No one should ever be arrested for what they think or say. It is remarkable – and depressing – that this still needs to be said in the 21st century. But it seems it does.
Over the weekend we witnessed an alarming, almost medieval act of censorship. A woman was dragged away by cops for holding up a sign that said ‘Abolish the monarchy’. It was an intolerable assault on freedom of speech.
The woman in question was standing outside St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, which was awaiting the arrival of the Queen’s coffin. Mournful crowds had gathered. But this woman wasn’t in the mood for mourning. She was in the mood for politics. Her sign, in full, said: ‘Fuck imperialism. Abolish the monarchy.’
Remind me what century this is?
‘Officers appeared behind her’, says one news report, and ‘took her away’. They arrested her. Remind me what century this is? Someone being hauled off by the law for expressing anti-monarchist sentiments – it’s like something out of the 1500s.
Now, we can agree that the sorrowful occasion of the late monarch’s arrival at St Giles’ Cathedral is not the right time or place to make political statements. It is infantile, and certainly uncaring, to hold up an expletive-laden placard bashing the monarchy in a crowd of mourners for the monarch. It’s a lefty version of what those loons in the Westboro Baptist Church do. They, too, hijack funereal events to make their showy statements.
But so what? We either have freedom of speech – that is, the right to express ourselves in the public realm – or we do not.
What’s more, the woman held up her sign a few moments before the public proclamation of Charles III as the new king. If people are not allowed to quietly, if offensively, protest against the proclamation of a king, then clearly our country is not as free as we thought. Declaring a king is a political, constitutional act – citizens ought to have every right to dissent at such an event.
There appear to have been other acts of anti-republican censorship over the past 24 hours. A man in Oxford says he was arrested after shouting out ‘Who elected him?’ as that city marked the accession of Charles III. He seems to have been arrested under the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. That act has ‘significantly reduced free expression and harmed democracy’, the man told the Independent. He’s not wrong.
And now it is reported that football matches were postponed following the Queen’s death ‘partly’ as a result of ‘fears that fans would not universally respect tributes to the Queen’. This smacks of pre-emptive censorship, fuelled, typically, by distrust of football fans. We’re in the territory of Philip K Dick’s ‘precrime’ here – the punishment of offence before it has even occurred.
It is especially disturbing that police officers are interfering with people’s right to express themselves. But here’s the thing: they have been doing that for some time. And many of the leftists currently kicking up a storm over the arrests of anti-monarchists raised not so much as a peep of protest against it.
If you said nothing about the recent police questioning of a man for sharing a meme mocking the Pride flag, I don’t want to hear your views on the arrests of the monarchy-bashers. If you said nothing about the police officer who recently gave a stern lecture to a woman after she displayed a sticker that said trans rights are harmful to women’s rights, I have no interest in what you think about officers collaring a woman for saying ‘Abolish the monarchy’. If you have been silent about the spate of arrests of Christian preachers for saying ‘offensive’ things from their public soapboxes, then please spare us your handwringing over the arrest of people for saying ‘offensive’ things at the proclamation of the king.
The entire point of freedom of speech is that it must be enjoyed by everyone. If you only rage against acts of censorship when the target is someone you agree with, but turn a blind eye when the target is someone you hate, then you are complicit in this authoritarianism. Your silence on all the occasions that Christians, ‘TERFs’ and other supposedly offensive people were punished for their views directly emboldened the state in continuing to censor and silence supposed undesirables.
We have to get serious about freedom of speech. It is the most essential liberty. It is the liberty upon which all other liberties are built. Without it, we are in serious trouble. So get out there and defend it for everyone, whether that’s anti-monarchists playing politics in a time of grief, Christians saying that homosexuals will go to hell, or women rightly pointing out that men are not women. In a free society, everyone must have the right to think what they like and say what they think.
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