The very founding document of liberal free speech principles makes the argument that free speech is context-dependent, not absolute
Patrick Hurley is the Labour MP for Southport
The online right wing of the UK political community has become, since the landslide election of a Labour government in July last year, increasingly libertarian in their outlook. Notably, they – and increasingly, their supporters both in Parliament and on television newspaper review shows – are becoming more and more fixated on the concept of free speech, and the commitment or otherwise to it of the government.
In recent days, this defence has come into even sharper focus than usual. The proscription of direct-action groups, the awful chanting of pop groups at Glastonbury, the criminal prosecution of people by an operationally independent criminal justice system over social media activity. All these things have contributed to an increase in commentary on free speech issues, which hasn’t yet reached fever pitch, but which nonetheless attracts the attention of Opposition politicians looking for something to criticise the government on.
In light of this, I thought it would be useful to go back to first principles around free speech, what it actually is, and why it’s a principle to be defended against those who would seek to either oppose it or misuse it for their own purposes.
Liberalism’s founding document, if it can be said to have one, is widely recognised to be John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, laying out the foundations for a society that not just allows, but encourages, people to demand and then exercise freedom in how to live their lives. For those of you who either didn’t study philosophy or who’ve had better things to concentrate on since your formal education ended, the fundamental doctrine in the book is called “the harm principle”; I summarise it, bluntly and only slightly inaccurately, that a person should be left free to pursue their own interests as long as this does not harm the interests of others.
It’s a principle worth fighting for.
And it’s a principle that is usefully expanded on by Mill himself, in a passage where he contextualises where and when harm can be caused by words alone. The passage runs as follows:
“Opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.
An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.”
The very founding document of liberal free speech principles makes the argument that free speech is context-dependent, not absolute; that what can be defensible in one set of circumstances might be indefensible in another. This is, of course, common sense. But it’s a common sense that is seemingly lacking in the understanding of even the Centre Right’s contribution to the current discourse.
On Liberty was published in 1859, and so of course its examples are anachronistic. So, what could we usefully substitute for “delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer” in a way that makes sense in the 2020s? What examples might be analogous? I contend that chanting for the death of people at a music festival is analogous, especially when broadcast on television. I further contend that making threats to people on social media, such that others may act on them, or the subject of the threat themselves might be notified of them, is also analogous.
Certainly, tweeting a wish for people to be killed or joining in a crowd of people shouting the same, seems much more like Mill’s “mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer” than it is similar to an op-ed arguing the same published in the pages of the Sunday Times. With no shade intended against the Sunday Times, I expect its inside pages are less likely to incite people to action than the immediacy of social media or the excitement of being part of a crowd.
So, based on the long and cherished history of free speech in the UK, based on the very foundational document it’s underpinned by, and based on timeless principles in a modern setting, it becomes clear – no matter whether your priors are left-coded or right-coded – that neither tweeting in support of attempts to murder people, nor the criminal damage of defence equipment, nor chanting death threats that send a chilling message to ethnic minorities, can automatically be defended by reference to “free speech”. Instead, they may justly incur punishment, in Mill’s own words.
Some things, whether spoken or written or otherwise undertaken, can justly be punished by the state, on the basis that they cause harm, even when in other circumstances the same action might escape censure. It’s the mark of a mature and civilised discourse that accepts this common sense and proceeds on that basis, rather than attempting to weaponise powerful concepts in support of weak politics.
The Real Crimes Are Taking Place In Gaza, Not At Glastonbury Or Brize Norton
The British government is being rocked by a growing public backlash to Israel’s 21-month slaughter in Gaza and the UK’s active collusion in it.
That fallout came to a head over the weekend, when punk group Bob Vylan led Glastonbury’s crowds in chanting: “Death, death to the IDF,” referencing the Israeli army – a performance aired live on the BBC, which later expressed regret for not cutting the feed. The Irish band Kneecap then focused audience rage towards British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, leading the crowd in a chant cursing his name.
Other musicians also used their sets to vent their indignation at British complicity in what the International Court of Justice ruled in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide.
Their grievances are well-founded.
The UK government is still supplying parts for the F-35 fighter jets dropping bombs on Gaza’s people. It has massively increased UK arms exports to Israel, even while stating that it cut them, while shipping US and German weapons through the Royal Air Force base Akrotiri on Cyprus. It is operating spy missions over Gaza on Israel’s behalf.
And to top it all off, Britain is still providing unstinting diplomatic cover for Israel, even as it has butchered tens of thousands of civilians and continues to enforce the starvation of more than two million people.
Starmer isn’t budging. In fact, he’s entrenching, labelling any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” – and increasingly as “terrorism”.
Depraved values
This is such a glaringly inverted way of understanding the world that it has required impressive amounts of ingenuity and creativity to prevent levels of popular anger from spiralling out of control.
