity or public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, the protection of the reputation or rights of others, the protection of confidences, or maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In Britain, the list of exceptions recognized by the law grows longer all the time: speech that discloses secret intelligence, speech that prejudices current legal proceedings, speech that supports proscribed terrorist groups, hate speech directed at racial, religious or sexual minorities, “grossly offensive” messages sent through the post or over electronic networks, and so on. Most of these exceptions are concerned in one way or another with public order and social harmony. In Britain we have not usually specified opinions that it is illegal to hold in public, but other countries have. In Germany, Austria and Belgium it is a criminal offense to deny, trivialize or approve of the Holocaust. Spain, France and Switzerland go even further. It is an offense in those countries to question the existence or gravity of anything which is regarded as a crime against humanity. In many countries it is illegal to display the swastika. In Latvia and Lithuania, that extends to the hammer and sickle and other symbols of Soviet communism.

There is an inevitable tendency for people to want to exclude from freedom of expression whatever ideas they personally cannot abide. Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, is one of the most eloquent pleas for freedom of expression in the English language, but he excluded Catholics and atheists, whose views he regarded as beyond the pale. So did John Locke, although he at least offered reasons for their exclusion. He thought that Catholics were intolerable because they were not interested in truth, and atheists because having no fear of God, they could not be relied upon to honor any social obligations. The authors of the famous early 18th-century tracts known as Cato’s Letters argued the case for free political speech but made an exception for what they called “factious scribblers” and “turbulent babblers”.

The problem, as George Orwell pointed out, is that free speech is worthless unless it extends to things that people do not want to hear. We all have different lists of things that we do not want to hear. Suggested candidates for legally enforced censorship include a variety of allegedly extreme or unacceptable positions such as gender-criticism, climate denial, antisemitism, blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed or the Koran, totalitarianism, eugenics, satanism and many others. Many of these demands reflect the sensitivities of particular ethnic, social or religious groups who say that their position is special. Censorship is often the child of collective grievances. People who feel that the world has been unjust to them are likely to claim that their position is special too. If some opinions are to be banned as beyond the pale, then why should my list of unacceptable beliefs be privileged over yours? The truth is that if we believe in freedom of expression, we have to tolerate things that we regard as intolerable. Otherwise the whole concept is meaningless.

Since we have to draw a line, where do we draw it? The starting point, I suggest, is to ask why we instinctively believe in freedom of expression in the first place. I think that there are three main reasons.

The first is that constraints on our ability to communicate facts or opinions invade our autonomy as moral agents and thinking creatures. When the constraints are imposed by the state, they imply a relationship between the individual and the state which is morally repellent. They reduce us to the status of mere instruments of other people’s power. Whether the suppression of free speech comes from governments or pressure groups or public opinion, it ushers in a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian world in which the fear of giving offense or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates some of the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

The second reason for believing in freedom of speech is that we live in a democracy whose entire political order depends on the free exchange of ideas. It depends on our ability to freely receive information, on an acceptance of diversity of opinion and on a large measure of tolerance of intellectual and emotional differences. Our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshaling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implications under common rules that exclude coercion, and on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it.

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A third reason why we believe in freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It is the one which received its most eloquent expression from Karl Popper’s classic work, The Open Society and its Enemies. No one person or group, however respectable or expert, has exclusive access to wisdom or truth. This is not just because of the limits on the capacity of the human mind. It is also because truth and wisdom are dynamic concepts. They are informed by a stock of experience which is constantly increasing. All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change in response to fresh discoveries or insights. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths. In a world of free expression, some of what people say will certainly be wrong, hurtful or even objectively harmful. But the principle which we would have to accept in order to justify censoring these statements is more damaging than the statements themselves. We cannot have truth without accommodating the possibility of error, or wisdom without accommodating the possibility of folly. In the end we have to accept the implications of human inquisitiveness, creativity and imagination. The alternative is to entrust significant parts of our intellectual world to external authorities whose capacity for objectivity, truthfulness and wisdom is no greater than our own.

Ever since the 17th century, our civilization has been based on the notion that truth is independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world on the footing that we get closest to the truth by objective study, logical reasoning and open debate, by what Mill called the “collision of adverse opinions”. I am not suggesting that this is guaranteed to produce truth or the wisest possible outcomes, but experience suggests that in the long term it is more likely to do so than any system of intellectual controls.

These reasons for believing in freedom of expression suggest a number of conclusions that we should bear in mind when we come to think about exceptions.

In the first place, freedom of expression is concerned with the transmission of information or opinion. Not everything that is spoken or written deserves protection. If I write you a letter or an email consisting of nothing but foul-mouthed abuse, I may be committing an offense under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003. Low level communications of this kind are devoid of intellectual, cultural or political value. In a sense I may be regarded as having communicated my opinion of you, but that hardly counts as an infringement of my right of freedom of expression.

The second conclusion to be drawn from our reasons for believing in free speech is that we should not suppress the expression of facts or opinions simply because they give offense, however understandable that offense may be. If we are not free to say things that other people regard as objectionable, we have no freedom of speech at all. In a famous statement of principle, Lord Justice Sedley observed in the High Court in a case about a Christian fundamentalist street preacher that “free speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to promote violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

Thirdly, it cannot be a good reason for suppressing some assertion or opinion that we think it is wrong or even that everybody thinks it is wrong. Few propositions are incontrovertibly false, in the sense that they are inherently incapable of being affirmed by hitherto unknown facts or fresh analysis. As a general rule, the best answer to misleading speech is counter-speech, i.e. reasoned refutation. Of course, counter-speech does not always work. The barrage of rubbish generated by the internet, generally mediated by algorithms which serve people up with material that confirms their existing prejudices, is a serious challenge. But counter-speech is more likely to work than suppression. Once upon a time, the authorized consensus was that the sun moved round the earth, because that view was supported by Biblical authority, then regarded as a source of incontrovertible truth. Galileo was condemned for denying it. The same point can be made about statements of opinion. Once upon a time the religious and social consensus justified slavery and the imprisonment of homosexuals, because this had been regarded as obvious for centuries. Once upon a time it was taken for granted in Britain that black people were inherently inferior. These views have almost entirely died out in advanced societies in the face of rational discourse.

In 2021 the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific society, called for legislation to ban the dissemination by anti-vaxxers of “false information” about vaccines, by which they meant information rejected by the scientific consensus. The case for vaccination is not inherently irrefutable. But in the current state of our knowledge, the debate has been won hands down by supporters of vaccination. That has only been possible because there has been a debate. Suppressing public opposition to vaccination will simply drive it underground where it will be more difficult to refute. Holocaust denial is another example. It is an absurd position which has been discredited not by legislation but exposure to the evidence. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote some of the greatest judgments of the US Supreme Court in support of free speech, once observed that the guiding principle was that almost all certainty is an illusion. We might always be wrong, he said. All of us can all point to public statements which are untrue, mischievous or absurd, sometimes manifestly so. But manifestness is not a very useful criterion for censoring other peoples’ opinions. Nearly every received opinion which rational examination has discredited was once regarded as manifest by those who held it.

Finally, the concept of free speech assumes that adults are capable of distinguishing what is good from what is bad in the torrent of information to which we are all exposed. In a democratic society, it is necessary to proceed on that assumption, even though we know that it is not always true. In a society which treats every person as entitled to equal consideration and respect, we cannot distinguish between adults according to their degree of intelligence or discernment or their skill in ordering their lives. In a democracy, we have to assume that adults are capable of making discerning choices in their own interest, because the alternative is an authoritarian world in which their choices are taken away from them by the state.

All of this suggests that the threshold for banning the transmission of information or opinion should be exacting. Any exception must, I suggest, be based on some consistent principle, not just on people’s subjective likes and dislikes. The exception should also be consistent with the basic rationale for wanting freedom of expression in the first place. And it must be clearly defined, because if the boundaries of the exception are unclear, we will end up with a freedom that is at least partly discretionary. A freedom which depends on the discretion of the enforcers is no freedom at all.

I suggest that the only speech which we are justified in suppressing by law is speech which is coercive. By that I mean speech which deprives us of our choices because it is threatening, or directly incites violence or manipulates people in highly vulnerable categories, especially children.

The suppression or punishment of speech is a coercive act. The traditional principle of English law has been that it is only justified if the alternative is coercion of a different kind, the coercion which follows from a breakdown of public order. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the earliest systematic survey of the common law, published in the 1760s, Sir William Blackstone described a free press as “essential to the nature of a free state”. This was why the common law did not allow pre-publication censorship. Blackstone added that after publication, an author could be punished or mulcted in damages if his words were contrary to public order. This was because the state’s ability to maintain public order was also essential to the nature of a free state and to its role as the guardian of liberty. In Blackstone’s day, the courts were much more willing to take action against provocative speech, because the state had fewer means of maintaining public order. There was no general police force in Britain until the 1830s. In the first half of the 19th century, as Britain became a more orderly, better policed society, speech became less dangerous and the courts became more active in protecting it. However, direct incitement to violence is still the main exception sanctioned by English law to the principle of freedom of expression.

The most interesting analyses of this question come from the American case law. The Americans have a related doctrine known as the “fighting words” exception. Their case law denies that this amounts to censorship, because they distinguish between the content of the message and its consequences. Restrictions on free speech are unacceptable if they are directed to the content of the message. They have to be addressed exclusively to the circumstances in which the words were uttered and to their likely consequences. A rather similar line has been taken in some decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. A good example is the case of Faber v. Hungary, decided in 1992. Faber was a Right-wing activist who had been convicted in Hungary of standing at a site in Budapest where Jews had been massacred in the Second World War and holding up a banner with a fascist symbol. His conviction was held by the Strasbourg court to violate the Human Rights Convention because the mere act of holding up the banner was incapable of disturbing public order or inciting violence. The fact that it was offensive and liable to outrage those who saw it was not enough. That was an objection to the content of Faber’s statement, not to its likely consequences. I think that that is also the approach of English law, even though English judges have been less articulate in saying so. Calling for violence in a university debating society is objectionable but not illegal, whereas calling for violence in front of a howling mob in a city center is likely to be both.

In September of last year, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for an inflammatory tweet. The case aroused much controversy. Her unsuccessful appeal against the sentence was supported by the Free Speech Union, and the sentence was roundly denounced in The Daily Telegraph and on GB News. This seemed to me to be strange. Her tweet said: “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” If she had expressed this opinion at a meeting of the Women’s Institute, there would have been no problem. The actual circumstances were that the murder of three children in Southport had been attributed (in fact wrongly) to an asylum seeker, at a time when there was rising tension against immigrants in much of the Midlands. If a rabble-rouser stood on a soap-box in front of an angry mob and urged them to head for the nearest immigration hostel and burn it down, the vice of words like these would have been obvious. Doing it on social media is worse because the reach of the internet is so much greater. Its algorithms thrust words like Connolly’s under the noses of people who are already likely to agree. The internet is not a private conversation. It can whip up a violent mob in minutes. Connolly soon regretted her post and deleted it three and a half hours later, but in the short time that it was up, it was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. It was one of a number of wild statements on the internet following the Southport murders which provoked serious riots across England later that day and violent attacks on mosques and immigration hostels. Connolly was not a free speech martyr. Her conviction was in line with a perfectly rational principle reflecting a centuries-old limitation on free speech.

Incitement to violence is not the only restriction that our law places on free speech. Some of the other restrictions are principled exceptions which are perfectly consistent with the underlying principle of free speech. Others are unprincipled exceptions which should have no place in a rational system of law.

Let’s start with the legal restrictions which I suggest we should accept. The Online Safety Act, which was passed in 2023, is a complex and in some ways clumsily drafted piece of legislation, which hits many targets that were not intended. However, its principal purpose is to require providers of online content to have age verification checks so as to control access by children to manipulative or corrupting material such as pornography or material advocating suicide or self-harm. I have pointed out that the concept of freedom of expression involves treating adults as capable of discernment and of intelligently ordering their lives. The same assumptions cannot apply to children, who are by definition in a state of developing but incomplete maturity, and who do not have the full range of liberties available to adults. It is fair to regard the manipulation of children’s sensibilities as closely analogous to the coercion from which we seek to protect adults.

Next, there are laws which regulate the way in which our right of free speech is exercised, rather than the content of our speech. These too are, in principle, acceptable. For example, you cannot picket abortion clinics within 150 meters of their doors or buy advertising time for political causes on television. The law restricts the picketing of abortion clinics because it harasses women at an emotionally difficult time of their lives, but you can still protest against abortion in ways that do not amount to harassment: you can stand with your placards 160 meters away, demonstrate in Trafalgar Square, write articles in the press, publish podcasts on YouTube, distribute leaflets, and so on. The law forbids political advertising on television in order to provide some limit on the power of big money to buy influence over political debate in a democracy. However, you can still do party political broadcasts, put up posters on billboards, take advertising space in newspapers, or hold political rallies. These restrictions are not directed against the content of any spoken or written statement. There is no infringement of the right to freedom of expression simply because there are some places where you cannot speak. A notice saying “Silence” in a courtroom, church or library is not an infringement of free speech.

My final example is more controversial. It is about the laws relating to defamation and privacy. The law of libel and slander allows people to claim damages from those who have told lies about them. The law of privacy allows those whose privacy has been invaded without any justification in the public interest to claim damages from the intruder. There are legitimate concerns about the granting of injunctions, especially in privacy cases, but I see no reason why the law should not, after proper investigation, correct the financial consequences of lies and intrusions into our private lives by awarding compensation for the damage which these things can cause. I do not regard that as censorship. It simply adjusts as between private individuals the financial consequences of free speech.

If these are legitimate restrictions on freedom of speech, there are others which have been imposed over the last half-century and which ought to cause us real concern. They are designed to protect people not from coercion or manipulation but simply from being offended.

A good example, which is currently topical, is the provision of the Terrorism Act 2000, which forbids public expressions of support for proscribed terrorist organizations. The Act forbids any conduct which involves assisting or participating in the work of a proscribed terrorist organization, which is fair enough. However, it then goes on to forbid expressions of support even where they do not assist the work of the organization but merely amount to the peaceful expression of a favorable opinion about it. Unlike the restrictions which I have just been discussing, this is a direct attack on the content of certain statements. There are people who think that terrorism in the service of a good cause is fine. I think that this is foolish, but should not be criminal. Arresting hundreds of people in Parliament Square for holding up placards saying that they support Palestine Action is an unprincipled interference with freedom of expression.

The main restrictions of this kind come under the broad heading of hate crimes, which is probably the most intrusive and least justifiable interference with freedom of expression in Britain. Hate crimes are based on the Public Order Act of 1986. Their scope has been expanded by successive amendments since the original Act was passed. The position can be summarized as follows: it is an offense to use language which stirs up racial hatred, religious hatred or hatred based on sexual orientation. In the case of religious hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation, the language used has to be threatening. This probably means words which threaten imminent violence, which broadly accords with the law’s traditional approach to breaches of the peace. However, in the case of stirring up racial hatred, the offense is much wider. The language used need not be threatening. It is enough that it should be abusive or offensive. In the case of religious hatred, there is a broadly drawn exception which allows people to discuss or criticize, or express antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of any religious belief or practice. This may be described as a proviso for the benefit of Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the late Bertrand Russell, all of whom have had harsh things to say about religious beliefs. Yet there is no such exception in the case of race or sexual orientation. In 2024, 140,561 hate crimes were recorded by the 43 police forces in England and Wales. The breadth of the offense can be seen from the facts that the police have arrested Christian preachers for their street sermons, parents engaged in a dispute with their daughter’s school, and the Irish comedian Graham Linehan for tweeting that women confronted by trans men in women-only spaces should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”.

In addition to hate crimes properly so-called, there is an anomalous category known as “non-crime hate incidents”. The police have a common law power to record incidents. Non-crime hate incidents are not criminal offenses, but are simply incidents which the police are administratively directed to record. They have real consequences and will usually entail intimidating visits and warnings from the police. They will show up on enhanced criminal record checks and may stop people getting jobs. The police defend the practice on the ground that such incidents may lead to real crimes if repeated. This seems rather far-fetched. The job of the police is to enforce the criminal law, not to regulate behavior which is perfectly lawful but may be loutish, offensive, politically incorrect or contrary to received opinion. Different police forces have recorded as non-crime hate incidents gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, and even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. Harry Miller, who was visited by Humberside police at his workplace and questioned about his gender-critical tweets, took them to court. The conduct of the police, said the judge, offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country,” he said, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Yet last year, more than 13,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded by police forces in England and Wales.

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“Hatred”, “threatening” and “abusive” are vague terms which cry out for precise definition, but there is no definition of these words in the Public Order Act. “Offensive” is an even vaguer term, which is likewise undefined. On the face of it, the word extends to anything that causes offense. As for non-crime hate incidents, they have no statutory basis at all and therefore no definition either. The looseness of these concepts means that in reality action depends on the discretion of individual police officers. This is not a proper function for a statutory public service or a satisfactory basis for penalizing speech. A police state can fairly be defined as a state in which the police have discretion as to what constitutes an offense. The prosecuting authorities have tried to resolve this problem in a highly unsatisfactory way. The Crown Prosecution Service and the police have agreed to define a hate crime as anything which is perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, the definition which they use is subjective. If the complainant thinks it is a hate crime, then it is a hate crime. One would think that hatred implied a very high degree of animosity, but the Crown Prosecution Service has suggested that it can include ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, and dislike. Yet all of these, humanity being what it is, are hazards which most of us must expect to live with. Remarkably, until 2021 the College of Policing, which sets standards for the police, after explaining that a hate crime depended on the perception of the victim, added the following observation:

“The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.”

