Last month I was privileged enough to participate in the annual House of Lords Chamber Debate. It’s the one time during the year when people who are not members of the House of Lords are allowed to sit on its benches and debate.
This year the debate was about free speech and its limits. I made a short contribution about the practicalities of censorship and surveillance, and said that free speech should be about dialogue and conversation. Continue reading
Tag: free speech (Page 20 of 48)
A Better Debate About No Platform? My Speech At the Leeds Beckett Festival of Politics and International Relations
This is an edited transcript of my speech to the Leeds Beckett Festival of Politics and International Relations Festival, delivered on 15th November 2016. This first appeared on the Leeds Beckett University Politics and Applied Global Ethics (PAGE) blog. You can listen to the unalloyed version of the speech on SoundCloud or via the player below.
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https://twitter.com/JunaidM2/status/798618037792411648
Some Arguments Against No Platform
I want to first set out my views on No Platform policies. In short, I think they’re bad for free speech and they’re bad for the people they seek to protect.
The idea of No Platform is that it seeks to avoid giving someone the credibility of speaking at a prestigious institution. Those who call for No Platform claim it is not a form of censorship, because the person is subjected to the No Platform rule can always take their words elsewhere. Moreover (they say), legal protections for free speech relate to the government, and since the government is not involved in choosing who speaks at a university there is no real issue. Why can’t we choose who does and does not speak on our campus? Continue reading
I’m bookmarking this Washington Post profile of Professor Susan Benesch, whose research looks at ‘dangerous speech’—that is, speech that can incite mass violence.
For Benesch, it’s important that people understand that the type of speech she wants to counter is different from hate speech, which she says is a broad category for which there is no agreed-upon definition. An advocate for free speech, she does not believe that hate speech can or should be silenced. In fact, it’s one of the central reasons she sought to differentiate dangerous speech.
Remember the incident over the summer when a woman was detained by the police, after a crew-member on a Thompson Airways reported her for the ‘suspicious’ activity of reading a book? Faizah Shaheen spoke about her experiences to the WorldLink programme on the Deutsche Welle English language service, as part of an hour long programme about fear. Continue reading
The Crown Prosecution Service have updated their guidelines for when someone should be prosecuted for something posted to social media. I spoke to Kieran Corcoran of Heat Street about how the UK laws governing social media really need to be updated:
Robert Sharp, a spokesman for free speech campaigners English PEN, also commented, telling us: “Free speech must always include the right to offend.
“The law already bans abusive, harassing or threatening messages, which is surely adequate to stop the worst social media trolls.
“The words ‘grossly offensive’ are highly subjective and introduce ambiguity into the the law. This in turn chills free speech.
“Parliament should legislate to remove these words from the Communications Act, just as it removed similar wording from the Public Order Act in 2014.
“Other countries look to the UK on free speech issues – criminalising causing offence sets a poor international example.”
The CPS has tried to head off criticism of its new laws by advising prosecutors to exercise “considerable caution” in their decision-making to avoid “a chilling effect on free speech”.
The Public Order Act amendment I mentioned was a tweak to section 5. See the Reform Section 5 website for more details.