Kyle Little and Theresa May
In recent weeks there has been little emerging from the Palace of Westminster to make supporters of democracy and its operation jump for joy. From the prime minister and his supporters in the coalition tying themselves in knots on two fronts, Europe and equal marriage rights, to dubious personal morality leading to resignation, the most appropriate word to describe the multifarious shenanigans is probably ‘unedifying’.
Here are the relevant clauses:
A person is guilty of an offence if he (sic)
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour
(b) displays in writing, sign or other visible representation anything which is threatening, abusive or insulting.
As one of the most visible campaigners for the removal of the notion of insult, David Davis MP, said: ‘The Act makes illegal things that should be illegal eg incitement to violence and abusive behaviour. But insult?’. In other words who in the legal system is in a position to decide objectively whether or not a remark, TV programme or placard is insulting or liable to offend? It was the recognition that the impossibility of such objectivity presented a serious threat to the expression of legitimate dissent that led to the ‘Amend Section 5’ campaign and the coming together of such disparate groupings as the National Secular Society, the Peter Tatchell Foundation and the Christian Association.
An examination of the cases of some of the victims of Section 5 is illuminating, and in some cases it also provides a few laughs. A 16-year-old student was arrested for peacefully demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Church of Scientology holding a placard saying ‘Scientology is a cult not a religion’. The case was dropped following the intervention of a civil liberties group.
Kyle Little growled and ‘woofed’ at two Labrador dogs in a public place. Against the wishes of the owner of the dogs, he was arrested under Section 5, held for five hours then charged and fined. The conviction was quashed on appeal. An Oxford student was arrested for saying to a policeman ‘Do you know your horse is gay?’. A spokesman for the Thames Valley police said: ‘He made homophobic remarks that were deemed offensive to people passing by’.
These instances are ludicrous though true. More disturbing are the following two cases. Section 5 was used by police to try to stop Andy Robertson preaching in a Gainsborough street market on the grounds that people might be ‘offended’. He continued but found the whole incident ‘disturbing’. On the other side of the belief spectrum, John Richards from Lincolnshire was told by police that he risked prosecution if he continued to display a small (A5) sign on his living-room window with the words ‘Religions are fairy tales for adults’.
The removal of the concept of insult/offence from the wording of one particular act of parliament is a welcome step forward, but serious issues still remain in the area of freedom of expression. One is that there appears to be a belief in certain quarters that ‘freedom from being offended’ is some kind of human right. This is of course not new as those of you who remember Mary Whitehouse will confirm.
In the 60s and 70s she became the self-appointed guardian of the nation’s sensibilities, firing off thousands of letters to broadcasters, mainly the BBC and Channel 4, whose lewd and libidinous programmes were undermining the moral fibre of the nation. Her star began to wane once it was realised that not only did she and her supporters have TV sets without an ‘off’ switch, but that she hadn’t seen many of the plays/films she fulminated against such as ‘The Life of Brian’ and ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’. Her legacy however remains as plays, films and articles are withdrawn from circulation for fear of retribution from the ‘offended’.
There was also a recent return to ‘sight unseen’ criticism. Spike Lee, the distinguished and respected black film director, has not only criticised Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ without having seen it, but he has also questioned Tarantino’s right to make a film about slavery on the grounds that he is not black. Quentin is well able to defend his brilliant movie, but it does seem to me that Lee is taking his sense of outrage a tad too far.
A second issue that needs to be addressed in the area of freedom of expression is the looming threat of libel. Last month a book about Scientology called ‘Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief’ was published in the USA. Its author, Lawrence Wright, is a distinguished journalist for the New York Times, a Pulitzer prize winner, whose interview with the Hollywood director and former member of the Scientology church, Paul Haggis, was published last year to great acclaim in the New Yorker. You can read that, but not the book, because Wright’s UK publisher has reluctantly withdrawn it through fear of a libel action.
Unlike in the USA where a pretty literal interpretation of the first amendment to the Bill of Rights about freedom of speech allows Donald Trump to call his elected president a liar and a forger, in the UK not only is there a tendency for judges to find in favour of the plaintiff, but more seriously, a record of equating dissent or disagreement with defamation. Thus London has become the libel capital of the world with huge sums of money being earned by specialist libel lawyers. For their names I direct you to ‘Private Eye’.
Sadly the caution of Lawrence Wright’s UK publishers may not be enough to protect him from litigation in the London courts. A few years ago an action for libel was allowed, despite the book involved not having been published in the UK, on the grounds that extracts were available on the internet and that it could be bought through online distributors. Such is the power and ubiquity of the internet…which should give us all pause for thought.
Within hours of the authentication of the bones of Richard the Third, discovered under a Leicester car park, came a great internet joke to the effect that ATOS, the French company to whom the coalition has outsourced its welfare policy, had pronounced Richard ‘fit for work’. This raises the intriguing possibility of ATOS suing the perpetrator of the joke for libel. The world waits with bated breath. Meanwhile don’t abuse or threaten me, but feel totally free to insult me.
Rose Galt is a former president of the Educational Institute of Scotland
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