What Israel, Washington, the UK and others have been forced to do to sustain the genocide is to create theatre – in a series of deflection dramas – to distract from the central crime.
Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, the film director who specialised in what he termed “MacGuffins” – narrative dead-ends to throw viewers off the scent – might have appreciated the skill with which this has been done.
The aim has been to get the western media to focus on, and therefore western audiences to think about, not the main drama – either the genocide itself, or the inherently violent, apartheid nature of the Israeli state carrying it out – but to invest instead in separate plot twists and turns. Ones, of course, that don’t make western capitals look so obviously complicit and depraved.
Even when the media reports on Gaza, it is rarely to address Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians. Rather, it is to debate dozens of other matters thrown up, like the rubble and dust from an Israeli bombing run, by the genocide.
The latest is the furore over Bob Vylan, in which the British public is being mobilised – quite preposterously – by politicians and the media to worry about the safety of Israeli soldiers from the supposed threat of angry music fans.
That should apparently concern us much more than the safety of Palestinians in Gaza, who are currently being slaughtered and starved by those very same Israeli soldiers.
Increasingly, our leaders sound like they want to make belonging to a genocidal army a protected characteristic – like being Black or gay – so that any criticism of the Israeli military can be classed as hate speech.
Imagine, if you can, police investigating a punk band – as they are doing with Bob Vylan – for being mean about the Nazi paramilitary Waffen-SS, or the Russian army in Ukraine.
Anyone like Starmer, or the British media, expressing greater concern for the welfare of Israeli soldiers engaged in mass killing than the victims of that slaughter is living in a world of utterly depraved values.
If Bob Vylan is held to account for making hollow threats towards a genocidal army, why are police not investigating and prosecuting Britons serving in that army, or indeed a British prime minister who declares that Israel has a right to “defend itself” by starving Gaza’s population of food, water and power?
If the double standard is not obvious, it is because you are concentrating on the MacGuffin, not the evidence.
Deflection tactics
As Israel’s actions in Gaza become ever-more indefensible – not least, the starvation of the population by blocking aid – the deflection dramas have needed to grow more lavish.
The recent attacks by Israel and the US on Iran, and before them Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, are the most egregious of these set-pieces.
Those illegal wars of aggression had their own logic, of course.
Israel’s usefulness to the West depends on it being the main attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East: terrorising others into submission, laying waste to those who refuse to submit, ring-fencing the West’s client Gulf states from other influences, and provoking the very “existential threat” the West then claims it needs to protect Israel and itself from.
These attacks served as MacGuffins too – of the deadliest kind.
Minimal coverage of Gaza was instantly shelved to focus on a non-existent Iranian bomb – ignoring, of course, Israel’s all-too-real nukes.
Western capitals and their media ramped up concerns of a supposed nuclear “threat” posed to Israel by Iran – even when serious analysts understand that it would be suicidal for Tehran to launch such an attack, even if it did develop a bomb.
Weeks were lost to feverish debate about, first, whether an Israeli or US strike could take out Iran’s legal nuclear programme; and then, after US President Donald Trump ordered an attack, whether he was right to claim the programme had indeed been “obliterated”.
Momentum evaporated
What all this achieved was to stop us from thinking about what Israel is really up to.
Notably, pressure had been building in the West – very, very belatedly – to stop the genocidal starvation of Gaza. That was until Iran’s “attack” became the story – and Israel, once again, was painted as the victim.
Overnight, the momentum to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza evaporated.
We were forced yet again to direct our chief sympathies towards Israel – a state that came under missile fire only because it provoked a war, and even as Israel actively starves two million people while its soldiers spray live fire at desperate Palestinians at so-called “aid hubs”, killing hundreds over the past few weeks and wounding thousands.
In the wake of Israel’s attack on Iran, a French-Saudi summit called to push for recognition of Palestinian statehood – a debate that has headed nowhere for 30 years, another MacGuffin – was postponed indefinitely.
And an EU human rights review that might have threatened Israel’s free trade deal with Europe – its biggest trading partner – was hurriedly concluded without any tangible plan to impose penalties.
It apparently wasn’t the right time to hold Israel to account for its ongoing genocide when it had been hit by retaliatory missiles from Iran. But then again, it never seems to be the right time to hold Israel accountable for its crimes.
Meanwhile, the timing of Israel’s attacks first on Lebanon, then on Iran, have successfully kept the Gaza genocide off front pages – and western leaders off the hook, even as the death and destruction mount relentlessly.
The MacGuffin industry
This is precisely why Israel and the West have needed to co-produce an endless series of MacGuffins over the past two years, either to justify or distract from the genocide. These deflection dramas range from outright deceptions and manufactured controversies, to skewed interpretations of real events – all repurposed to obscure the slaughter and redirect sympathy towards Israel.
