Speaking Your Mind

Free Speech. Two little words but with so much complexity and nuance attached. It sounds so obvious and straightforward, doesn’t it? We think of ourselves as living in a free country, so surely we should be at liberty to say whatever we want without fear or favour? However, thanks in part to a particularly nasty email that I received from one of my erstwhile followers and LFF customers just before my holiday, I have been giving the subject of ‘free speech’ a great deal of thought.

And I have come to the conclusion that we should fight hard to preserve free speech as a cherished right within any civilised society whilst being very aware of the dangers of doing so.

Let’s start with the obvious. There are laws in this country designed to stop you saying, whether directly or in writing, anything you want. The laws of slander and libel are there to protect individuals from malign actors whose words might cause serious harm to the reputation of that individual, or in the case of a business, might cause serious financial loss. This is called defamation and, if there’s sufficient proof then the case might end up in the courts. One of the problems with this however, is that you might need deep pockets to be able to successfully defend yourself against something malicious and untruthful that someone has either written or said about you, so the protections you get from this law may only apply to those rich enough to pay. 

Then there’s something that’s been in the news lately. Namely hate crime and incitement to violence. In the UK, hate speech is defined as “any incident that is considered to be motivated by prejudice or hostility based on a person’s disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation”. If any examples of this can be shown to be hate speech, then it might be punished by fines, imprisonment or both. 

Incitement to violence is “the act of encouraging, persuading, or prompting someone to commit an unlawful act”. Nowadays using social media sites to create posts which contain abusive or threatening words with the intent to cause ‘alarm, harassment or distress’ to other people may bring the police to your door, although the intent to cause harm may be very difficult to prove, especially if you can afford a good defence lawyer.

I wanted to get those specific legal definitions out of the way first, in order to discuss something which is much more likely to affect all of us: the freedom we have every day to speak our minds. If you have lived for almost eight decades as I have, you will have seen words come and go. Language is a living, breathing thing and the way that it’s used changes constantly. If you’re not very careful and if you don’t keep up, then you can get into very hot water. This will be extremely amusing to your grandchildren, but it might leave you feeling at best a bit silly and, at worst, angry and loudly complaining that “you can’t open your mouth these days for fear of offending someone.”

Twas ever thus! I well remember a time in the 1980s when we used to say that something wasn’t ‘politically correct.’ This often alluded to misogynistic or racist phrases that people would have happily trotted out only ten years earlier. As a woman I was often the butt of whatever was deemed to be funny about describing me as physically or mentally inferior in some way. Too stupid to drive safely, too ditzy to be trusted to do ‘a man’s job’ (maybe you’d be labelled ‘a dumb blonde’ - although I was never blonde - but you get my drift). And if you were an older woman, then you were likely to be portrayed as an overbearing mother-in-law or a termagant if you worked, say, as a mature secretary in an office. Oh, how we all laughed at the jokes and how we all had to pretend that we didn’t mind the misogynism, sexual innuendo and, occasionally, the actual sexual harassment.

Thanks to a few brave women who started to challenge such things and speak up, and I am proud to be numbered amongst those that stuck their heads above the parapet especially when I started working in a professional capacity at the age of 38, gradually words that could be used in public about women, homosexuals, and people of other races and religions started to change.  Overt sexism, racism and homophobia became much less acceptable, at least to most people. And now we have the word ‘woke ’ to contend with, which, like political correctness in the past, has come to be defined negatively as a restraint on free speech.

During the 1990s and 2000s it felt as though we had made real progress towards tolerance and inclusion. We had the Black Lives Matter and #Me,Too movements in the USA. These grew out of egregious miscarriages of justice and a revulsion at the predatory behaviour of extremely rich and privileged men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvery Weinstein, both of whom were tried, found guilty and locked up for sexually exploitative behaviour, one with underage girls. Perhaps a backlash was inevitable and, with the rise of social media, we now have a lot of very rich and powerful people, like Elon Musk, railing against ‘woke’ because it’s seen as a major curb and affront to ‘free speech’. 

Social media poses a new language challenge for all of us to contend with. And in many ways it’s the hardest of all in relation to our desire to be able to speak our minds freely. If we express our views amongst like-minded people at some social gathering, then no harm will be done. Someone may challenge you, disagree with you or agree wholeheartedly. That’s fine. It’s normal socal intercourse. We may even say something controversial, but we still (mostly) live in a free country, and so we have exercised our rights to free speech and no harm is done.

The problems arise as soon as you start to treat Facebook or Twitter as a similarly ‘safe space’ in which to air your views. The algorithms that govern such platforms reward rage, strong opinions and emotions with attention and followers. And it’s against this backdrop that an increasingly toxic debate over free speech is being fought. What you are at liberty to say to a few friends in a social setting becomes far more troubling when it's seen on social media channels by hundreds or thousands thanks to it being liked and shared. There is an inevitable tussle between benign intentions and malign actors and in that process, our society is in danger of losing sight of what we most need to protect.

Which brings me to the very long, angry, and bitter email which I received just as I was about to drive all the way down to the south of France. It was good that I was leaving the next day and that I was going to spend long hours with my mind free to consider what response I would make, if any. The email had been replied to on my behalf with a pleasant and anodyne response confirming that the person had been removed from our mailing list and customer base, as requested, and thanking her for her past custom, so I could have left it there. 

But the tenor of the email bothered me, especially the ending which read: “I am sorry to be so blunt but I see you and people like you as the problem with this country and why we are in such a mess”. This accusation was preceded by over a thousand words expressing her opinions, beliefs and views about everything that was wrong with the UK and why she ultimately had to lay the blame for all of that on me and ‘people like me’ - mainly because I apparently hold and had publicly expressed views very different from her own.

Reading her email, I suspect that much of the content for what she wrote had come from those social media posts which most closely aligned with her views. This allowed her to speak on behalf of ‘the vast majority of people in this country’ who, she insisted, agreed with her about everything that has been going wrong in the recent past to ruin our once great nation. I have no desire to be the mouthpiece here for her views, so I won’t quote them, and, anyway, you will have some idea of what they are. As you’d expect, I didn’t agree with anything that she said, and that is why she felt able to blame me for all the ills she wished to lay at my door.

So, she has cancelled me and banned me from her life as is her right to do. She wants to deny my right to speak freely in my blogs about what I believe because it doesn't chime with her beliefs. And yet I have no desire to cancel her or to stop her from freely expressing what she believes, and although this feels uncomfortable because I considered her accusation was totally unjustified (I’m only human, after all), I am enough of a liberal to believe that I have no right not to be offended. 

Would that she accorded me the same right to speak freely, even at the risk of causing her offence!

Do feel free to speak your mind below in a comment.  I read them all and publish all of them unless I have a very good reason not to do so.

Don’t forget to enter our birthday competition to tell us all about something new you have tried here. The top prize is Teatime at the Ritz with me for you and a friend.

Tricia x

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