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To win back free speech, Britain needs a new constitution, argues Preston Byrne.
The problem:
What is happening today, it seems, is that the entire population of the UK is in the midst of realizing that whether a controversial idea may be safely expressed depends, in large part, on the hearer, and not the speaker.
Current law fails the rule-of-law test:
the law hands police and magistrates wide discretionary powers to decide which viewpoints are acceptable, depending on the social or political mood at the time and on the ground.
Legislation can not seem to fix the problem:
Because every legislative fix proposed in recent years has failed to address the root problem: the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. This is the idea that the King-in-Parliament wields unlimited power with no guardrails, and has long been a foundational principle of British constitutional order. The British state does not concede the existence of any legal limits on its own authority. Individual rights have become casualties of rigid adherence to this ancient doctrine, which, plainly, no longer serves the interests of the society it governs.
Byrne goes on to argue that the application of speech laws has changed over time due to fashion. The only real solution to that is absolute free speech like that granted by the US First Amendment.
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it.
– David McGrogan
As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes (£)
“Robert Jenrick turns vigilante in bid to tackle London’s fare dodgers”, reports the Guardian in a valiant effort to make tackling fare dodgers look like a bad thing.
Tory MP claims ‘law breaking is out of control’ in video in which he accosts travellers on the underground
Robert Jenrick is perhaps best known to the public as the former government minister who unlawfully intervened in a planning decision involving a billionaire Conservative party donor.
To others, he may be the Tory MP that parliament’s spending watchdog said was centrally involved in wasting nearly £100m on a botched plan to house asylum seekers.
Now, however, Jenrick has a new claim to fame: as the man who released a video of himself delivering “vigilante justice” to people he accused of fare dodging in London.
The failed party leadership candidate posted a video online on Thursday morning in which he accused the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, of “driving a proud city into the ground”, adding: “Lawbreaking is out of control. He’s not acting. So, I did.”
The problem for the Guardian’s Kevin Rawlinson is that Jenrick’s video has indeed brought him fame and admiration, which has only been augmented by the sneering responses from various left wingers. Jenrick’s video has had 11.6 million views. The Secret Barrister’s response, “This is the most spectacularly Alan Partridge thing that has ever happened, and I include Alan Partridge”, has had 1.4 million views and a ratio for the ages.
The alternative media outlet “The London Economic” has been busily putting out anti-Jenrick arguments that exemplify how left wingers miss the point, and which contain the word “akshully” even when they don’t:
“It’s been pointed out that Jenrick’s constituency of Newark actually has a higher crime rate than London”
So the Shadow Justice Secretary isn’t allowed to care about crime outside his own constituency?
and
“Robert Jenrick broke TfL rules in video complaining about Tube fare-dodgers”
Oh no, won’t somebody please think of the poor Transport for London rules – since TfL itself evidently does not.
I came across this tweet a week ago and bookmarked it because I knew it would soon be relevant:
One of the fundamental operating modes of the British state is that it will make everyone’s lives worse in numerous small ways rather than properly get to grips with the people who actually cause the problems.
So, why did we stop this taxation of “excessive” pensions pots? Because it lost revenue. It took tax rates well over the Laffer Curve peak if you prefer.
So, what’s Ms. Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, suggesting today? That we reimpose a policy that we already know fails.
Idiot’s a bit mild really, isn’t it? Also, it’s rather a pity that Googlebombs don’t work these days.
– Tim Worstall
“Kneecap rapper charged with terrorism offence over alleged Hezbollah flag at London gig”, reports the Guardian:
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs with the Irish rap trio Kneecap, has been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in London, police said.
The 27-year-old, of Belfast, was charged after an investigation by the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command and is scheduled to appear at Westminster magistrates court on 18 June.
Kneecap, named after the IRA’s favourite type of mutilation, are a rap group who sing in the Irish language. They’ve had it all, the award winning biopic, the laudatory coverage in the Guardian, the visit from Jeremy Corbyn. And now they’ve had the visit from the counter-terrorism police.
In these cases I never know whether to wrap myself in the mantle of libertarian righteousness and defend even these terrorist fanboys – it was only a piece of patterned cloth, FFS – or to say with Ulysses S. Grant that “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”
The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
We will not lack for mind-broadening frenemies to defend even after tolerating ‘equality before the law’ arguments against the loudest “I can say it but you can’t” enforcers of the double-standard. The woker-than-thou of today love purging the woke of yesterday – they will supply.
Equality before the law is good in itself. Demanding equality of oppression before the law is a way to expose a dishonest process. Think carefully before judging it a betrayal of our war against the hate speech laws’ evil goal, rather than a way – that can be both honest in itself and effective – of waging it.