Carried to its logical conclusion, this approach gives racial minorities a right of veto; an entitlement to silence opinions to which they object.

In 2021, the guidance was changed in response to criticism by the Court of Appeal in Miller’s case. The Court of Appeal did not object to the subjective character of the definition, but it held that the guidance was unlawful because it was far too wide. It interfered with Miller’s right of freedom of expression and was likely to have a chilling effect on the discussion of controversial issues like gender. However, the changes to the guidance were minimal. The guidance now says that at the point of receiving the complaint, no justification or evidence is required, leaving open the possibility of seeking such evidence later. The effect is that the investigation of a hate-crime is still dependent on the personal sensitivities of the complainant and the discretion of the police.

All of this originated with the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which was published in 1999. Macpherson made two recommendations which are relevant for present purposes. First, he recommended that the police should systematically record “racist incidents”, a category which he defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. That is the origin of the subjective definitions currently used by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Secondly, he recommended that racist incidents should include both crimes and non-crimes. That is the origin of the category of non-crime hate incidents. Experience has shown the Macpherson recommendations have proved to be extremely damaging. Speaking in the House of Lords last November, Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, observed that the recording of hate crime was a well-intended change which had gone wrong. “The definition of a crime is objective and the definition of hate crime is subjective,” he said, “during the time this has been in place, online crime and online hate crime have grown massively, and the application of the hate crime definition has been inconsistent.” Recently, Britain’s largest police force, the Metropolitan Police, announced that it would stop dealing with non-crime hate incidents. The current commissioner, it was announced, “has been clear he doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position”. So far the Met’s example has not been followed by other police forces.

The most famous test for determining what can and what cannot properly be suppressed is the “harm principle” proposed by John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian apostle of free speech, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty. Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. Hate crime and non-crime hate incidents are symptoms of a modern tendency to redefine harm so that it extends to the discomfort caused by having to endure rudeness, contradiction or dissent. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion of them, they commonly call for a subjective approach to its impact. Harm is whatever the relevant target group perceives as harm. It depends on their “lived experience”, as the phrase goes. This way of looking at the harm done by free speech is particularly common when the offended group is a racial, religious or sexual minority. The argument is that words may undermine the dignity of the groups against whom they are directed. Words wound, it is said, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status. Words are therefore viewed as a form of violence comparable to physical assault. But there are obvious problems with this approach. One is that concepts such as undermining human dignity are too uncertain and subjective to serve as part of the definition of a criminal offense. Another is that there is an important difference between violence and words. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence.

Today, racial, religious or sexual minorities are said to need protection from hurtful words. The desire to accommodate groups who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. Racial, religious and sexual differences are highly sensitive matters, but they are also major issues in our society, as well as in other countries of Western Europe and North America. They need to be openly discussed without fear of criminal liability. Discussion certainly cannot be suppressed without inviting serious suppressed anger which will ultimately be destabilizing and very bad for community relations. Historically, minorities have been the main victims of censorship and other forms of intellectual and social intolerance and the chief beneficiaries of freedom of speech. As I have pointed out, people once believed in the persecution of sexual minorities, the inferiority racial minorities and the exclusion of religious minorities. These notions were supported by the social consensus of the age, but died out in the face of rational discourse. In general, rational counter-argument is a better way of addressing hate speech than the attempt to suppress it through criminal law.

The suppression or punishment of speech tends to start from the best of motives. Its progress is gradual and frequently unperceived. But the ultimate result is objectionable. Recent legislation and police practice has, I fear, moved away from the distinction between coercion and liberty, which represented the only rational basis for curtailing freedom of expression. The result has been to reduce large parts of the law in this area to incoherence.

Once you start proscribing speech on the sole ground that it offends or distresses people, you open the door to the censorship of any words that people do not like. Without a coherent principle governing the permissible limits of free speech, there is effectively no free speech on some issues, except for those who confine themselves to the inoffensive and the anodyne. I think that that would be a retreat into an unpleasant world.

***

This essay is adapted from the Shrieval Lecture, given at Hereford Town Hall on 12 November 2025

In February, in response to Vice-President Vance’s criticism of the British State’s suppression of free speech, Sir Keir managed to get his bit out: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time […] I’m very proud of our history there.” Is he very though?

Is it pride he feels when he looks at the history of the Paul Chambers case, for instance, when the CPS, under his leadership as Director of Public Prosecutions, pursued a young man through the Magistrates, Crown, and High Courts, for a harmless piece of flippancy, an obvious joke about blowing up an airport, which none of the relevant authorities took seriously? If there’s any truth to the Guardian’s report of his personal intervention to continue fighting Chambers’s appeal “to save face” (and it is inconceivable he wasn’t aware of the matter) then he must have had in mind a different pride, and a different history.

But his answer flew well enough, and the discussion moved on. A few months later, in Scotland, the question was again raised in front of the US President. Dusting his cuff and pulling a grin as if in dad-like apology for an overused joke, he parried with, “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time here, so we’re very proud about that and we’ll be protecting it,” before being interrupted. Indoors later that day, he again stuck to the script — “Free speech in this country has been [sic] for a very long time, and we’re very very proud of it, we will protect it forever.”

The fourth outing of the very-very-long-time-very-very-proud defense came at Chequers the other week. “It’s one of the founding values of the United Kingdom, and we protect it jealously and fiercely, and always will, and we will bear down on any limits on free speech,” he began. And to conclude, “We have had free speech in this country for a very long time and we will always protect it.” But sandwiched between these two pieces of now familiar pabulum was something with a new flavor: “I draw a limit between free speech and the speech of those that want to peddle paedophilia and suicide social media to children.” The Paedo Pivot. They should teach it at Bar school.

Over the two months since Trump’s Scottish visit, something in the order of 2,000 people were arrested in the UK for online communications offenses, including, most publicly, Graham Linehan. In an attempt to deflect the backlash from the comedian’s detention, the PM said the police should “focus on the most serious issues”, while the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley put out a statement asserting that it’s not the police’s fault as they have no choice but to investigate reported hate crimes, and the law needs to be changed.

Clearly, then, there is defensive anxiety among the new Establishment about restrictions on Free Speech in the UK. But whose fault is it, and what can be done?

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My own experience of the senior ranks of the police, which comes mainly from defending officers in their disciplinary tribunals, often for speech transgressions of one kind or another, is that the Force has been more thoroughly captured by extreme progressive zealotry than any comparable institution. For evidence, peruse almost any of the College of Policing’s recent output.

The Hate Crime Operational Guidance is, as you might imagine, representative. Turgid and internally inconsistent, it contains countless encouragements to go in hard on the likes of Linehan: “Positive action should be taken,” “Hate crimes should be treated as priority incidents,” “There are occasions where an immediate response by a police officer may not be appropriate or possible… Where such delays occur, a supervisor should consider the reasons given and set out a clear plan for how and when the incident will be responded to.” At the same time, a light dusting of uninformative references to “proportionality” provides plausible deniability.

But the only important message — that officers have wide discretion and must use their common sense — is buried among little nudges as to how that discretion should be exercised: “Where the evidence justifies it, taking positive action is preferable, but the decision to arrest is always a matter for officers, and should be based on the evidence available at the time.” Taking all this stuff together, the thrust of the guidance is clear: if a member of a protected group alleges hate crime, and you don’t get stuck in immediately, you’ll have to answer for it.

So Commissioner Rowley is right to say the Guidance could usefully be amended, but he’s wrong to imply that officers have no choice but to investigate. When an allegation contains no crime, as in the recent Linehan arrest, or when it does but the crime is trivial, the police need make no arrest. Indeed, generally they must make no arrest, because for an arrest to be lawful it has to be “necessary” — a law the police routinely ignore. Most victims of unnecessary arrests don’t have the money to sue. Linehan, funded by the Free Speech Union, is an exception.

But the UK’s status as global number-one free-speech laughing stock does not rest solely, or even mainly, on the volume of arrests, but rather on the substantial sentences of imprisonment that can follow these arrests — of which my former client Lucy Connolly’s is perhaps the best-known example. Although I write this with her knowledge and consent, my role as her advocate is over. How, then, did she end up spending over a year in prison, for posting and then deleting after less than four hours, “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

The simplest answer, as her less forgiving critics would have it, is that she pleaded guilty to Stirring Up Racial Hatred, and accepted the Crown’s case that she was guilty of both the more serious version of the offense — s.19(1)(b) intention to stir up — and the highest categorization on the sentencing guidelines — intention to incite serious violence. That gave a starting point of three years’ imprisonment before the reduction for a guilty plea. And then the Court of Appeal rejected her claim not to have properly understood what she put her signature to when accepting an intention to incite serious violence. So what, really, is the problem?

