‘The UK’s speech laws are insane’

Britain has been engaged in a decades-long experiment in policing ‘hate’. Thousands have been arrested for ‘grossly offensive’ comments. Those who share unpleasant memes are often treated more harshly than those who commit serious crimes. The state is also taking an increasing interest in policing what is and isn’t true. How did a supposedly free nation like Britain become so preoccupied with punishing people for things they think and say?

Greg Lukianoff, president of the US’s Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers recently to discuss the UK’s insanely illiberal speech laws. Here is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full video interview here.

Fraser Myers: It feels like a lot of people in the UK don’t appreciate how bad things have become in terms of free speech. How far has the UK fallen?

Greg Lukianoff: It’s like your country has Stockholm Syndrome. You’ve become used to things that are absolutely insane.

For historical context, when people look back at the First Red Scare in the US, there’s an assumption that it was a horrible period. Thousands of people were arrested for their ties to anarchist or communist organisations. About 800 people were deported. Between 1919 and 1920, during the First Red Scare, the government arrested about 4,000 people.

In two years in Britain, between 2015 and 2016, the state arrested more people for making offensive comments on the internet than the US did during the First Red Scare. The UK has become used to the idea that you can be arrested for saying something online. That’s one of the reasons why there’s a sense that things aren’t so bad in the UK – the country has become so used to it.

Myers: The common counter-argument is that people are only being arrested for ‘hate speech’, which is somehow different to regular speech. What do you say to that?

Lukianoff: Hate speech is the best marketing campaign the pro-censorship movement has produced in 50 years. It originated from Herbert Marcuse, whose essay, Repressive Tolerance, argued that it was necessary to censor the right if we wanted a free society. Then figures like Richard Delgado, and other founders of critical race theory, argued for greater restrictions on hateful speech. As a result of this movement, there have been hate-speech codes on US college campuses since the 1980s. They’ve been a disaster. They have prevented discussion of perfectly reasonable topics.

You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think. If there are 900 bigots in a room and you’re the only one who isn’t, you’re better off knowing this. And it’s important to know what bigots think. You don’t change anyone’s views by censoring them. That will only drive bad ideas underground, which isn’t a desirable outcome.

One of the best-documented phenomena in social psychology is group polarisation. It occurs when people only speak to people who they agree with, and become far more radical in their views as a result. That is what you would expect to see in a country that has been policing speech for quite some time.

Myers: Since Hamas’s 7 October attack in 2023, both the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel sides have said their freedom of speech has been suppressed. Are both sides equally suppressed, or does one side have a greater claim than the other?

Lukianoff: It’s absolutely true that, after 7 October, pro-Palestinian students and professors got in trouble for things such as expressing support for Hamas. On the left, there was a lot of buzz about this being a new form of McCarthyism. At the time, I wrote a piece in the Atlantic asking the left where it had been during the rise of cancel culture. We’re talking about a period that saw more professors fired than during McCarthyism.

During 2023, de-platforming at US universities reached a high point. Yet the pro-Palestinian activists were demanding free speech exclusively for themselves. They actively tried to suppress the speech of others. This includes a case where, for example, pro-Palestinian students shut down a talk on the topic of black holes by a Jewish professor on the grounds that he was pro-Israel.

Often, people on campus will refer to their opponents as fascists. They don’t seem to realise that using force to shut down opinions you don’t like is a characteristic of fascism.

Myers: We’ve talked about racism and hate speech, but what about misinformation? Is that a legitimate reason to suppress speech?

Lukianoff: This is one of the great lessons of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is probably best understood as the discovery of our own ignorance. Essentially, once we began to test what was perceived as common folk wisdom, we discovered that it didn’t hold up. That was an amazing revelation for humanity. We began to understand how hard it is to know the truth, and what an arduous journey it is to attain it.

In our book, The Cancelling of the American Mind, Rikki Schlott and I discuss the many things people got in trouble for during the Covid-19 pandemic, who were later vindicated for being right. Wouldn’t that give you pause for thought over giving the government the power to decide what is misinformation and disinformation?

Misinformation and disinformation exist, and they should be called out. But it’s an awful idea to give the government the power to decide what misinformation and disinformation are.

Greg Lukianoff was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch the full conversation here: