By Douglas Kruger
IS it Civil War Day in the UK yet? Or do they still have a week or two to go?
It’s all feeling like a bit of a powder keg over there, isn’t it? And it makes one grateful for the safe remove of Jersey, not to mention the independence of our government.
Speaking of which, do we have a constitutional equivalent of America’s First Amendment? The UK doesn’t. Up until recently, no one really believed it was necessary. Free speech was an assumed English birth right.
Yet their current regime appears to share no such assumption. Last week, in a move that reminds me uncannily of Apartheid South Africa in the bad old days, armed policeman were waiting at Heathrow Airport to arrest…a comedian: the writer of Father Ted.
He committed a crime so egregious that he had to be taken into custody in a splashy public display by five officers with guns. Four officers with guns would not have been sufficient. His offence? His tweets didn’t mesh with their ideology.
And they have teams employed to search for such tweets. Reporting from overseas, the New York Post estimated that up to 30 people a day were arrested in the UK for sharing memes and social media opinions, undoubtedly the best use of resources given that no other issues in there require police attention.
What surprises me most is that not a single one of the officers resigned their job in disgust rather than carry out these orders.
To think that the British police were once the envy of the world. Where did it all go wrong?
For starters, combining power with woke ideology consistently ends in Orwellian dystopia. But it goes back further than that.
Policing, as the world knows it today, originated in London, with “Justices of the Peace” deriving their authority from the monarch, not the government. That’s an important distinction. Over time, and in slow stages, this arrangement changed, with government assuming ever greater control.
What began as a king’s mandate to “protect my subjects” has morphed into a government’s never-ending temptation to “mould them into compliance” via social engineering. Worth stating, the king never asked this of them, and his subjects never agreed to it.
Yet free speech is not negotiable. Not unless we are willing to tell our children: “We preferred that you not live in a free society, and so we relinquished this right on your behalf.”
Our natural right to free speech is our greatest societal safeguard against tyranny. If we can debate an issue, criticise it, point out its flaws, laugh at it, agree on it, or suggest better ways forward, we remain capable of keeping the worst abuses at bay. If we can’t, we can’t. We get China, North Korea or South Africa in the 1980s.
It’s tempting to believe that it will never happen in Jersey. But who would ever have believed it would happen across the water, in what has traditionally been a global beacon of freedom?
I love Britain. I love the idea of Britain. And I dearly hope it finds its way back.
It was here that the notion of free speech, now enshrined in America, was originally formulated. This is the culture that dismantled the global slave trade, then halted a national-socialist dictator for an encore. Freedom is one of Britain’s core ideals, and freedom of speech is the highest expression of that impulse. If one is not free to speak, one is not free to think and what can be more fundamental than that?
Meanwhile, perhaps we in Jersey do need a constitutionally enforceable right to free speech, which may be applied against any imposition by authority, and perhaps we should implement it now, before it is ever needed. If the day comes, it’s already too late. Do we have a politician willing to champion this one? You’ll have my vote.
As it currently stands, we follow the UK model. On the surface, our free expression is enshrined in our rights.
But here’s the flaw that needs shoring up: these rights are not absolute. They remain provisional and subject to restriction. Under what circumstances? If government deems that doing so is necessary for order, safety, morals or the rights of others. With even a smattering of experience, you will immediately perceive that to mean, “For any reason whatsoever, should authorities wish it”.
That’s not sufficiently robust. Free speech must be absolute, if it is to mean anything at all, and inalienable, not provisional.
Now, not for one second do I see our current Jersey authorities as dangerous. Personally, I’ve had nothing but excellent experiences with our police, and I have no difficulty believing our institutions are largely peopled by good-faith operators who are genuinely trying their best.
But safeguards of this nature are not implemented against today’s high-calibre representatives, but the unseen monsters of tomorrow. You do it for your children.
Meanwhile, as a thought experiment, take this test. Who do you most vehemently disagree with in Jersey right now? Given the option, would you shut them down?
Free speech laws mitigate against that very impulse; in all of us.
The greatest problem with restrictions on speech is simply this: “Who decides?”
Today, your interest group is in power. So it limits its detractors. Tomorrow that changes, and their interest group takes the helm. So they ban you, in turn. Who was right and who was wrong? Under such a dynamic, there isn’t even a possibility of discovery. Instead, there are only cycles of power, with ‘truth’ as a constant casualty.
But truth matters. And our ability to haggle our way toward it must never be impeded.
Free speech laws promote democracy. They facilitate truth, protect individual liberties and act as a check on power. They allow for inquiry into important questions, so that facts may emerge, rather than dogma. I’m a big fan of the phrase, “If the truth can kill it, it deserves to die”.
And contrary to the notion that such laws permit hatred to flourish, the opposite proves true: free speech exposes poor, undeveloped or malicious thinking to scrutiny within the public arena, where it may then be addressed and debated through further speech.
That is infinitely superior to the alternative, by which bad will, ignorance or resentments are forcibly repressed through censorship, then driven underground to fester and radicalise. That’s when eruptions occur.
Benjamin Franklin observed: “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.” And closer to home, Victor Hugo said: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.”
We have an opportunity right now to shore up free speech rights in Jersey.
We can see firsthand why it matters. Do it today, and we might bequeath it as a gift and a safeguard to our children – perhaps the most important they will ever receive.
Douglas Kruger is a writer and speaker based in St Helier. His books are all available via Amazon and Audible, including the brand new novel House of the Judas Goat.