Well, even if she had understood that she was signing up to be sentenced for an intention to incite serious violence (and I have no wish, and no need, to relitigate that here), her agreement would have been made in the same spirit as her admitted agreement to be sentenced on the basis of an intention to stir up racial hatred: namely, that she didn’t think she would win if she argued it in front of a judge, and she didn’t want to risk losing any of her guilty plea discount by trying.

To be clear, she said in the police interview that she “didn’t intend to cause hate or racial issues”, and despite waiving privilege in the Court of Appeal, there was no evidence of her ever having said to anyone that she had in fact had any criminal intention. Rather, her decision to accept the Crown’s allegation of intent was really a predictive judgment call, a guess at the inferences a judge would draw— and one about which both she, and the lawyer who was advising her at the time, may well have been right.

So, on one view, the problem isn’t so much the action of this particular court in this particular case — which was, after all, presented with an apparent acceptance to be sentenced on the Crown’s case with no argument about intention. But rather it is the broader political climate in which a defendant in Mrs Connolly’s position can make an accurate judgment, on accurate legal advice, that a judge will probably decide that her tweet demonstrated, to the criminal standard of “sure”, an intention to incite serious violence. For my own part, I just can’t see it.

Certainly, there were elements of the proceedings which, in my opinion, might have been different, and might then have made some difference. The Crown could have split the allegation into two counts to at least give her the option of putting to a jury, rather than a judge, the issue of whether she even intended to stir up racial hatred (let alone incite serious violence). And the decision to refuse her bail on 22 August 2024, two weeks after the riots had stopped, was, in my view, unjustifiable. Nevertheless, she might still have made the same decisions regarding her plea, and might still have been right to do so.

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The Right is coming for free speech

By Adam King

The trouble is, to the Progressive mind the success of multiculturalism isn’t just good, it’s the highest good, and its failure the worst ill. All decent people, therefore, will carefully avoid saying or doing anything that even might push things in the wrong direction. And so anyone who does take that risk is not a decent person, and can only really have been intending the bad outcome: if you don’t want the worst imaginable thing to happen, you don’t take the slightest chance of bringing it about. It’s only a short distance away from “silence is violence”: evil must be fought, not ignored, and certainly not diced with. This, in any event, seems to me the most likely chain of reasoning, unconscious or otherwise, of those that believe Lucy Connolly deserved her 31-month sentence.

But it’s not generally fair, nor conducive to the aim of restoring free speech in the UK, to simply blame the judges. Of course the judiciary is more Left-wing than the national average. Even Tony Blair thought so. But it’s the same in all professions. They’re Gen-X-ers and young boomers who attended top universities in the late 20th century. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise. But on the criminal side at least (I make no comment about immigration tribunals), they tend not to be activists. Most of their work has no political valence to it, and the culture in their corridors, so far as I’m familiar with it, is to try very hard to be boringly fair. They don’t always succeed, but politics basically isn’t their game.

It would be nice if the judiciary were more politically representative of the people they serve, if only for optics’ sake. But if your free speech laws cannot withstand a wave of Left-wingers on the bench, then those laws aren’t up to much.

So if the law isn’t currently up to it, how should it be changed? First, section 127 Communications Act 2003, which criminalizes “grossly offensive” messages sent privately even where the recipient is unbothered, delighted or amused, must be repealed: we should be free to send electronically anything we are permitted to say in person. This outdated offense, with its absurd privileging of “a public electronic communications network”, has no place in modern society.

Secondly, Stirring Up Racial Hatred needs a refresh. As another former client Jamie Michael discovered to his detriment, all that’s required — at least for an arrest and prosecution, although not in his case a conviction — is a spirited objection to illegal immigration with a couple of borderline-insulting words thrown in. The 1976 expansion of the offense, to include words that are merely “likely” to stir up racial hatred, now has too great a chilling effect. After all, there arguably is a good chance that some racist somewhere might see your punchy anti-immigration post and feel inspired to a shade more hatred than they were feeling already. And that is now enough for the police to put your door in.

Whereas common sense and proportionality were once inherent features of the system at every level – before the communality of the rules of political engagement, including the conventions around free speech, had been fractured — now they might be absent until — as in Jamie’s case — they are effortfully injected by legal argument in the Crown Court about the jurisprudence on the right to freedom of expression. Safer, then, to just keep your mouth shut on the most significant political issue of our age.

The curious fact that both sides in the culture war offer the same answer about where “the line” should be drawn — speech that incites real-world violence — shows that it is no answer at all. Causation is a quicksilver concept, which lawyers, like philosophers, struggle to delineate. Are you morally responsible, and should you be held criminally liable, for a bad outcome if you can foresee that your words could make that outcome more likely?

If the outcome is bad enough — like terrorism — the answer is sometimes yes. That is why, in those rare cases, we criminalize the mere expression of support. The modern State, though, now seems to be taking a de facto similar attitude to expressions of political opinion that have the potential to influence others in a way that threatens the wellbeing of its sacred cows. But that is not terrorism, and should not be illegal.

Obviously, the less racial hatred there is, the better. The law can, and does, seek to reduce it. But to try to silence millions of citizens who want to share their views on immigration, despite in some cases lacking the verbal dexterity required to avoid rude words and other tripwires, is a terrible own goal.

Starmer reminded us, in his conference speech this week, of the mid-century roots of his socialist convictions: his father’s frustration that the nation did not respect him because he worked with his hands. But the frustrations of the modern working class, certainly on immigration, seem to be of less concern – acknowledged, now and then, but always with a disapproving caveat: “This party is proud of our flags, yet if they are painted alongside graffiti telling a Chinese takeaway owner to ‘go home’…”

Suppressed views, like suppressed emotions, tend to erupt with great force. If disputes over our nation’s future are to be conducted peacefully through debate and not violently on the streets, speech must be free. And if Keir Starmer wants that to last a very, very long time, as he claims, he must act now, and make us all very, very proud.

But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted. Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind. His crime? Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offense.

As for those tweets: on 19 April, he posted an image of a transactivist protest in London along with the caption “a photo you can smell”. When challenged by a user for the “unnecessary comment”, he replied: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” The third was posted on 20 April, and in it Graham wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Those of us accustomed to the churn and clatter of social media have become adept at explaining the obvious to the congenitally literal-minded. And so, with infinite patience, Graham outlined the thinking behind this comment on his Substack, saying that it “was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence”. In any case, as the lawyer Sarah Phillimore pointed out, there is nothing illegal about tweeting advice that any father would have said to their daughters about how to handle a men encroaching on their personal space. “If you want to arrest my dad for this,” she writes, “he’s in a jar on the dresser.”

For Graham, this is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution: one with multiple ringmasters. He was first contacted by the police back in October 2018, when he was given a verbal warning for “deadnaming” and “misgendering” trans activist Stephanie Hayden. A later police visit was prompted by a complaint about Graham’s tweets by Adrian Harrop, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was temporarily suspended for “insulting” online conduct. “This was the visit that really shocked my wife and frightened her”, Graham told me. “It’s one of the main reasons we broke up”.

There has, over the years, been a concerted effort by trans activists to weaponize the police against their victims, aided by the their capture of law enforcement. Consider the different standards at play here. It is now commonplace for trans activists to threaten violence and rape against their adversaries, and yet police rarely investigate. After two SNP politicians were photographed at a trans rally in Glasgow in front of “decapitate TERFS” placard, complete with guillotine, no arrests were made. Compare this with the routine hounding of feminists by police simply for expressing their gender-critical views. Perhaps the police might wish to refresh their memory about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex in the Equality Act, and its implications for the rights of women and gay people.

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The fools who captured the Fringe

By Andrew Doyle

The misuse of police powers has been bad enough, but it has been accompanied by Graham’s broader cancellation by the very industry that once feted him. Unable to make a living in television since 2018 — due to his vocal opposition to gender ideology and the threat it poses to women’s rights — he had no choice but to relocate to Arizona where he has been working on a sitcom for Friendly Fire Studios, with me and a new company we have established with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and writer and producer Martin Gourlay. A full draft of the series has already been written and, if we can successfully put it into production, it will be the sharpest riposte to those activists who have tried to ensure that Graham never writes again.

The farce of Graham’s arrest at Heathrow has already garnered worldwide attention. J.K. Rowling has described it as “totalitarianism”. Joyce Carol Oates has cited it as proof that “the UK is, or has become, an authoritarian government”. Perhaps sensing that the UK is fast becoming an international laughing stock, even Keir Starmer has weighed in, his spokesperson making clear that the police should be focusing on issues that “matter most to their communities”. Given his party’s appalling track record on free speech, this is almost as funny as a line from Father Ted.

