Free speech stops riots

Toby Young comments on the present widespread political riots in Britain:

With depressing predictability, the riots have led to calls for more censorship. Historically, it was the authoritarian right who blamed outbreaks of civil disorder on too much free speech, but this knee-jerk, illiberal reaction is now more likely to be found on the left. I’m not just thinking of Paul Mason, who called for Ofcom to revoke GB News’s broadcast licence, or even Carole Cadwalladr, who tweeted: ‘This should be our Dunblane moment. Only with social media not guns.’ I’m thinking of statements by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.

Is Sir Keir going to urge the police to investigate his own role in ‘whipping up violence’?

In his first speech about the unrest last week, Sir Keir Starmer said: ‘And let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them… Violent disorder clearly whipped up online… That is also a crime. It’s happening on your premises. And the law must be upheld everywhere.’ A few days later, his spokesman took aim at Elon Musk for tweeting ‘civil war is inevitable’ below a video of rioters aiming fireworks at police. The spokesman said there was ‘no justification’ for Musk’s comment, adding: ‘Anyone who is whipping up violence will face the full force of the law.’

So is the former director of public prosecutions asking the police to investigate the owner of Twitter? Even if Musk was guilty of ‘whipping up violence’, I know of no such criminal offence in England and Wales. Stirring up hatred against a group on the basis of their race or religion is an offence, as is inciting someone to commit a crime. But even a Crown Prosecution Service in thrall to Sir Keir would baulk at charging Musk with either of those offences. In any event, could he be prosecuted for breaking one of our laws while 5,000 miles away? Perhaps the Prime Minister was urging Ofcom to investigate Musk’s comments using its new powers under the Online Safety Act. But that, too, seems like a long shot.

The same tone was adopted by Yvette Cooper on Monday when she was interviewed on Good Morning Britain by her husband Ed Balls. (Surely that’s more deserving of an Ofcom investigation?) ‘Social media has put rocket boosters under… some of the violence that we have seen,’ she said. ‘[Social media companies] have to take much greater responsibility for what is happening on their platforms.’

For all the talk of ‘whipping up violence’, this sounds like a case of blaming the messenger in much the same way that ‘pirate radio’ was fingered for the riots in Birmingham in 2005, and BlackBerry for the unrest in 2011. The authorities have already started arresting right-wing social-media users for stirring up racial hatred, which looks like another example of ‘two-tier policing’. After all, no such arrests were made in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, even though hundreds of thousands of social-media users in the UK ‘whipped up’ violence against the police by accusing them of racism. During one demonstration, which the BBC described as ‘largely peaceful’, 27 officers were injured. Social media companies were also culpable – more so than now – because they promoted pro-BLM posts and, in some cases, included a BLM logo on their platforms. But Sir Keir didn’t demand they should feel ‘the full force of the law’. On the contrary, he took the knee.

I suppose the Prime Minister could argue he wasn’t in charge back then, but that doesn’t solve the ‘two tier’ problem, because people on the left have been guilty of disseminating ‘harmful misinformation’ in the past week and I doubt they’ll have their collars felt. Last Saturday, Nick Lowles, the chief executive of Hope Not Hate, tweeted: ‘Reports are coming in of acid being thrown out of a car window at a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough. Absolutely horrendous.’ Those reports turned out to be baseless, but it’s possible they contributed to young Asian men engaging in running battles with anti-immigrant protestors in the town the following day. Indeed, you could argue that the PM’s statement blaming ‘far-right’ outsiders for organising the unrest in Southport – and singling out their attack on a mosque – contributed to the violence by Asian counter-protestors over the following days. Is Sir Keir going to urge the police to investigate his own role in ‘whipping up violence’?

To paraphrase the US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the best remedy for harmful speech is not enforced silence, but more and better speech. It was the absence of accurate information about the Southport attacker’s identity – due to legal restrictions – that led to the feverish speculation. More censorship would make things worse, not better.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/free-speech-stops-riots/

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