We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
– Tom Slater
No one with a shred of humanity could fail to sympathise with Leanne Lucas. On 29th July 2024, she was hosting a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance and bracelet-making workshop in Southport when Axel Rudakubana walked in and started attacking the children, killing three of them. In trying to protect the children Ms Lucas herself was stabbed five times.
When people suffer terrible things, they often throw themselves into searching for a means to help others avoid the same fate. Ms Lucas thinks she has found her cause. The Daily Mail reports:
Southport survivor calls for ban on pointed kitchen knives – as she says she’s not been able to use one herself since the attack that left three girls dead
[…]
After her horrific experiences, the teacher had assumed there would be tighter controls around kitchen knives and was shocked to find there weren’t.
She said: ‘Every time I learnt something new, I’d think, “That doesn’t sound right. Surely there are laws in place so that couldn’t have happened.” The more my eyes have been opened, the more I’ve been able to formulate an idea.’
She does not seem to be entirely clear in her mind whether that idea is a cultural change or a legal one. If my only source had been the BBC’s article on the same topic, I would have thought she was only advocating that people voluntarily adopt a different style of cooking that employs knifes with rounded tips rather than traditional knives with sharp tips.
This idea will not work. The sort of person who would take her proposed pledge to commit to exchanging their pointed knives for round-tipped ones could have a nuclear weapon in their cutlery drawer and still be no threat to anyone. But I have no objection to her proposing it as a desirable cultural change. I do have an objection to her proposing to ban pointy kitchen knives, as if the existing ban on murder lacked only this finishing touch to be effective.
As I said in an article for the Libertarian Alliance written five years after another massacre of children:
When the parents of the Dunblane children spoke there was every reason for the world to hear about their terrible experience. There was never any particular reason to suppose that their opinions were right. In fact their opinions should carry less weight than almost anyone else’s should. This point is well understood when it comes to juries. It goes without saying, or, at least, it once did, that guilt or innocence must be decided by impartial people. Decisions of policy require the same cast of mind as decisions of guilt and innocence.
We want to comfort those who have suffered unfairly. One way you comfort someone is by agreeing with them, by allowing them emotional license for any outburst. In the ordinary course of life and death, though, even as we say, “yes, yes” to a distraught person we discount – not ignore, but discount – the content of what they say. Phrases such as “He didn’t know what he was saying” or “She was mad with grief” illustrate this. Then, after a while, they are expected to get back to something like normal.
[…]
However it came about, nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
“Labour seems to think the British economic renaissance is going to be rebuilt on minor changes to a food and drink trade that amounts to 2-3 per cent of our exports, yet if it really believed this, why is it killing family farms and making them erect solar panels instead?”
– David Frost, former chief Brexit negotiator in the former Tory government, writing about the sellout deal that UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed with the EU at the weekend. The deal effectively puts the UK back into the EU Single Market on farming and food; it also gives a number of concessions that, even if they don’t completely reverse the UK’s independence from the EU, make a number of steps in that direction. This is one of those cases where the devil is in the detail. Like Lord (David) Frost, I want the UK to go for mutual recognition of trade standards, which is what sovereign nation states, such as New Zealand, already do without fuss. Apparently, this is outside the mental universe of Brussels negotiators and the UK government.
The reference in the quote above is to the policy of the current Labour government to impose inheritance tax on family-run farms, a measure that will force a number of these farmers’ families to sell up, possibly selling out to energy companies instead.
From where I stand, it seems pretty clear that Starmer wants to reverse Brexit, even if it falls short of formal re-entry into the EU.
The idea that the British government should subsidise an American mine is pretty weird. Very weird even. But it does seem to be about to happen.
[…]
To the extent that we’ve got a scandium expert lying around I’m it. Niocorp isn’t going to work. But the British government, using your and my money, is eager to invest in it?
Why can’t they leave us just to piss away our own money in our own ways? Why this insistence upon doing it wholesale on obvious disasters?
– Tim Worstall
The biggest reduction we ever enjoyed in our electricity costs was after the newly privatised electricity industry installed gas power stations across the UK. It halved our electricity costs. The biggest increase we’ve ever seen was after the Government imposed “green” ideology on the electricity industry. It has tripled our electricity costs so far.
So as with every statement made by the UK Government about energy, this one is wrong. Shutting down our oil and gas exploration, and increasing taxes on existing production, makes us poorer.
– Richard Lyon
There’s an old saying in policing, usually uttered after the latest scandal or disaster: ‘The public get the police they deserve.’ It reflects how police officers feel about the elites who set their rules of engagement, as well as the occasionally capricious public they serve: whatever the police do will be criticised by somebody. Which, probably, is as it should be; policing isn’t a popularity competition. If a police officer is performing their duties properly, ‘somebody’ is going to have their day ruined. That ‘somebody’ used to predominantly be criminals. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. Yet still, I wonder, What did we, the British people, do to deserve the police we have now?
– Dominic Adler
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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