A police officer has been sacked for gross misconduct. His offence? Racist remarks made while off duty in a pub – that traditional sanctuary of the sharp and unguarded tongue – captured by the Panorama programme filming undercover. Mr Neilson, dismissed over what were described as ‘highly racist and discriminatory remarks’ about different ethnic groups, protested that the undercover reporter had ‘breached his human rights’ and had been ‘egging me on’. He’d had eight or nine pints of Guinness – and wasn’t, he said, a ‘drinker’. His body-worn camera footage, he insisted, proved that on duty he treated everyone ‘with the utmost respect’.
Racist remarks made while off duty in a pub – that traditional sanctuary of the sharp and unguarded tongue
Last month brought another casualty in the assault on private conversation. Paul Ovenden, Starmer’s director of strategy, resigned after text messages he had sent to a female Labour colleague in 2017 were leaked. The eight-year-old messages recounted a version of the game of Snog, Marry, Avoid played about Labour MPs, including Diane Abbott.
Neither incident will prove scandalous enough to dominate headlines for long. But they join a lengthening catalogue of such exposures, each one chipping away at the private–public distinction – that fundamental boundary which liberal societies, until quite recently, understood as worth defending.
Recall Boris Johnson’s 2019 leadership campaign, when neighbours recorded a heated domestic row and called the police. The officers, having determined that everyone was ‘safe and well’, left. The press, however, published detailed transcripts: Carrie Symonds complaining about a wine-stained white sofa, telling Johnson, ‘You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt,’ and expletives about laptops. The journalistic justification – that he might become prime minister and that who he really was in private was therefore essential to reveal – seemed to preclude any sphere of life remaining off limits.
Then came the criminal prosecutions. In 2022, James Watts, a former police officer, was sentenced to 20 weeks in prison over racist messages sent to a private WhatsApp group, under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. (Four ‘memes’ sent by Watts referred to George Floyd and the BLM protests that were taking place in America at the time.) Michael Chadwell, another former officer, was convicted in 2023 for sending a ‘grossly offensive’ WhatsApp message. It featured a parrot and racist remarks, shared with five other retired Met officers.
And it’s not just police officers in the dock. Paul Bussetti filmed a bonfire party where guests burned a cardboard model of Grenfell Tower while they stood around laughing. The video, sent to two private WhatsApp groups, leaked, as such videos now reliably do, and resulted in a ten-week suspended sentence. Tasteless? Certainly. Should it have been criminal, though?
Police have knocked on the doors of parents who criticised their children’s schools in supposedly private parent groups. University students have faced disciplinary proceedings for tasteless jokes made in what they assumed were confidential chats.
These cases involve genuinely objectionable speech. But the question is not whether the speech is objectionable; it is whether the objectionable can any longer be private.
Scotland has gone furthest in answering no. In 2021, the SNP passed the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which criminalises speech deemed to be ‘stirring up hatred’ against groups with protected characteristics: age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. The penalty is severe – up to seven years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both. The law has yet to be enforced, perhaps because no one is quite certain what ‘stirring up’ means.
What makes Scotland’s legislation unprecedented is not its subjectivity or vagueness (common in hate-speech legislation), but its explicit dropping of what is known as the ‘dwelling defence’. That is, what is said in the privacy of one’s own home – say, at a drunken dinner party, shouted in anger from the sofa, muttered over breakfast – is now subject to prosecution.
When Humza Yousaf, then justice secretary, introduced the bill to Holyrood’s justice committee, he was admirably frank. Children, family and house guests, he argued, must be ‘protected’ from hate speech within the home. ‘Are we comfortable,’ he asked MSPs, ‘giving a defence to somebody whose behaviour is threatening or abusive and who is intentionally stirring up hatred against, for example, Muslims? Are we saying that is justified because that is in the home?’ Yousaf went further, arguing that a dwelling defence would draw an ‘entirely artificial distinction’ between public and private utterance.
The answer to Yousaf’s rhetorical question is that, historically, liberal society is not only comfortable with that defence: it is based on that ‘entirely artificial distinction’. Not because we approve of hatred, or find bigotry defensible, but because the line between private and public speech has been understood as foundational to freedom itself.
Everyone speaks and behaves differently in private than in public: policy strategists, police officers, politicians – you and me. It is where we vent frustrations, tell transgressive jokes, air untested thoughts, and say things that would not pass muster in front of others. Context matters, and words mean different things here, where there are shared understandings and layers of history. Given, too, that the boundaries of acceptable public speech have shifted dramatically in recent years, many people require space to navigate this privately – to perhaps rethink their positions. Or perhaps not. But that is the point of privacy: it is where we are permitted to be uncertain, foolish, wrong, nasty. To rant and rave.
This is not about protecting racists and misogynists (though both need privacy). It concerns the preservation of an essential space for human development. Without the opportunity to express ourselves candidly within a circle of trust, we lose the means to explore and untangle our thoughts.
It is, as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it, the backstage area where we drop the performance required for public life. Goffman understood that without this backstage, the front stage becomes impossible to sustain. The performance collapses not into authenticity but into paralysis – into people who have forgotten how to think at all.
Privacy is also essential for the development of bonds of trust with friends, colleagues, lovers. These ties are vital not merely for individual flourishing but for the functioning of society itself. Yet we are creating a culture in which such bonds become liabilities. Fall out with a friend, end a relationship, and suddenly they can comb through years of confidential conversations – the light-hearted, the intoxicated, the intimate and the heated – and weaponise them. Who hasn’t felt that itch in their thumb, reading a spicy comment in a message; the knowledge that you could destroy someone’s life by exposing something they’ve said? This behaviour, though dishonourable by any traditional standard, is becoming normalised.
The result will be a culture in which we conduct ourselves as though a spy sits on our shoulder, filtering every utterance through an internalised tribunal, and producing a transparent society of performed conformity. We lose not only the freedom to speak candidly, but the capacity to think and to form genuine bonds of trust. The real casualty in destroying private conversation is not privacy itself, but us – stripped of the essential space in which human beings become fully themselves.
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