Freedom of speech means being free to give offence
(Filed: 15/12/2004)
Some of Nick Griffin's pronouncements on race and religion, for which he was arrested yesterday morning, are extremely stupid and nasty. They give offence to all civilised Britons, of every religion and none, who value our country's tradition of tolerance. Most of all, the leader of the British National Party has offended British Muslims by apparently condemning Islam as a "vicious, wicked faith", and making rude and highly questionable remarks about the contents and meaning of their sacred book, the Koran.
We have the greatest respect for devout Muslims, and the passion with which they defend the name of their prophet, Mohammed. They have every reason to feel offended by some of Mr Griffin's remarks, made at a meeting of BNP zealots and secretly recorded and broadcast by the BBC in July. We have grave doubts, however, about the extent to which offensive speeches on any subject should be matters for the law.
Freedom of speech means nothing, after all, if it is taken to mean only the freedom to express views approved by the Government, or those that nobody finds offensive. If the term is to mean anything, it must surely include the freedom to give offence.
There is clearly a cast-iron justification for our ancient laws against incitement to violence. In some countries, there may even be a case for outlawing the expression of certain opinions. One can readily understand, for example, why it was made a criminal offence in post-war Germany to deny that the Holocaust took place. At the time, the possibility of a Nazi revival seemed a real threat to civil order and to the survival of the new republic. But in these islands, no such arguments apply for banning stupid and offensive remarks.
Until we hear the case against Mr Griffin - if any is to be brought to court - there are three observations that ought to be made. First, why did the West Yorkshire police think it necessary to send four plain-clothes policemen to arrest the BNP leader at dawn at his farmhouse on the Welsh border, in the week before Christmas? Here is a man who has never made any secret of his longing to be arrested, and to have his martyr's day in court.
The police say that, since July, a team of officers has been working 10 hours a day, five days a week, watching videos handed to them by the BBC. Is there so little crime in West Yorkshire that they have nothing better to do with their time?
The second observation is that it is a very serious matter to arrest the leader of a political party for stating his opinions - no matter how unpleasant we may find them, or how misguided we may think the 800,000-odd voters who backed the BNP at the European elections in the summer.
The third is that there are surely far more effective ways of silencing Mr Griffin and his kind than the law and the threat of prison. The most effective weapons in the liberal arsenal are argument, scorn and public ridicule.
