Without the right to hate, there is no free speech

I’ve often thought that Britain’s small but plucky band of free-speech warriors has been playing this debate on easy mode in recent years. That’s not to trivialise the scale of the censorship we have to confront, or the disastrous impact cancellation and arrest have on those who find themselves caught up in it all. But for a good while there, I would often find myself asked on to the airwaves or into the comment pages to defend the right to speak of someone who was pretty reasonable, mainstream, often self-evidently in the right. The bar for censorship has become so low that the biggest free-speech scandals of late have almost all involved feminists accurately gendering people. Well, 2024 reminded us that free speech really is for all or it is for none at all. And that if we fail to defend even those we hate from censorship, we can hardly be surprised when those we agree with are censored, too.

The racist riots that ripped through England in the summer, like a lurid flare going up, illuminated the vast censorship regime that has been built in Britain. One scumbag after another was arrested, prosecuted and convicted for ‘inciting racial hatred’, for ‘grossly offensive’ messages and for ‘false communications’, after they revelled in or egged on or spread misinformation amid the bigoted violence. Meanwhile, the government, the police and prosecutors took it upon themselves to terrify everyone away from their keyboards. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account, as the director of public prosecutions informed us that even retweets can land you in prison.

The majority of riots-related speech crimes were, no doubt, rancid racism of various kinds – from that Northampton woman who said ‘set fire to all the fucking [migrant] hotels full of the bastards for all I care’ to the Carlisle man who shared a meme of Muslim caricatures menacing the Egremont Crab Fair (a quaint local twist).

But that doesn’t mean they should be speech crimes. Especially if you actually want to discredit the hatreds being expressed. If you think hate-speech laws are all that stand between us and Nazism, then you should look into Weimar Germany’s hate-speech laws. Spoiler alert: they didn’t stop the Nazis, and, if anything, handed Hitler and Co the dissident status they craved. Given the conspiratorial form racism often takes, allowing racists to pose as political prisoners only fuels their grift.

The inconsistent treatment of racist speech this year also reminded us that, while we all think we know ‘hate speech’ when we see it, it is ultimately a subjective category that should not be defined by officialdom. How else can we make sense of the fact that those ‘Paraglider girls’ – who paraded around with images of the paragliding anti-Semites of Hamas stuck to their backs – were given a slap on the wrist, while far-right activist Sam Melia was sent to prison for producing anti-Semitic stickers? This two-tier speech policing is the inevitable consequence of having speech policing in the first place: it will always be shaped by the prejudices and blindspots of the police and the judiciary.

The solution is not to criminalise speech more evenly, but to throw off the speech restrictions entirely. Otherwise, one day you wake up to find that what the state considers to be ‘hateful’ or ‘offensive’ now includes pug-related YouTube skits or telling a police officer she resembles your lesbian grandmother.

The rise of elite offence culture, coupled with the explosion of social media, has turned the UK into a veritable world leader in woke censorship. As Greg Lukianoff, from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has calculated, the British police are easily arresting more people for speech today than America did during the First Red Scare.

It’s a grim paradox. We’ve never been freer to express our opinions, a printing press in everyone’s pocket, and yet more people are being locked up for speech than at any time in our modern history. Meanwhile, politicians and judges, here and abroad, are continuing to pass sweeping legislation and launch shameless crackdowns to try to cajole tech firms into censoring ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate’ on their behalf. There’s the UK’s Online Safety Act, the EU’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s (thankfully defeated) Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, Brazil’s outright ban of X and France’s outrageous arrest of Telegram’s Pavel Durov. The list goes on and on.

With a new Labour government apparently hell bent on making speech even less free, the stakes could not be higher. It’s high time we free-speech activists got off of easy mode and started making the hard arguments again. That means defending everyone’s right to free speech, even the people who are, themselves, morally indefensible. It means recognising that my right to publish this article rests on precisely the same basis as the right of fascist scum to make vile stickers.

We can and must campaign against our myriad speech laws, new and old. But essential to that fight is making the argument from a point of principle, and carving out a culture of freedom in society that is strong enough to rebuff any attempts to curb speech and thought further. As George Orwell once brilliantly put it: ‘If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.’

So let’s make ‘free speech for all’ – and I mean all – the rallying cry of 2025. All of our liberties depend on it.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater