https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JKMFDJ8SeaM
I’ve become notorious, I suppose, for my particular take on free speech. And so it was a book that interested me. Tell me why you wrote it and, and, and what you learned and all of those things. Well, it’s not the sort of book I ever envisaged that I would have to write. You know, I think if you go back 10, 15 years, the idea that free speech, which is obviously what the seedbed of all our liberties would be something that we would have to defend, would have probably seemed a little bit ridiculous to me because I basically took it for granted. I thought that everyone was on, on that side. But I fear that something has happened, particularly over the past 10 years or so. And it is connected, I feel, with the rise of this social justice movement, or what we might call critical social justice, or however we want to call it. A lot of people call it the woke movement. Whatever you want to label that ideology, which at its heart has a real mistrust of free speech. And you hear it all the time in the kind of phrases that the activists use, phrases like words are violence, or this kind of language normalises hate or legitimises hate, or all this kind of thing. And there’s a real genuine mistrust of the power of language to effectively corrupt the masses. And what I wanted to do, I suppose, was try and marshal a defence for this principle that I had always, always taken for granted. But at the same time, attempt to grapple with the concerns that people might have. Because my worry with the culture war, as we call it, is that you have two sort of extreme poles arguing against each other. And most people are caught in the middle. I think most people are broadly for the idea of free speech, but they have a few reservations, for instance, when it comes to demagogues espousing hate or hate against a particular minority group or something like that. Or people are concerned about the ways in which language can cause harm. And I don’t think anyone would deny that words can be hurtful. So most people, I think, are somewhere in between and are open to persuasion. And I think my point, my principle argument in the book, is that absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better. And in fact, by promoting free speech, you’re doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about. So recently, the Scottish Parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors. And I’d be interested in your feeling about that. Now, you said, I believe in this book, if I remember the statistics correctly, that there have been 120,000 incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in Britain in how long? Since that’s been over the last five years or so? It’s worse than that. The statistic I quote is between 2014 and 2019, there are 120,000 recorded incidents of non-crime. They call them non-crime hate incidents. And this is something which is now routine in the UK. I mean, obviously, I’m going to be talking about the UK and the US and Canada is a very different kettle of fish, I’m sure. And I’m sure a lot of the people who are watching won’t be familiar with the problems we have in the UK. Of course, we don’t have constitutional protection for free speech. We don’t have a First Amendment. We don’t have anything like that. So we are particularly vulnerable. And at the moment, unfortunately, in the UK, the police who are trained by the College of Policing, who do issue very specific guidelines about this, and anyone can check this because if you go to the government’s website on hate crime and hate speech, they make very clear what they’re talking about. What they say is that there are five protected characteristics and these fall into race, gender, sexuality, gender identity and disability. I think I may have misquoted that, but there’s one missing. But anyway, there are five protected characteristics. And if a victim, and they do use the word victim rather than complainant, if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics, then it qualifies as a hate crime if it’s criminal. If it’s not criminal, if it’s just speech or something like that, it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident. Police will investigate that. They will record that. And although non-crime incidents don’t lead to prosecution, they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take. We call it a disclosure and barring service here. So it can affect your employment prospects. And is that without a trial? That’s recorded without a trial? Of course. There’s no trial. So you get a quasi criminal record. You get something flagged up. Particularly if you’re applying for a teaching job, say something like that where you’re working with children, it’s very important. And you get this thing flagged up. So it does have serious ramifications. But even beyond that, we have hate speech laws which are encoded into the Public Order Act, which is one example. But the main example is the Electronic Communications Act 2003. In this country, and I do quote the statistic in the book as well, we have roughly 3,000 people arrested a year for offensive things that they have said online. So in other words, nine people a day, roughly, the police in the UK are arresting. And people in the UK will be familiar with this because if you see the Twitter accounts of various police forces, various police departments across the country, they often put things out like, you know, make sure you don’t say anything offensive or thoughtless online, or we will be knocking on your door. They say these very kind of frightening things. There was a recent police display outside a supermarket in the UK. It went viral, this image. It was them next to a big digital billboard. And the slogan on the billboard was, being offensive is an offense. And this was flanked by police officers who were socially distanced, but they were there in their masks, which made it seem slightly more sinister. They got in a lot of trouble for that because people were saying, well, being offensive surely isn’t a crime. But actually, the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime and they were acting on that basis. They obviously hadn’t just concocted this billboard out of nothing. They’d really considered what it should say. And more to the point, actually, they were right. In this country, you can go to prison for jokes, for offensive remarks, and people have gone to prison, have been arrested routinely for causing offense. And of course, the notion of offense is incredibly subjective. In fact, the legal stipulation in the Communications Act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is quote unquote grossly offensive. Well, I don’t know how you define that. I wouldn’t know how to… Also, who defines it is the real question as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I’ve looked into this legislation to some degree and one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offense, which has become a subjective reality. And you can understand why that might be to some degree, because how would you define hate and how would you define offense without especially the latter without making recourse to someone’s subjective experience?