Between bigots and censors

The response to the race riots has been defined by two competing forms of denialism. 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.

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.

There has already been a good deal of fisking of the former. Not least in these pages. (If you haven’t already read Inaya Folarin Iman’s takedown of the white-identitarian pseuds who are suddenly all over the right-wing chattersphere, you’re in for a real treat.)

So 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. After all, while hard-right poseurs have become an unpleasant feature of online public discussion, the great and good’s ability to silence public discussion is infinitely more dangerous.

The government’s depressingly predictable pursuit of censorship after the riots has made the UK both a cautionary tale and a transatlantic laughing stock. The backlash has been led by Elon Musk, owner of X, Big Tech’s only relatively pro-free-speech platform, whose sometimes tongue-in-cheek interventions have been a little lost on Britain’s humourless illiberal liberals.

‘It’s 2030 in the UK and you’re being executed for posting a meme’, Musk said last week. ‘Elon Musk has literally gone mad’, quoth Dan Hodges, the literal-minded columnist for the Mail on Sunday, in response, completely missing the point. For while I doubt we will be bumping off shitposters in just six years’ time – and I dare say Musk doesn’t think so, either – we are already locking them up.

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.

Labour MP Dawn Butler said this week, chiding Musk and accusing his allies of fueling the far right, that there is a ‘clear difference’ between free speech and hate speech. But there really isn’t. 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.

Scottish YouTuber Count Dankula (real name Mark Meechan) was infamously convicted for a ‘grossly offensive’ comedy video, in which he taught his girlfriend’s pug to do a Nazi salute. As he told Andrew Doyle, in spiked’s landmark documentary about the case, the video was obviously a joke. Meechan even explained the joke at the beginning, so as to avoid being misunderstood. He was convicted and fined £800.

Section 127, the scrap of law Meechan and the aforementioned trolls were convicted under, is responsible for at least nine arrests a day, according to a Times investigation a few years back. Going by these numbers alone, Britain is already locking up more people than America did during the first Red Scare, according to author and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff.

If it is fighting the far right – in human or pug form – that the Great and Good are genuinely concerned about, they should read up on Weimar Germany. It had hate-speech laws. Every leading Nazi propagandist you can think of was prosecuted under them. But it didn’t stop them. They used it as a propaganda tool. They even published cartoons of Hitler with tape over his mouth.

This reminds us that 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.

Unphased by this terrifying state of affairs, the new government wants to toughen up online laws even more. It is mulling over reviving ‘legal but harmful’, a feature of the Online Safety Act that was originally shelved which would compel social-media companies to remove content that, while not against the law, might inflict ‘harm’. In fittingly Blairite style, Starmer would effectively be outsourcing censorship to the private sector.

And to what end? Censorship – aside from anything else – can often be a displacement activity. A kind of authoritarian gesture politics, numbing the symptoms without ever addressing the underlying issue.

The same goes, by the way, for the hefty sentences that have been meted out to those who have taken to social media to egg on or seemingly call for more violence. Which appear to have made up the bulk of the post-riots online offences.

Tyler Kay, 26, has been sent to prison for 38 months for inciting racial hatred. He copied, pasted and posted a tweet that had already landed Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Northamptonshire Tory councillor, in handcuffs. She posted on the day of the Southport killings: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it.’

Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old from Cheshire, pleaded guilty this week to sending communications threatening death or serious harm. ‘Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosques up with the adults in it’, she wrote in a community Facebook group in the wake of the Southport riot. She’s been given 15 months in prison.

Sweeney had never bothered the law before and is her husband’s primary carer. The judge said he took all of this into account, but still had to make an example of her: ‘In circumstances such as these, even people like you need to go to prison because a message must go out that if you do these terrible acts the court will say to you “you must go to prison”.’

Of course, direct incitement to violence and true threats are not free speech – even in America, as many right-on British commentators have been haughtily pointing out in recent days, after a quick skim of Wikipedia.

What they clearly don’t know, going by their simultaneous calls for Nigel Farage and Elon Musk to also be arrested for ‘stirring up’ the riots, is that incitement to violence in America is, rightly, tightly defined. It means speech that is both likely and intended to cause imminent lawless action. This standard dates back to the case of Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969, in which the US Supreme Court upheld the right of Ku Klux Klan members to call for ‘revengeance’ against the state. This means that even advocating for violence and lawbreaking, in the abstract, is protected speech in the US.

Similarly, for speech to be considered a true threat in America, it must constitute a ‘serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals’. In the landmark Watts v United States case, also of 1969, the Supreme Court held that a man, who had just been drafted into the Vietnam War, had not broken the law when he rashly stated: ‘[I]f they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ.’

Tyler Kay wasn’t addressing a baying mob, he was posting to his 127 followers, hoping to ‘impress some random person on the internet’, in his words. ‘Your comment was recklessly made, rather than intentionally’, is what the judge said about Julie Sweeney’s horrific outburst.

The notion that anyone would see what went on in Southport and immediately begin jabbering darkly about attacking mosques turns the stomach. Still, over a year in prison for a ‘reckless’ moment of madness on Facebook, or over three years for a bit of vile, racist attention-seeking on X, seems disproportionate, to say the least.

Let’s be real. The post-riots authoritarianism has 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.

But the depressing truth, as I wrote on spiked last week, is that the British state hasn’t suddenly been taken over by one woke authoritarian. It is doing what it has been doing for many decades now – trying to fight hatred with censorship and swallowing up all manner of dissenting speech along the way. The establishment is predictably using the pretext of fighting violent racism to shame and silence those who have dared to take a different view on immigration, multiculturalism and extremism.

This isn’t about the cure being worse than the disease. Censorship is the disease, or certainly a primary cause of it. The deplatformings, the cancellations, the occasional knock at the door for saying something off-colour online. All of it has been a disaster for freedom of speech and a boon to the genuine extremists. It has perversely lent hard-right misinfo merchants the status of truth-tellers. Meanwhile, it has sown widespread distrust in what the powers-that-be are telling us.

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.

After the riots, they aren’t just locking up the rioters, racists and inciters, they are trying to sabotage the truly open, fear-free debate we need to work out how the hell we got ourselves into this mess.

We must break out of this dreadful, authoritarian cycle. Between the bigots and the censors, freedom of speech is our only way out.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_