From today, ‘Stop Brexit Man’ is free. This character, whose real name is Steve Bray, the long-standing bane of broadcasters, politicians and pedestrians on account of his persistent and clamorous pro-EU protests, has been cleared of flouting a police ban after playing anti-Conservative and anti-Brexit songs outside Parliament.
Bray was apprehended after blaring loud music through speakers last March, when the then prime minister Rishi Sunak arrived for Prime Minister’s Questions. Today, Westminster Magistrates’ Court found him not guilty of failing without reasonable excuse to comply with a direction given under a 2011 Act on ‘prohibited activities in Parliament Square’.
Free speech matters for the underdogs
Some might lament that ‘Stop Brexit Man’ has not himself been stopped. They will sigh that this modern-day Don Quixote will most likely continue his noisy, one-man war against reality. But instead of groaning, we should be celebrating. This is a triumph for free speech. Liberty doesn’t merely entail defending to the death the freedoms of those you disagree with, but defending those you find deeply tiresome and tedious. Or worse.
Free speech is a principle that should always be regarded as precious, irrespective of current, transient circumstances. This is because you don’t know what the future holds, and who will be in charge when your children grow up. Left-liberals are blasé and even dismissive about free speech today because they are now the establishment, the ones who exercise power in our institutions, in the legal system, education, local government, the BBC and elsewhere. The reverse was the case a few generations ago. When all these bodies were run by conservatives in the 1960s, free speech was a decidedly left-wing and progressive concern. In short, free speech matters for the underdogs. History suggests that those who do the silencing today will be the ones being silenced tomorrow.
And so it has come to pass. The reason free speech has come to be perceived as a right-wing cause is because it’s conservatives who are now the underdogs. It’s they who now suffer for speaking their minds, for saying things that our liberal-left overclass finds intolerable.
For instance, earlier this month, the pro-life activist Livia Tossici-Bolt was convicted for standing outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth with a sign reading ‘Here to talk, if you want’, and fined £20,000 for twice breaching the clinic’s ‘buffer zone’. This is no isolated incident. In October last year, the army veteran Adam Smith-Connor was ordered to pay £9,000 for silently praying in the vicinity of the same clinic.
J. D. Vance’s concerns about free speech in Europe may well have been prompted by these specific developments on account of his Catholicism, but that’s no reason to dismiss them. He is right to be worried. Never mind ‘hate crime’, we now have de facto ‘thought crime’ in this country, with people being prosecuted for what is deemed to have taken place in their heads.
This authoritarian drift at the behest of a liberal establishment has been made all the more apparent with the incarceration last October of Lucy Connolly, sentenced to 31 months in prison for making a post on X in the wake of the Southport murders. Yes, what she said was abhorrent, but her disproportionate sentence is unbefitting of a modern, truly liberal democracy, in which the punishment should fit the crime. The notion that punishment should be an act of vengeance, or a blood-curdling deterrent to others, belongs to the age of hanging, drawing and quartering.
But justice as performed in this country at present seems less like an act dispensing objective, dispassionate restitution, and more like the enforcement of the mores and prejudices of the establishment, especially that of progressive lawyers and judges. An Albanian criminal’s successful campaign to halt deportation in January owing to his son’s supposed aversion to foreign chicken nuggets has become a bit of a running joke, but the number of times we read of illegal immigrants successfully managing to retain residence in this country with the connivance of left-leaning judges and lawyers is no laughing matter.
A two-tier justice system in this country is not remotely funny, either. But it is a joke. Lucy Connolly’s particular case is grimly ironic, in that the reaction to the Southport murders was fuelled by a suspicion that white people in this country are treated almost as second-class citizens, not least in matters of free speech. Her punishment, and that meted out to others that summer, seems grossly inequitable when compared to the lenience accorded to Islamist hate-preachers who never seem to feel the strong arm of the law.
Stop Brexit Man should be free to annoy passers-by in Westminster. Those who believe that abortion is wrong should be allowed to say so – and even think so. Because offending people’s beliefs or hurting people’s feelings should never be a crime.
Comments