The response to the race riots has been defined by two competing forms of denialism, writes Tom Slater for Spiked. “There’s the denialism of the Very Online right, desperate to downplay, make excuses for or flat-out ignore the racism on display, online and off, in those dark days after Southport. Then there’s the denialism of the authoritarian establishment, desperate to pretend that there is no threat to freedom of speech, even as the British state goes about telling people to ‘Think before they post’, cracking down hard on ‘online violence’ (whatever that is) and throwing the book at people for bigoted or untrue things they have said on the internet.” He continues:
Both are a pox. And if we want to stand up for free speech and defeat the racial politics that has emerged in our midst, they both need to be exposed and discredited.
Let’s focus our attention here on the establishment, the censorship deniers – the smug, gaslighting, midwit elites who are calling for censorship one minute and saying ‘no one is being censored here, you idiot’ the next.
Lee Joseph Dunn is the latest man to be imprisoned for meme crime. In Carlisle Magistrates’ Court on Monday, he pleaded guilty to posting ‘grossly offensive’, ‘menacing’ messages – an offence under Section 127 of the Communications Act. He shared a series of images – reportedly depicting Asian men arriving on boats, wielding knives and the like – captioned with the words, ‘Coming to a town near you’. In an almost quaint nod to a local institution, one image depicted these racist caricatures outside of the annual Egremont Crab Fair, home of the World Gurning Championships. Dunn was given eight weeks in prison.
Were these posts racist, contemptible, disgusting? Absolutely. Should the poster have been sent to prison for them? Absolutely not. That is the distinction, as a society, that Britain has completely lost now, following our decades-long experiment with hate-speech legislation.
Hate speech is free speech. It’s why America, home of the First Amendment, has the sum total of zero hate-speech laws. Because it doesn’t matter how ugly, even dangerous, an opinion is, the state should not be empowered to clamp down on it. Allowing the government to define and police hate is a recipe for never-ending restrictions on thought and speech.
As we know, the state often operates under a definition of ‘hate’ that few would recognise. Indeed, it isn’t just racist speech that is being criminalised by Britain’s array of hate laws.
The way you challenge hatred is through more speech, more mobilisation, more debate – not less. Otherwise, you never truly dispel and discredit these ideologies. You just make martyrs out of fascists. And you open the door to censorship of many more views, too.
Censorship never stays put. That’s certainly been the British experience. Bernadette Spofforth, a conspiratorial influencer, has been arrested and bailed, pending further inquiries, for her role in spreading that odious bit of misinformation – about the Southport killer being a Muslim asylum seeker – that helped spark the unrest. She was arrested, in part, on suspicion of a new ‘false communications offence’, brought in by the Tories’ Online Safety Act 2023.
Much more troublingly, but less widely reported on, a man was actually convicted of this same offence last week, after he posted a video to his 700 TikTok followers, pretending to flee for his life from far-right rioters. He’ll be in prison for three months.
So now we’re locking up people for being fantasists on the internet. We’re going to need a lot more prisons.
Let’s be real. The post-riots authoritarianism has already gone far beyond justly punishing those who engaged in or incited violence on our streets. That the censorship deniers are pretending otherwise, while also mulling over whether X should be banned from the UK and its owner banged up, is ridiculous.
The vast, vast majority have zero sympathy with the rioters. The British public are not conspiratorial bigots. But if you wanted a strategy to embolden and inflame a bigoted, conspiratorial fringe, you’d do well to improve on what the British establishment has been up to over recent decades.
The elites have come to see freedom of speech as the source of all of our problems and censorship as all that stands between civilisation and barbarism. Not for the first time, they are catastrophically mistaken.
Worth reading in full.
