Policing Speech

Occasionally we take a look at life across the pond. The pond in question is the Atlantic Ocean, but cool people call it the pond. Go figure.

As often happens, our guide is the highly estimable Julie Burchill. At the least, her commentaries make you happy that you do not live in Great Britain. The reason, that nation is suffering labour pains, for having elected too many Labour Party members of Parliament. The new British government has chosen to get seriously into the business of policing speech.

It begins in the playground. British police have started to police children in the playground, for the horrific crime of name-calling. No kidding. 

… children as young as nine are being cautioned by the police for calling each other names in the playground.

Burchill thinks this is a very bad idea. She thinks that it is better to teach children how to deal with insults than to try to ban all insults. After all, you are never going to ban all insults. 

In order to be very clear, we are dealing here with schoolyard taunts. The rules that she offers do not, obviously, pertain to civil torts, like slander, libel and defamation.

The correct way to counter name-calling is either to hurl them back or ignore them. 

She continues:

I believe that people should be allowed to say anything they like about anyone, except for baseless accusations of criminal acts or threatening criminal acts against them. Our aim should not be ridding the internet of trolls – it can never be accomplished, and the police have far more important things to do – but to make young people utterly immune to name calling. Instead, we seem to place the emphasis on making bullies stop bullying rather than encouraging the bullied to toughen up.

As for a concrete example, Burchill confides in one of the insults that are routinely hurled at her. The subject is the fact that one of her sons committed suicide.

Given that she has spoken ill of Meghan Markle, one of the duchess’s fans threw this at her:

One of them asked me why my son committed suicide and I replied instantly, ‘Because he was mentally ill – like you’. 

The effort to censor all disparaging speech renders children weak. They never learn how to stand up for themselves, to defend themselves. They remain coddled:

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’ is still a good credo to live by. Making children feel like victims is the best way to ensure that they never succeed but become ever more weakened. By taking and dealing out verbal abuse, we get to know what the boundaries are.

Burchill wants children to toughen up, and she remarks that in Keir Starmer’s Britain, language has been criminalized and offensive speech has often led to imprisonment. 

But this criminalisation of language is already being felt in other arenas, from the people jailed for posting on social media to the journalist Allison Pearson being accused of a hate crime over a Tweet. It starts in the playground – but it ends as a provision in the Employment Rights Bill that seeks to make employers liable for staff being offended by customers or members of the public. 

This is all about infantilizing people, not treating them like adults. It also involves a totalitarian wish to produce groupthink.

Their reaction is not that of an adult talking to another adult who holds different views from them, but of parents remonstrating a rude child who refuses to obey. Starmer’s resemblance to an exasperated supply teacher was often noted before he came to power; now he has the top job, he’s headmaster, and he can jolly well make us pipe down. So, in the interests of freedom – and of fun – let’s call the head all the nasty names we want: Sir Shifty, Captain Hindsight, Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest – and, especially, Two-Tier Keir.

Of late, the Labour leader has been flirting with a ban on blasphemous speech-- but only when directed against one specific religion.

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