Freedom of Speech and the Fascist Wave

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

Yesterday I received a phone call from a police Inspector asking me to delete my tweet calling for people to assemble to prevent the far right demonstration called for Blackburn today and tweeted out by “Tommy Robinson”, the well known immigrant to Spain with the false name.

She also asked me not to come to Blackburn myself, and said that members of the community had contacted her and said I was an insider coming to Blackburn to make trouble.

I am therefore on a train to Blackburn, a place where a number of people have been telling me to leave for weeks, but I genuinely can’t walk down the street without being warmly greeted by name by random locals.

Although our conversation was perfectly friendly and I have no complaints about the police Inspector, who seemed to accept that her telling me not to come was unlikely to work, I do rather object to the police telling me what to do.

There are a number of interesting questions raised by this. There is a wave of anti-immigrant far right violence spreading across the North of England – Sunderland, Southport, Hartlepool and elsewhere – and recently London saw the largest fascist demonstration for many years.

The horrific murders of the poor little girls in Southport at a dance class have been seized on by the far right to foment anti-immigrant violence. This is such a well-established pattern now across the country that it is impossible to deny.

And yet the police inspector who phoned me did deny it. She told me to be aware that three little girls had died and this was about commemorating them. I replied it was not about that at all; it was about stirring up racial hatred against a community who had no connection at all to the murder.

Blackburn’s newly elected independent MP, Adnan Hussain, has also issued a call to people not to gather to oppose any far right demonstration today. I believe this is mistaken. The wave of fascist violence across the country has gathered momentum precisely because it breeds copycat activity. Fascism has to be confronted and stopped.

That is not just a matter of explaining that poverty and deprivation is not caused by immigration but by an economic system designed to produce massive inequality of wealth. Fascism has also to be nipped in the bud by denying them control of the street. That is what we acheived with the Anti-Nazil League 40 odd years ago.

If you do not confront fascism and defesw it, it will grow.

How does this stand with my strong commitment to free speech?

In On Liberty, the great John Stuart Mill argued that to state that corn merchants are thieves and profiteers who starve the poor was perfectly valid. But to shout the same thing to a howling mod outside a corn merchant’s house was not valid freedom of speech.

It is not just the words, it is their context. This is a crucial insight (and it also carries a pro-freedom of speech weight against the sledgehammer of hate speech legislation which denies the importance of context and seeks to condemn simple forms of speech).

And I have no doubt at all that as for the likes of “Tommy Robinson” to be encouraging anti-immigrant speech in the highly ethnically diverse town of Blackburn, in the context of widespread anti-immigrant violence, this fits perfectly with Mill’s exception to free speech in the case of the mob and the corn merchant.

I hope all goes quietly and my journey is quite unnecessary. There are multiple far right demonstrations today and perhaps this will not be one of those that gets nasty. But I shall be there ready to profess my truth and my opposition to fascism if called for.

Allowing fascists to speak and sitting mute ourselves – or being prevented from speaking by the police – is completely the wrong prescription.

I very much hope I don’t get arrested because I have to dash back to speak at the Free Palestine Film Festival this evening, Genesis Cinema, Mile End Road, London. Yesterday’s opening night was great and I will blog about it when life is less fraught. There may still be tickets for tonight – phone the cinema to check.

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