But as absurd as it sounds, the arrest of a comedy writer at an airport is by no means the most egregious example of state overreach in recent years. We have seen journalists visited by police for wrongthink; citizens imprisoned for posting memes; prosecutions for controversial Halloween costumes; teenagers convicted and jailed for offensive jokes. Freedom of Information requests by The Times revealed that over 12,000 people are arrested each year for offensive comments posted online, and an estimated quarter of a million of us have been logged by police as perpetrators of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), mostly without being informed.

In spite of all this, there has been no serious effort among the political class to actually change things. There have been occasional overtures: the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has called for the abolition of NCHIs, while previous Home Secretaries have explicitly instructed the College of Policing to end the practice. But all have been ignored. The Court of Appeal has ruled that NCHIs are “plainly an interference with freedom of expression”. Yet nothing has changed, because the activists deeply embedded in the system believe they know best.

There is, though, plenty that our elective representatives could do to address Britain’s totalitarian spiral, if only they could grow a spine. For starters, Parliament should abolish the College of Policing; its activist influence, long apparent, has led to inconsistent and arguably unlawful behavior by officers trained to believe that it is their job to audit the speech and emotions of the public they serve.

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Why I'm leaving the UK

By Andrew Doyle

Parliament should further abolish all “hate speech” legislation. Given that no two governments can agree on a definition of “hate”, these nebulous laws are routinely exploited to chill free speech. Section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly outlaws ‘“threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior” if it is intended “to stir up racial hatred”. Quite apart from the liberal principle that the state should not be attempting to intuit our private motivations, the charge of “racism” is so often misapplied that the law is effectively rendered useless.

Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 proscribe the sending of material that is deemed “grossly offensive”: a hopelessly subjective notion. The Communications Act further prohibits words that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. If every person who posted such messages on social media were convicted tomorrow, the prison population would exceed the number of law-abiding citizens. Either way, these laws are clearly both draconian and incoherent.

Moreover, the very concept of “protected characteristics” makes a nonsense of the principle of equality before the law. Few would object to protections against discrimination on the basis of immutable qualities in the workplace. but there is no sound reason to create differential tiers of law enforcement. In all “hate crime” guidance, “perception of the victim” is the determining factor, as a 2019 report from the Home Office made clear. No actual evidence is required for someone to be recorded as a hate criminal.

Finally, we should introduce sensible laws on “incitement to violence”. The Lucy Connolly case has drawn international attention to the folly of our present laws, in which a nasty but hastily deleted tweet by someone with no influence whatsoever resulted in a 31-month prison sentence. The US standard, known as the “Brandenburg Test”, offers a model of best practice. It makes clear that the speech in question must be deliberately aimed at inciting violence, likely to do so, and that any impact should be imminent. If the UK had an equivalent on the statute books, police would no longer be wasting so much time and money on offensive tweets and memes.

There can no longer be any doubt that free speech is under life-support in Britain, and to keep ignoring the sheer weight of evidence is a labor of perversely Herculean proportions. Many commentators are claiming that the arrest of Graham Linehan could be a tipping point, but this will only be true if the public’s rising frustration can be directed into action. It has been grotesque to witness the state’s ongoing harassment of an acclaimed comedy writer, but perhaps one consolation is that it might finally jolt Westminster out of its complacency.

The day after Captain Tom died last February, 36-year-old Glaswegian Celtic fan Joseph Kelly substituted “Brit soldier” for “Indian”, in the manner of the IRA, in a tweet. He then clarified his position by adding: “burn auld fella, buuuuurn.” Last week, almost a year on, he was convicted by Sheriff Adrian Cottam of sending a “grossly offensive” message contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. He awaits sentence, and perhaps an appeal.

On the rare occasions when discussion of free speech trials avoids the buffers of perceived partisanship — “You were a Thursday night pot-banger so of course you want to throw the book at him” —  it is usually derailed by flitting between two separate questions: “Was the law correctly applied by the court?” and “Should the law be different?” Such flitting can of course be deliberate as well as careless.

Our answer to the first question almost always depends on the meaning of “grossly offensive”. In 2006 the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords held:

“There can be no yardstick of gross offensiveness otherwise than by the application of reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards to the particular message sent in its particular context. The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates.”

As to the mental element of the offence: “the defendant must intend his words to be grossly offensive to those to whom they relate, or be aware that they may be taken to be so”. And in 2017 the High Court seems to have clarified that to mean: “taken to be so by a reasonable member of the public.”

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The law can't end the culture wars

By Adam King

So, if a message is liable to cause gross offence to a person to whom it relates, and the defendant is aware that a reasonable member of the public might take it to be liable to do so, that is enough for a guilty verdict.

Now, one could argue that there is no prospect of someone taking offence at a tweet posted after they’ve died — the charge, after all, specified “offensive remarks about Captain Sir Tom”, rather than about British soldiers in general. But the appeal courts would likely find a way to close that apparent loophole — perhaps by establishing a very broad interpretation of “to whom it relates”.

Was Section 127 applied correctly then? Probably, yes. My own reaction to the tweet was, I confess, low-key: somewhere between a frown and an eye roll. But it was clearly liable to cause gross offence to Captain Tom’s family, and the defendant would surely have been aware that a reasonable member of the public might see it that way.

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By Tanya Gold

But that doesn’t mean this law is any good. And that’s because it does not rest upon a shared cultural respect for a set of extreme taboos. All manner of commonplace statements are now liable to cause gross offence to those to whom they relate — yet be completely unobjectionable to almost everybody else. Yes, there are interpretative protections about the importance of context and so on, but Section 127 criminalises too much, and too vaguely.

The Indian Supreme Court came to this conclusion several years ago. The relevant parts of Section 66A of their Information Technology Act 2001 were written in near-identical terms to Section 127 of our Communications Act 2003. In striking down the legislation in 2015, the Justices held that “expressions such as ‘grossly offensive’ […] are so vague that there is no manageable standard by which a person can be said to have committed an offence or not”.

Fortunately, we might be about to catch up with the Developing World. In July last year the Law Commission recommended we get rid of Section 127. Its report noted that we lack universally accepted definitions of concepts such as “grossly offensive”; the “spectre of universal standards” should be “rejected”. Arguably, a lack of universal standards does not augur well for society — but we mustn’t deny that this is the state we find ourselves in.

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By Jenny McCartney

In place of Section 127, the report recommended a new offence: posting, without reasonable excuse, a communication “likely to cause harm to a likely audience”, and the Crown must prove that the defendant intended harm. Harm is defined as, at a minimum, serious psychological distress. This is, on the face of it, a great improvement. And last Friday, the Government published an interim response expressing their intention to add this offence to the Online Safety Bill.

So unlike Section 127, the new offence would require proof of an intention to cause serious psychological distress. And even when a defendant did hold that intention, he or she could argue that the message wasn’t actually likely to be seen by anyone likely to be seriously distressed by it. This could place heavier responsibility on the bigger Twitter accounts, which is as it should be. And “It was supposed to be a joke”, “I didn’t mean any harm by it”, “I didn’t expect it to be retweeted so much”, and even “in the circumstances it was fair enough” (reasonable excuse) could all, if this law is enacted, become relevant parts of a defence.

But there is a twist. The Law Commission’s original plan, in the consultation paper, was that the Crown need only prove that the defendant was aware of the risk that harm might be caused. This is a much lower threshold than intention. The reason for their change of heart, they repeatedly emphasised, is that the Online Safety Bill imposes a legal duty on social media companies to remove harmful content — including content that is not illegal.

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Can you ever trust a jury?

By Adam King

So a complaint to Twitter about the removal of a perfectly lawful tweet could be met with the response, “Yes, but the only reason tweets like this are not illegal is because we have to delete them”. Of course, the State delegating its natural responsibilities to private companies is nothing new. But to do so to this extent — narrowing the ambit of an important piece of criminal legislation at the heart of our right to Free Speech — is a worrying development, and does not sit well with the Law Commission’s stated aim of “technological neutrality”, or their intention that new offences be “future-proofed”.

If a behaviour is so wrong that it should be criminal, it ought not to slip through the net simply because global tech companies will be told to prevent it. The Law Commission rightly expressed concern about the “inconsistent application” of the Section 127 offence. But if there is one thing all sides can agree on it is that Twitter’s moderation policies are known for little else.

The high bar of intention to cause harm is a welcome development, and a measure of offensive dross in the digital public square is a price worth paying: for freedom, yes, but also for the sense of freedom, particularly among people at the less free end of the socio-economic spectrum. But instead of requiring social media companies to remove non-criminal material, it might be better — safer, even, in the long-run — if they were prevented from doing so. After all, responsibility for deciding what can and cannot be said should rest, perhaps, with any reasonable member of the public. And most of them are not on Twitter.

Everyone involved in the play — playwright, actors, the producer, the director, even people who handed out flyers on the streets of Edinburgh — could find themselves under investigation. In time, they might be charged with a new criminal offence, whose penalties include up to seven years in prison.

Sounds like scare-mongering? It’s not. A whole section of the bill, snappily titled “culpability where offence is committed during public performance of play” [sic], has been drawn up with theatrical performances in mind. Its definitions are so widely drawn as to catch stand-up, one-person shows, even opera. One of the bill’s critics, the Faculty of Advocates, has pointed out that there does not have to be “any intention on the part of the performer, director or presenter to stir up hatred”.

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Hate crime is the new blasphemy

By Mary Harrington

Have MSPs ever been to the theatre? Read a book? Don’t they know that authors often create unattractive characters without endorsing them or condemning an entire group? There would be no way of knowing in advance what might lead someone to use the new law to close down a production that offends their views on religion, say, or one that focuses on gay men using surrogacy to have a child. The chilling effect on the performing arts is not hard to imagine, but the legislation would also have the bizarre effect of criminalising performances in Scotland that would be perfectly legal in England.

What kind of government blithely steams ahead with legislation that would muzzle one of the world’s most successful arts festivals? Let me introduce you to the SNP’s Justice Secretary, Humza Yousaf. The 35-year-old MSP for Glasgow Pollok has managed to create an impressive coalition of opponents to his Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) bill, even though it’s being presented as a tidying-up exercise that merely brings together existing hate crimes laws into a single piece of legislation. Its critics, who include everyone from the crime writer Val McDermid and the comedian Rowan Atkinson to the Humanist Society Scotland, the Scottish Police Federation and the Catholic church, take a very different view. Earlier this week, McDermid was among 20 writers and performers who signed an open letter warning that the bill could stifle freedom of speech.

Yousaf’s response is best summed up by a tweet he posted last month, which managed to be patronising and dismissive while also getting a core part of his own legislation wrong. “The Bill will not prevent you expressing controversial or offensive views”, he lectured his critics. “Just don’t do it in a threatening or abusive way that is likely or intended to stir up hatred”.

https://twitter.com/HumzaYousaf/status/1286690052479877123

As I’ve already pointed out, you don’t have to intend to stir up hatred to be caught by the legislation, something that the Justice Secretary should surely know. Rank-and-file police officers in Scotland are horrified: “We are firmly of the view this proposed legislation would see officers policing speech and would devastate the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of the public,” says Calum Steele, the SPF’s general secretary. New powers to forcibly enter and search premises in pursuit of an offence of “possessing inflammatory material”, whatever that may be, are hardly likely to improve relations between the police and the public.

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Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

By Peter Franklin

The Scottish government has fallen into a familiar trap, in assuming that we all agree on the definition of subjective words like ‘hate’, ‘insult’ and ‘offence’. We don’t — and there isn’t even agreement on which groups need enhanced legal protection. To return to my theoretical example for a moment, if I were offended by the negative portrayal of the feminist in the play, I would just have to lump it. I’m not complaining about that — I’ve campaigned for the right of authors and performers to offend for years — but it’s striking that women have been left off the list of people who will receive additional protection under the bill. (Age is being added to the protected characteristics, joining disability, race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity.)

This is par for the course: misogyny isn’t a hate crime anywhere in the UK and senior police officers baulk at the very notion, on the grounds (I paraphrase) that there’s so bloody much of it. The omission speaks volumes about the motives behind hate crime legislation, which are well-meaning — but only up to a point. Governments are selective about who they see as vulnerable, even though women are far more likely than men to be on the receiving end of sexual harassment, murder and rape threats.

The Scottish government says it is considering adding women as a protected group at a later date but the bill won’t protect Edinburgh’s most famous resident, the author J. K. Rowling. She has been the target of a vicious campaign of abuse in recent months, facing nonsensical accusations of ‘literally’ killing trans women for defending women’s rights. If the legislation is passed in its present form, however, Rowling might well find herself reported to the police for stirring up hatred against trans people, an offence that will be very much in the eye of the beholder. Indeed the legislation seems to have been drafted by people who haven’t given any thought to the possibility of vexatious or misguided complaints.

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Our dangerous approach to misogyny

By Joan Smith

Countless people have been driven off social media sites, not for “stirring up hate” but for posting material that zealots of one sort or another disagree with. The acronym DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — refers to a common tactic used against feminists, describing the way hateful people turn the tables and present themselves as victims. That’s bound to happen if the bill isn’t amended, and women will be among the biggest losers. Genuine hate speech — threats to kill, rape or hurt someone’s family — is already a criminal offence and should be prosecuted under existing legislation, without putting authors, comedians, playwrights and campaigners at the mercy of malicious reporting.

To be fair, there is one aspect of the hate crimes bill that has been almost universally welcomed, and that is the abolition of blasphemy. It is an outdated law, incompatible with the values of a modern, secular society, and it has not been prosecuted in Scotland for almost two centuries. Yet the very same legislation threatens to criminalise the free expression of ideas that challenge prevailing orthodoxies, whether they are religious or (more likely) rooted in social movements. It would be ironic if Nicola Sturgeon’s government was to go down in history as the administration that got rid of blasphemy, only to introduce a secular form of heresy into Scottish law.

The strange thing is that the piece was a defence of Muslim women’s right to wear the full veil, and a condemnation of the Danish government’s decision to ban them. It was a couple of nasty little throwaway lines that caused the outrage, rather than the content itself.

Now, the NGO Tell MAMA, which records anti-Muslim incidents, has said that the piece was followed by a 375% surge in abuse and attacks on Muslims. The Guardian goes further, saying that the comments “led to a surge in anti-Muslim attacks”.

That sounded absolutely extraordinary to me. A 375% increase is enormous. So I thought I’d have a closer look.

The report records all “anti-Muslim incidents” received by Tell MAMA. That includes offline and online incidents, and also both verbal abuse and physical assaults. Tell MAMA says that it received 1,282 reports of anti-Muslim incidents in 2018, and that it “verified” 1,072 of them, 745 of which were offline.

Johnson’s “letterboxes” column was published on Monday 5 August 2018. In the week before that, Tell MAMA “received 8 reports of street-based (offline) anti-Muslim attacks”, by which I think they mean all incidents. But in the week afterward, the 6th to the 13th, “this jumped to 38, an increase of 375%”.

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If I’ve read it correctly, and they’re referring to all verified offline incidents, then 745 incidents a year translates to a bit more than 14 a week, on average. So the eight reported the week before was anomalously low, making that 375% increase sound much more dramatic.

Still, 38 is 165% above the average. But, again, I can’t work out whether that’s unusual. The report doesn’t give weekly breakdowns, so I can’t see whether the numbers are usually pretty steady around the average, or if they jump up and down a lot. If the former, then a week of 38 is surprising; if the latter, it might not be. (I have asked Tell MAMA for more information, but so far, I haven’t heard anything; I’ll add an update here if I hear back from them.)

They do have a breakdown by month, which shows in August there were around 70 of these incidents, about the same as April, May and June, and rather lower than March, which had a little over 80. The Tell MAMA report says that the March spike was driven by a horrible letter-writing campaign called Punish a Muslim Day which called for anti-Muslim attacks on the 3 April.

I think, though, that the really standout thing about these numbers is how tiny they are. For instance, there were only 327 verified anti-Muslim incidents online in the whole of 2018. I can’t believe for a second that there aren’t more than that every day on Twitter alone, if “anti-Muslim incident” includes abusive language.

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By Tom Chivers

There are more than three million Muslims in the UK. Tell MAMA recorded about 1,000 anti-Muslim incidents, on and offline, and said that the police recorded nearly 2,000 more (they say there’s no overlap). If those numbers are the whole story – and Tell MAMA are very clear in saying that they’re not – then at most one in 1,000 British Muslims were the victims of anti-Muslim abuse of some form last year. I would be amazed if that’s not a huge underestimate.

What that means is that it’s much less likely that the Tell MAMA numbers are recording real underlying change. It’s like an opinion poll – the smaller your sample, the less likely it is to be representative of the population. In real opinion polls, the pollsters try to get around that problem by finding a representative sample, and weighting it where it is not.

The Tell MAMA numbers come from people who contact Tell MAMA, which is a non-random, non-representative sample of the population. It could, for instance, be simply that, in the aftermath of high-profile events such as Johnson’s column, anti-racist projects such as Tell MAMA get more publicity and so get more reports. Given the difficulty of teasing out media effects on real-world behaviour, that sounds more likely to me than a single column, behind the Telegraph paywall, causing a 375% spike in incidents.