It is astounding that these are still being churned out, 21 months into the genocide. None would have the desired effect, were it not for active collusion by western capitals and their compliant media in prioritising these dramas over the core issues.
The production of MacGuffins has been on an industrial scale. Israeli tales of Palestinian savagery, from murdered babies to mass rapes on 7 October 2023, keep resurfacing without a shred of evidence.
The plight of an initial 250 Israeli captives has been constantly foregrounded over Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands – and possibly hundreds of thousands – of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel’s preposterous rationalisation for destroying hospital after hospital, school after school, food kitchen after food kitchen – that each has been serving as a Hamas “command and control centre” – is barely questioned.
The West has accepted Israel’s confected claim that the death toll in Gaza is greatly inflated – even when all evidence suggests it is a massive undercount, given the inability of the collapsed health and civil emergency sectors to recover bodies and identify them under relentless Israeli bombardment.
Western capitals have similarly indulged Israel’s vilification of UN aid agencies in Gaza, while implicitly accepting that two million Palestinians must be deprived of food and water as a result.
The West has colluded in the aid blockade with ineffective, time-sapping workarounds to deliver food, from airdrops to building a pier that broke apart almost the moment it was completed.
Israel has been allowed to buy yet more time to starve the people of Gaza by engineering an alternative “aid distribution” system – one that requires the execution of dozens of Palestinians daily as they mass at Israel’s “aid hubs”.
Western media have echoed Israeli claims that Hamas is stealing food, even as video evidence shows criminal gangs armed by Israel looting the aid.
Genocidal policy
Occasionally, the real story peeps through. Haaretz recently reported testimonies from Israeli soldiers who said they were ordered to shoot into crowds of unarmed Palestinians near “aid hubs”, even as they posed no threat.
Remember, Palestinians only attend these hubs because Israel is actively starving them, and because Israel chose to shut down the UN’s established system of food distribution.
Explaining that the Israeli military now routinely fires artillery shells into these crowds, a military commander observed: “No one [in Israel] stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day.”
A senior officer told the newspaper: “My greatest fear is that the shooting and harm to civilians in Gaza aren’t the result of operational necessity or poor judgment, but rather the product of an ideology held by field commanders, which they pass down to the troops as an operational plan.”
In other words, genocide is the policy.
The frenzied production of MacGuffins is necessary to stop western publics from thinking about the only issue that really matters: Israel is slaughtering Palestinians because it is a settler-colonial state that wants to rid itself of the “wrong” ethnic group.
What European settler-colonial states have done throughout modern history – from the US, to Australia and South Africa – is replace the native population through strategies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and extermination. Israel is simply following in that tradition.
Were the hostages’ lives paramount, they could have been returned many months ago through negotiations. Israel refused such negotiations because, more than the return of the hostages, it wants to exploit the opportunity to rid itself of the Palestinian population it has occupied, besieged and failed to subdue.
Aid distribution could have continued had the UN been allowed to do its work. But the West doesn’t want to end the siege of Gaza. It doesn’t want a peace deal with Iran. It has no interest in keeping Palestinians safe, preoccupied instead with keeping its military Goliath in the Middle East armed and dangerous.
This is why the default position every time Israel commits a war crime is for western capitals and media outlets to turn the world on its head, insisting Israel has “a right to defend itself”.
‘Antisemitism’ drama
The MacGuffins are not confined to the Middle East. They are homegrown, too – because the genocide can persist only if the West is able to ring-fence its ultimate client state, Israel, from serious scrutiny and criticism.
The clearer Israel’s genocidal actions have become, the more western capitals have needed to manufacture deflection dramas at home.
The US, British, German and French governments – the key players in the West’s projection of colonial power into the Middle East – have expended inordinate amounts of political capital in producing an improbable, grand “antisemitism” drama.
The nearer we move towards the endgame of the genocide in Gaza, the more the groundswell of opposition to British complicity will grow
That drama isn’t interested in real antisemitism, of the kind espoused by Jew-hating racists.
In true MacGuffin tradition, it has focused on the anti-racists and anti-imperialists who oppose Israel’s genocide; who reject Israel as a continuation of western racism and colonialism; who believe everyone deserves to live in dignity, including Palestinians; and who want to see Israeli apartheid broken, as occurred with South African apartheid before it.
On US campuses, pro-Palestinian activism to end western complicity in arming and protecting Israel’s genocide has been met with brutal repression from police. University administrations have expelled students and withdrawn their degrees. American officials have smashed federal protections so they can disappear other students into detention to deport them.
