Scotland’s new anti-free speech law is a wicked product of an increasingly censored society that must be woken up, writes James Price
Nearly four years ago, we were all trapped in lockdown. Some of us did silly things, like break our own rules to have parties in Downing Street, or wear masks outside. The silliest thing I did was run to be president of the 200-year-old Oxford Union debating society as a joke, despite having graduated many years beforehand and then accidentally winning.
During my time as one of the oldest presidents in hundreds of years, I got to see how threatened that wonderful thing, freedom of speech, has become. It was bad enough wnen students ‘no-platformed’ controversial speakers or shouted down opinions they disagreed with. But to now see freedom of expression under such peril in the birthplace of both the Scottish Enlightenment, and of the man who lends his name to the Adam Smith Institute, which I am proud to represent, is harrowing.
Scots now live under the shadow of a wicked and despotic law that criminalises speech that can be deemed to ‘stir up hatred’.
This law would almost be funny if it didn’t have such chilling effects. The hapless first minister, Humza Yousaf, is the leading advocate for this fatuous legislation (adopted, appropriately enough, on April Fool’s Day). He is also one of the most reported individuals for a panoply of comments his fellow Scots have deemed to ‘stir up hatred’ including negative comments on the working classes and on how many people in positions of power in Scotland are white. All this in a country where 80 per cent of burglaries go unreported, drug deaths are by far the highest in Europe and devolved competencies like education have outcomes far below England’s.
Where has this censorious climate come from? Much of recent British jurisprudence around speech issues comes from Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, described by Preston Byrne of the ASI as a “woefully inadequate, faux-constitutional and weakly implemented rule of law which has, in the form of Article 10(2), more often than not been used to restrict freedom of speech than expand it.”
Instead of this European law, why not look to our American cousins? Free speech is enshrined in their First Amendment and bolstered by centuries of case law that stems from the same fundamental legal, political and cultural traditions as our own. We should create a UK Freedom of Speech Act, protecting all speech from state interference, bar criminal threats, perverting the course of justice, perjury and direct incitement.
Without this assurance, businesses and citizens are self-censoring, and we are the poorer as a society for it. Companies fret over their policies on what employees should be allowed to say. A clear Act that protected speech and did away with ‘non-crime hate incidents’ and other stifling nonsense would give clarity and peace of mind to business and workers alike.
As Frederick Douglass said: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” And if anyone is in need of hearing new ideas, it’s Humza Yousaf.