The question, of course, is what is really happening with anti-Muslim hate crimes and abuse. Unnervingly, hate crimes recorded by the police have gone up dramatically in the past few years: from a little over 40,000 in 2011/12 to nearly 100,000 in 2017/18. Racially motivated crimes have gone up from 35,000 to 70,000; religiously motivated ones from 1,600 to 8,300.

Suggested reading

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

But those increases, according to the police themselves, are largely due to the police getting better at recording these sorts of crimes, and a growing public awareness of them leading to more reporting. A Home Office hate crime report, using the Crime Survey for England and Wales data, reports that the total number of hate crimes has in fact dropped, from around 300,000 in 2007 to about 184,000 in 2018, although religiously motivated incidents have stayed roughly steady at about 38,000.

Interestingly, there was some evidence (not from the CSEW but from Home Office figures) of some spikes after major incidents – but those incidents were huge national news stories, such as the EU referendum or the five terror attacks in 2017, not pay-walled columns. And even they aren’t anything like the 375% increase Tell MAMA claims; they’re larger spikes in a spiky line.

So the problem is both less and more than the Tell MAMA report suggests, I think. Boris Johnson’s reckless column gets far more notoriety than it deserves; it may have caused a few isolated incidents, but I would be astonished if it had the sort of major effect it claims. But hate crimes in general are much more common than the small numbers Tell MAMA records.

Tell MAMA aren’t a polling company: they exist to give Muslims a place to report the abuse and attacks they find themselves on the end of. I don’t blame them for trying to collate that data and turn it into something useful. But the media should know better than to take the dramatic numbers it comes up with at face value, assume a causal link where none can be shown, and then plaster the whole thing under a dramatic headline. Britain already feels like a powder keg, and these are just more sparks flying around.

Over the next week, I’ll be counting down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 – the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.

Today, numbers 10 to 1:

#10

China’s chip addiction

UnPacked features a lot of stories about China –  and especially its game-changing use of technology. But for all the ways in which the Chinese as moving faster into the future than we are, there are some big gaps in the country’s technological prowess.

One of the biggest is the subject of an Adam Minter piece for Bloomberg:

“Although China long ago mastered the art of making products with semiconductors produced elsewhere (the iPhone is the most famous example), it wants to move beyond being a mere assembler…

“…China is currently the world’s biggest chip market, but it manufactures only 16 percent of the semiconductors it uses domestically.”

China’s influence over the global economy and geopolitics can only grow in the decades ahead, but its vulnerabilities – technological, social, environmental and demographic – are as significant as its strengths.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#9

The Centrist Paradox

Is political polarisation a threat to democracy? Are the ‘wings’ – Left and Right – drifting towards authoritarian extremism?

That’s the standard account of what ails the body politic, but in a fascinating piece for the New York Times, David Adler presents evidence to show that the most disillusioned voters are those in the centre of the political spectrum:

“I examined the data from the most recent World Values Survey (2010 to 2014) and European Values Survey (2008), two of the most comprehensive studies of public opinion carried out in over 100 countries…

“Respondents who put themselves at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, according to several survey measures…”

This is so counter-intuitive that Adler calls it the Centrist Paradox. Who, then are these ‘centrists’? Are they latte-sipping liberals aghast at the rise of populism or are they working class populists who’ve become disillusioned with the parties of the mainstream Left and Right?

It could, of course, be both – meaning that the centre is also incoherent.

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Flyover Country

#8

The gaping hole in the party system

Here’s another possible explanation for the Centrist Paradox: there’s a large group of voters who are unrepresented by the conventional party system. Traditionally, there are progressive parties that lean to the Left on economic and social issues and conservative parties that lean to the Right. You can also find liberal parties that lean Left on social issues and Right on economics.

But what about voters who do the opposite – leaning Left on economics and Right on social (and, especially, cultural) issues? A fascinating report by Lee Drutman for the Voter Study Group, suggests that there are a lot of these ‘Left conservatives’ – indeed they heavily outnumber the economic and social liberals who have such an outsize influence on politics.

This gaping hole has allowed populists of Left, Right and centre to disrupt the party system, but without offering a coherent policy platform.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#7

The deflationary Death Star versus healthcare

In a piece for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson refers to Amazon as a “deflationary Death Star” – a brilliant description of the company’s effect on any market it enters into.

If there’s one market whose prices definitely need deflating, it’s the ruinously expensive US healthcare industry. Therefore, the fact that Amazon is teaming up with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to sort it out may prove the most important business news of the year:

“The surprising trio of the nation’s largest online retailer, largest bank by assets, and most famous investor (Warren Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire) riding to the rescue of the beleaguered health system already rocked insurance stocks and thrilled health-care experts who have long dreamed of a technological solution to ‘bend the curve’ of inexorably rising medical costs.”

The immediate interest of the three companies is obvious – reducing the cost of providing healthcare benefits to their combined workforce. But if they succeed in developing a new and much cheaper healthcare model, I doubt they’ll keep it in-house.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#6

The opioid epidemics

America’s greatest public health crisis is the opioid epidemic – and according to Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times, the latest figures show it getting worse:

“Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans last year, a record number that reflects a rise of around 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes or gun deaths.”

In the Atlantic, Ashley Fetters brings us news of another American epidemic:

“…reported cases of three sexually transmitted diseases in the United States had reached an all-time high in 2017. Rates of gonorrhea rose by 67 percent, syphilis by 76 percent, and chlamydia by 21 percent, to a total of almost 2.3 million cases nationwide… the fourth year in a row that STDs increased steeply in the U.S.”

Inevitably, the “rise in high-risk sexual behaviors [is] associated with opioid use and addiction”.

Suicide is also on the rise again in America, and that too can be linked, in part, to opioids.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Flyover Country

#5

The polygenic revolution

A strong contender for book of the year is Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are – by the geneticist Robert Plomin. It guides us through the accumulating evidence that genes have a major influence on behavioural traits, not just physical ones.

Quoted by Andrew Anthony in the  Guardian, Plomin is at pains to point out that the genetic influence on how we turn out is polygenic – i.e. hundreds, even thousands, of genes can be involved in influencing a single trait. We don’t understand exactly how these complex interactions work, but we can measure the correlations between the presence of particular genes and the expression of particular traits. On this basis, polygenic testing could be used to make predictions about behavioural outcomes.

Whether this tool is used to tailor support to individuals or to discriminate against them will be down to society, not science.

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The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Technology

#4

Amazon Go

Amazon is best known as an online retailer. But in 2018 it opened a new store in Seattle called Amazon Go. In a fascinating piece for Stratechery, Ben Thompson tells us about it:

“The trick is that you don’t pay, at least in person: a collection of cameras and sensors pair your selection to your Amazon account — registered at the door via smartphone app — which rather redefines the concept of ‘grab-and-go’.”

Think of all the different systems that have to be coordinated to make it all work. But then that, in a nutshell, is Amazon’s grand strategy – expanding in all directions, not just to achieve unbeatable economies of scale, but also to create a unified retail ecosystem in which it controls and seamlessly integrates all the interfaces between each bit of the overall operation. No other retail or logistics company will be in a better position to fully automate just about everything it does.

This year, there’s been a lot of debate over how Amazon treats its workers. In ten or twenty years time we could be asking ‘what workers?’

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Capitalism

#3

Yes we’re richer, but where did all the wildlife go?

The counterpoint to the crisis of capitalism in the West is the massive fall in global poverty. And, as well as the world getting richer, we also see long-term trends on literacy, violence, longevity and access to sanitation all moving in the right direction.

Yet the good news is no excuse for ignoring the trends heading in the wrong direction. In the Guardian, Damian Carrington writes about an especially dramatic and disturbing example:

“The Living Planet Index, produced for WWF by the Zoological Society of London, uses data on 16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, representing more than 4,000 species, to track the decline of wildlife. Between 1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of 60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%.”

At what point do we call a halt?

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Global Affairs

#2

Americans against hate speech… and political correctness

One of the most encouraging stories of 2018, was a study, published by More in Common, which demonstrates that Americans do indeed have more in common than one might think.

In a must-read piece for the Atlantic, Yascha Mounk highlights the key findings:

“Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that ‘political correctness is a problem in our country.’ Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24…”

These majorities were pretty consistent across ethnic groups too.

Meanwhile 82% of Americans “believe that hate speech is also a problem.”

It’s great that’s there such an overwhelming constituency for common-sense and against bigotry. If only there was a politician ready and able to represent it.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Flyover Country

#1

Social Credit System

I’m afraid I’ll have to conclude on a dystopian note; but there’s no other way of seeing China’s Social Credit System. This is the government plan to quantify and gamify the ‘good behaviour’ of every Chinese citizen in the form of a single score – a bit like a financial credit rating or points on a driving license, but applied across a whole range of different activities.