In the UK, mass demonstrations have been demonised as “hate marches” – as though fervent, popular opposition to a state murdering and maiming tens of thousands of children in Gaza could only be attributed to antisemitism. As though “normal” behaviour during a live-streamed genocide is staying silent.
Obscene logic
Last week, Starmer’s government took this obscene logic to a whole new level.
Palestine Action is the most visible protest group trying to put practical pressure on Britain to honour its obligations under international law to stop assisting in Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s people.
Unlike those taking part in mass street demonstrations, Palestine Action’s members use civil disobedience and direct action as tools to highlight the exact nature of Britain’s complicity and try to disrupt it.
That has included acts of trespass and criminal damage to the machinery of genocide, mostly to Israeli arms factories based in the UK that make weapons used to execute Palestinians, including children.
Last month, Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and symbolically sprayed two planes with red paint to represent the blood of Palestinians in Gaza. Planes from Brize Norton regularly fly out to Akrotiri, the RAF’s base on Cyprus, from where the UK transports arms to Israel for use in the genocide.
For the government, the break-in should have chiefly raised issues of security at the base. How were the activists able to get inside and leave without detection?
But that is not how Starmer’s government responded. Instead, it is planning to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, even though the group engages in activities that terrorise no one, apart from those profiting from genocide.
A vote is expected on the matter this week. If it moves ahead, this would be the first time Britain has declared a direct-action protest group to be a terrorist organisation, equating it with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
To make Starmer’s case more plausible, the government appears to have concocted another MacGuffin. Anonymous officials leaked a claim – without any evidence, of course – that the Home Office was investigating whether Palestine Action was receiving funding from Iran.
Under the UK’s draconian Terrorism Act, Palestine Action’s proscription would mean that anyone – including politicians, journalists and public figures – who expresses solidarity with the group, or with activists being hounded through the courts, risks 14 years in jail for supporting a terror organisation. Anyone making a donation would risk the same.
Insiders have acknowledged widespread consternation in the Home Office. One official told the Guardian: “Are they really going to prosecute as terrorists everyone who expresses support for Palestine Action’s work to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel as it commits war crimes?”
Finishing the genocide
Palestine Action’s members know they are breaking Britain’s property laws, in a long and honourable tradition of direct action, from the suffragettes to Extinction Rebellion.
They risk jail, though juries have a notable tendency to acquit such activists when they consider arguments presented at trial that they would never hear from the BBC or Daily Mail.
Those include the fact that these activists break British laws – laws protecting weapons manufacturers’ enormous profits – to prevent far more important laws from being broken by the British government, such as collusion in war crimes.
Starmer himself understands this rationale, because it is precisely the argument he made – when he was a barrister – in defence of activists who sought to stop British bombers heading to Iraq in 2003. They were due to bomb Baghdad in what Britain and the US called a “shock and awe” campaign, one that killed untold numbers of Iraqi civilians.
The man Starmer defended, Josh Richards – who planned to set fire to an RAF plane, not just spray it with paint – was prosecuted twice and walked free each time, having argued that he was trying to stop an illegal war.
Starmer’s job now, however, is not to side with good people trying to stop genocide. It is to side with those whose job is to distract us with noise – with MacGuffins – to smooth the path towards completion of Israel’s genocide.
Death grip
The nearer we move towards the endgame of the genocide in Gaza, the more the groundswell of opposition to British complicity will grow, as evidenced over the weekend at Glastonbury.
This is why Starmer – a man utterly without principle – needs to redraw the battle lines more to his convenience. He must present opponents to genocide as depraved, as terrorists.
But these MacGuffins serve an even grander purpose. They are being used to shore up the impression that Britain inhabits an ever-more dangerous world of rogue states and terrorism, requiring a massive surge in what Starmer’s government wants to call “defence spending”.
In line with new commitments announced by Nato, Britain is preparing to double its expenditures on the machinery of war and “homeland security”, to five percent of GDP by 2035.
When everyone from Palestine Action members to music fans at Glastonbury critical of a genocide can be portrayed as potential terrorists, the architecture of intimidation and repression needs to be heavily fortified. That is Starmer’s task.
The truth is that the biggest rogues, the biggest terrorists, are not to be found in far-off lands. They sit in airy offices in western capitals, working to undermine and attack countries that insist on control over their own resources, and to grow profits for a corporate sector invested in endless resource wars – profits that are laundered back to western politicians and officials as donations and cushy jobs in later life.
The more violence the West spreads to shore up Washington’s policy of “full-spectrum global dominance”, the greater the resistance from those abroad it seeks to crush.
And similarly, the more the British government seeks to bully and threaten its own citizens at home to assure their compliance, the more opposition will bubble up where it is least expected.
The fight is on. We have to stop being distracted by the MacGuffins. The war industry’s stranglehold on our lives has to be challenged, or we will all end up victims of its death grip.
