Hatred is in the eye of the beholder

There’s a broad mainstream consensus on both sides of the Atlantic: Trump’s tweet telling four hard-left minority Congresswomen to ‘go home’ to the crime-ridden countries they’re from, when three of the four were born in the US, was racially inflammatory and staggeringly ill-judged. But the first question that would be raised in the UK if a British politician committed such a gaffe is the last question raised in the US: was that post ‘hate speech’?

The First Amendment to the American constitution guarantees five basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, and these principles ought rightly to pertain in other democracies such as Britain. (I’m sorry, but we’ve one-upped the Brits here; the UK’s ‘constitution’ isn’t worth the paper it’s unwritten on.) Thus the US Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down ‘hate-speech’ laws, now catastrophically installed and vigorously prosecuted in Britain, resulting in the grievous squandering of limited police resources.

On the Continent, freedom of speech evokes a knee-jerk ‘yes, but’. Particularly in France, despite all that Gallic ‘liberté’ guff, conversations about the topic inexorably degenerate into a listing out of freedom of expression’s many crucial constraints. Yet in the US, free-speech exemptions are strikingly few. They are: 1) Obscenity — definitionally dodgy, much adjudicated and legally eroded. 2) Defamation — although short of telling witting, malicious lies, you may defame public figures. A ludicrous threat of legal action by the Sinn Fein Belfast Lord Mayor John Finucane against Ruth Dudley Edwards for labelling him an IRA ‘apologist’ would get laughed out of court in the States. Were current British libel law extended to Northern Ireland, such a case would be never be heard in the UK, either. 3) Incitement to imminent lawbreaking or violence. Commercial advertising is less protected, but the ordinary American citizen can espouse all manner of ghastly views within the law.