In a report for ScienceAlert, Peter Dockrill says that citizens will get a higher score for acts “like paying bills on time, engaging in charity, and… recycling” and a lower score for “[being] late with payments… jaywalking or smoking in non-smoking areas.”

The rewards of a high score will likely include “better credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services”. Low scorers will be second class citizens, restricted in movement and opportunity.

Quite clearly intended as an instrument of social control, the regime is making no attempt to hide that fact:

“According to China’s Communist Party, the system will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.”

Pilot programmes are already in place with the system due to go national in 2020.

How long, I wonder, before we get something like it too?

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 10 to 1

Technology

Hired: Six months undercover in low-wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Low paid, insecure and precarious work has come to characterise the modern labour market, and UnHerd columnist James Bloodworth’s book Hired exposes just how exploitative much of it is. In a similar vein to Polly Toynbee and George Orwell before him, Bloodworth goes undercover in various low paid jobs across the country to experience first hand the conditions millions of workers face. Hired is an illuminating piece of journalistic work and sheds light on a topic that rarely gets serious coverage. For this reason it is a must read.

Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher

Leta Hong Fincher’s excellently researched book draws on extensive interviews with women across China to paint a portrait of a burgeoning feminist movement that is flourishing despite repression by the powerful Chinese state. Hong Fincher focuses on the feminists’ activism against domestic and sexual violence, unequal pay, sexual harassment in education and the workplace, arbitrary detention and political surveillance, and the more general fact that the Chinese Communist Party relies on patriarchal authoritarianism to enforce “harmony” and social stability. The stories of these Chinese women are inspirational and remind us of the need for continued feminist activism across the globe.

Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider

I have my differences with Asad Haider politically, but Mistaken Identity is a nuanced critique of identity politics from a socialist and anti-racist perspective. He briefly, yet energetically charts the history of identity politics from the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s to the present-day reemergence of social movements like Black Lives Matter. Haider argues that “identity politics” has lost any emancipatory potential it may once have had, and has degenerated into essentialism – viewing ‘identity’ in itself as an organisational category and a condition of being political. I did feel Haider could have further developed his advocacy of strategic “insurgent universality”, but Mistaken Identity is nonetheless an important contribution to the debate about identity politics on the Left.

HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

The role of free speech is at the centre of the culture wars that are polarising Western society, and the concept of hate speech, and whether it should be criminalised, is a frequent topic of debate. Supporters argue that hate speech laws are a tool in the fight against racism and other forms of bigotry, and can remedy the injuries hate speech can cause.

Using strong legalistic arguments and evidence from other countries Nadine Strossen takes the view that hate speech laws are at best ineffective, and worst counterproductive, to their stated aims. In particular, she shows how vague the concept tends to be, leading to very loose interpretations and the propensity for abuse. It should not be a surprise that reactionary politicians and commentators in the US refer to Black Lives Matter as a “hate group”.

Strossen’s core argument is that the best way to fight against hate, and for equality and social justice, is not through censorship, but with the vigorous use of free speech. Her argument may not be popular in some circles, but the need to defend free speech from all threats is more important than ever.

Indefensible by Rohini Hensman

This is one of my favourite books of this year. Rohini Hensman has written a much needed critique of certain tendencies on the Left to subscribe to a hypocritical form of “anti-imperialism” – opposing imperialism from Western powers while expressing indifference, or worse support, for Russian imperialism, Iranian clerical imperialism or various Bonapartist regimes that are authoritarian and nationalist in nature and who give lip service to anti-Western populism. Indefensible should serve as a clarion call for the Left to practice a more consistent internationalism, where the values of freedom, democracy, self-determination and human rights apply to all parts of world.

It’s not clear what led to the final breach, though on Tuesday the Mail was forced to issue one last, expensive apology on her behalf. On the same day H*pkins appears to have deleted nearly all of her past 45,000 tweets. Imagine what kind of individual you’d have to be to feel the need to do that, or for your lawyers to advise it, or to need lawyers in that way at all.

Still, nothing ever really vanishes from cyberspace. The greatest hits are there if you look: there’s the ‘we need a final solution’ classic that followed the terrorist massacre of young concert-goers in Manchester; there’s ‘Ramadan typically brings a spike in violence in Middle East. I get grumpy when I don’t eat – but I don’t blow things up. Religion of peace?’; there are the two from when Pauline Cafferkey, the Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola while volunteering in Sierra Leone, was given treatment in London: ‘Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn’t cricket. Scottish NHS sucks’, and ‘Glaswegian ebola patient moved to London’s Royal Free Hospital. Not so independent when it matters most are we jocksville?’

Then there was the column in the Sun comparing African migrants crossing the Mediterranean with ‘cockroaches’ and calling for gunboats to stop them, which the UN felt moved to describe as hate speech. Earlier this month she delivered an extraordinary speech in Florida to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a far-right American think-tank, in which she said it was ‘a pleasure to be amongst people that are prepared to fight for their country’ and described this as ‘our time’: ‘We can commit to arm ourselves, not just with the help of the NRA. Get furious and fight back.’ She went on to insist areas of Britain are controlled by a ‘Muslim mafia’ and to claim Britain has ‘institutionalised discrimination against whites’. She also railed against “Muslim men” and the “Muslim mayor of Londonistan’.

Reader, it is not for me to condemn this reprehensible, inhumane creature – it is for you to do so.

Free speech: yes, I know. But free speech is the right to say any old crap (H*pkins: tick), even malicious old crap (H*pkins: tick), even offensive, malicious old crap (H*pkins: you get the picture) without fear of censorship unless you libel someone or are judged to be provoking violence (H*pkins: oh…). What free speech isn’t is a requirement that major mainstream news outlets, read, watched and listened to by mass audiences and with a significant and influential role in the national debate, make house room for the most contemptible, inflammatory views in our society. And yet that is what the Sun, and LBC, and the Mail did with this woman. It is a matter of judgement. As is Iain Dale’s decision to use his otherwise estimable Biteback imprint recently to publish her autobiography. And we are entitled to judge them back.

Why would you carry regular columns or broadcasts by someone like this? On the newspaper front it might be taken as an indication of weakness: the right-wing papers have watched as the less pleasant parts of their readership have hared off in the direction of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and maybe even Tommy Robinson, their baser instincts bubbling to the surface along with these ignorant, tinpot rabble-rousers. Falling circulations and revenues plus a radicalised constituency are a dangerous mix: desperation kicks in, the junkie hunger for clicks – regardless of who is clicking – is overpowering, standards plummet, you end up with a K*tie H*pkins column, she and her views now have your legitimising imprimatur, the national tone slips a bit further hellwards. So the cycle goes. Provocative writers are a must, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with radio’s shock jock culture. But where is the line drawn? Is there a line?

Whether they like it nor not, big institutions should have an eye to their moral footprint. The media likes to believe it stands alone and aloof, bad boys with a sheriff’s badge and a gun. But too often, and I say this as a lifelong newspaper hack, with a deep love of the medium, they demand a standard of behaviour from others – parliament, banks, celebrities and the rest – that they do not feel the need to meet themselves.

H*pkins is, in the end, a circus act, the equivalent of a medieval fool, using what limited gifts she has to make a living. From her first appearance in the public eye many years ago, on The Apprentice, she has been the cold, canny type: the kind who looks at a situation, calculates which position will generate the most controversy, then adopts it good and hard. I have no idea if she even believes what she says: if she believes in anything beyond K*tie H*pkins.

What should worry us more than a damaged woman spouting hatred from her bedroom laptop is the contamination of our shared space – the mainstreaming of opinions that have been regarded as beyond the pale for good moral reasons. Trump has praised Hopkins as a ‘respected columnist’ and thanked her ‘for her powerful writing on the UK’s Muslim problems’. He has patronised Nigel Farage, too, even if the former Ukip leader’s fanboy adoration for the President has latterly become an embarrassingly one-sided affair. Farage is arguably more responsible for Brexit than any other individual, and decent Leavers rode his racist tiger to victory, whatever their own views (Farage has a show on LBC – of course he does). This week Trump retweeted videos posted by the deputy leader of the BNP-linked Britain First that appeared to show extreme Muslim violence. At the less egregious end, though still swimming in the same swamp, is Alex Salmond and his appalling decision to present a talk show on the Kremlin mouthpiece Russia Today.

We increasingly appear to live in a world where all opinions must be afforded the same weight, where the parameters of what constitutes reasonable opinion are so wide as to be meaningless. Trump, Farage, Hopkins, Fox News, Breitbart and the rest are like a noxious gas seeping into our minds and respiratory tracts. Have we decided that this is fine, that we’re cool with it? Is it ok for our media to refuse to exercise restraint and judgement in the public interest? If hate weighs the same as love, what is either worth?