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Why incitement to hatred should not be a crime

The jailing of Lucy Connolly will do nothing to challenge racism. It will only bolster the state censors.

Tim Black

Tim Black
Columnist

Topics Free Speech UK

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On 29 July, as soon as the news broke that three children had been stabbed to death in Southport, in the north-west of England, several online accounts spread a malicious rumour that the suspect was an asylum seeker. This prompted Lucy Connolly, a child minder and the wife of a Northamptonshire Tory councillor, to take to X and indulge in a vile bit of migrant-bashing. ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government politicians with them.’ She concluded (superfluously), ‘If that makes me racist so be it’.

Having pleaded guilty to intent to stir up racial hatred in September, Connolly has this week been sentenced to 31 months in prison. There’s no doubt that her tweet was a disgusting piece of racist attention-seeking. But it was still just a tweet. Should it really have merited criminal sanction, let alone nearly two-and-a-half years in prison? Absolutely not.

Connolly is far from alone here. Ever since the UK authorities responded to this summer’s riots by promising to crack down on ‘online violence’, countless others have been locked up for their unpleasant social-media posts. In August, Julie Sweeney, from Cheshire, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for a Facebook post that read, ‘Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ Most would agree that this was a nasty, racist thing to say. But worthy of a long stretch inside? Really?

More disturbing still was the punishment dished out in August to Tyler Kay from Northampton. He was sentenced to over three years in prison just for copying and pasting Connolly’s post fantasising about migrant hotels going up in flames. Quite why he received a longer sentence for posting exactly the same words is unclear.

And then there was the case of Lee Joseph Dunn from Cumbria. In the days immediately after the Southport stabbings, he shared a series of images – reportedly depicting knife-wielding Asian men arriving on boats and later standing outside parliament – captioned with the words, ‘Coming to a town near you’. In August, he pleaded guilty to posting ‘grossly offensive’, ‘menacing’ messages – an offence under Section 127 of the Communications Act – and was given a two-month jail sentence.

That these individuals have expressed vile sentiments is not in doubt. What ought to be in question, however, is whether expressing vile sentiments should be a criminal offence. It can be in the UK, thanks to our myriad hate-speech laws. But it’s not in the US, which, as the home of the First Amendment, has no hate-speech laws at all. And that’s because the American system recognises what Britain’s does not – namely, that so-called hate speech, no matter how obnoxious, is also free speech. To allow a government to criminalise certain forms of speech in the name of combating ‘hatred’ is to give the state power over what we can and can’t say. It is a recipe for more and more censorship, as the steady, decades-long expansion of Britain’s hate-speech laws attests.

Of course, those supporting the incarceration of Connolly or Sweeney will say that they weren’t just expressing hateful views – they were also inciting others to violence, or in the troublingly vague language of the Public Order Act, ‘stirring up racial hatred’.

US law again offers a useful corrective here. It defines incitement as speech intended to and likely to provoke immediate unlawful action – a concept sometimes referred to as the ‘emergency principle’. So, to update an old John Stuart Mill example, if a far-right agitator stands in front of an angry mob, who are assembled outside a Holiday Inn housing migrants, and he then tells the crowd to burn the hotel down, that qualifies as incitement. It should be limited and punished.

None of the social-media posts that has landed the likes of Connolly in jail could be said to meet that standard. These individuals have little to no authority and relatively few ‘followers’. Their posts didn’t address anyone in particular, and anyone who did read them was hardly likely to simply act on them. They certainly expressed ugly and hateful views. But they did not pose an imminent threat.

No doubt, the locking up of these individuals for their cretinous social-media activity will make Labour’s authoritarians feel virtuous. But ever more punitive censorship will not solve anything. The only way to tackle the actual hatreds festering at the margins of society is through more free speech, not less.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

Picture by: YouTube.

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Topics Free Speech UK

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