‘There are a lot of voices out there’ as a character in an old (1970’s) movie once said. Today, thanks to the wonders of the internet and unlike the past, I’m no longer limited to the opinions of published hard copy authors, broadcasters or newspapers or even what I can pick up on Shortwave. The advent of online communications has allowed me to read and hear a lot of opinions, some of them I agree with, some of them I disagree with and some I want to challenge with counter arguments.
The advance of technology has meant that discussion, whether that be about relatively innocuous subjects or those subjects that are more ‘controversial’ has been democratised. In the Anglosphere in particular, the internet has had as big an effect on society as William Caxton’s introduction of the printing press to England in the 15th century.
I tend to think of this viewpoint and information democratisation and diversity as a good thing. We can, or rather should be able to debate anything, even bad ideas, because the only way that bad ideas can be exposed as such is via open debate. I believe that there should be no restrictions on speech apart from libel or those words that constitute a direct, immediate and credible incitement to a specific act of violence, which is a similar policy to that which has been interpreted from the US First Amendment to the Constitution. Even the most disgusting should be allowed to speak because if such individuals are banned from speaking then we are left in the dark as to the existence of such people and their views and what’s worse is that such people can still operate in the unchallenged shadows. In other words, we cannot challenge what we cannot hear or see. I’m Jewish and I do not even want to see Holocaust deniers silenced, as how else are we to know just how mental and dishonest the Holocaust deniers are unless we let such people speak? Yes, total freedom of speech and the means to distribute said speech does bring problems, discerning truth from utter rubbish can become more challenging, but freedom, for all its faults, is infinitely better than slavery.
As you can probably understand, I have a pretty liberal view when it comes to freedom of speech. Unfortunately my view is not shared by everyone, especially those groups and individuals who have a narrative to sell and who find challenges to their narrative unwelcome. There are now a plethora of Left leaning and Islamic organisations, some of whom receive taxpayer cash, who are dedicated to creating and nurturing a culture of censorship. Such organisations do not want views that run counter to their own to be aired and for this reason they should be treated as being dangerous to free speech culture, especially as all too many of them seem to have an awful lot of influence over both government, police forces and legacy social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Groups like Tell Mama, Stop Funding Hate, Stop Hate UK and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Hope Not Hate etc are all firmly on the side of the censors as are the activists on the wilder shores of the transgender movement.
There have been two cases in the last week which shows this censorship tactic in action and shows why those who promote censorship and the entities that fund them, should be peacefully but strongly protested.
The first case concerns the ITN newsreader Alistair Stewart who was forced out of his job by a complaint from a black identity activist about a Shakespeare quote that Mr Stewart had also used against a white online interlocutor, something that in my view completely negated the claims by the activist that Mr Stewart was being ‘racist’ You can see the Twitter conversation screenshots in the appendix below. What is interesting about this case is that Mr Stewart was not sacked until after the complaint by the activist had sent his complaint (or rather whine) had been sent to the Tell Mama organisation. Although Tell Mama did not engage as far as I could see with the activists whine in public, the swift forced resignation of Mr Stewart suggests that ITN ran scared of the fact that Tell Mama had seemingly become involved. This is something that should worry anybody concerned about freedom of speech in this country. We should not be having a situation where questionable groups with a fetish for censorship call the shots either directly or by organisations fearing what might happen if they don’t kow tow to the censors. There was nothing in what I could see in Mr Stewart’s conversation that could remotely be seen as ‘racism’, the ‘ape’ comment from Shakespeare was not dished out with a racial motive, Mr Stewart was in my view merely mocking the ignorant and the arrogant. But there is, thanks to ‘hate speech’ laws, no longer need for any evidence to prove racist intent, just the perception of someone who feels ‘offended’ is enough and ‘perception’ is more than enough to have someone unjustly lose their job or to be dragged through the courts.
The enforced resignation, lets call it what it is shall we which is firing, of Mr Stewart is wholly unjust, Mr Stewart in the opinion of myself and others who want to see freedom of speech restored, did nothing wrong. Although I concur with the more pessimistic people our there that the anger being voiced over Mr Stewart’s sacking are unlikely to persuade his cowardly and indeed cowed management to reinstate him, his removal from ITN has highlighted both the poor state of free speech in Britain today and the undue influence that censorious Leftist and Islamic groups have in our country.
The censorship of Alistair Stewart came to a large extent ‘out of the blue’. It was basically a Twitter spat in which a minority interlocutor of Mr Stewart’s lost an argument and then went whining to a bunch of Islamic grievance mongers, screaming about ‘muh racism’. The result of this was that the ITN management kow towed to the great god of diversity and sacked Mr Stewart in the hope that the bullies would leave them alone. The removal of the commentator and broadcaster Katie Hopkins is an altogether more different and sinister matter.
Ms Hopkins was removed from Twitter not because of her immediate words, although I understand that this is an excuse that is being used, but because of a long term campaign by Leftist and Islamic organisations to silence Ms Hopkins. In this case, Tell Mama have admitted on social media that they have been campaigning for years to silence Ms Hopkins and have worked with other censorship-friendly and racial identity groups in order to do so.
It should be remembered that the Tell Mama group receives spectacular amounts of public money, £1.9M the last time I looked, and have used that money not to monitor the surprisingly small amount, as discovered by the YouTuber Luke Reid, of real anti-Muslim violence that occurs in the UK, which is what the money was granted for, but to campaign for censorship. Tell Mama and groups who support or who are associated with them have consistently showed that they want to censor any speech that goes against their narratives. TM was a significant campaigner to remove Tommy Robinson from the legacy social media platforms and was also in a similar position when it came to forcing the Britain First organisation off of Facebook. Whilst no reasonable person would grudge a group monitoring crimes, getting a small amount of funding to do so, lots of groups both religious and secular undertake this task, we should not be paying for censorship, especially censorship that harms the British culture of free speech.
But Tell Mama is not alone in being a bunch of well connected and funded censors. There are other groups, hostile to freedom of speech that use money from funders both public and private to push for censorship. Hope Not Hate for example may seem to many to be a standard anti-racist organisation of the sort that grew up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s made up of well meaning Leftists who gave the impression of wanting the reasonable aim of seeing people judged by their character and not their colour. Unfortunately many of these groups, Hope Not Hate included, have moved on from King-ite reasonableness, to what Spiked magazine called ‘Anti-Fascist Authoritarianism’. Spiked is correct in their description of Hope Not Hate. This is because how else but ‘Authoritarian’ would be appropriate to refer to an organisation that campaigned to have their very selectively curated list of ‘dangerous books’ banned from large booksellers? As Spiked noted, Hope Not Hate was OK calling for the anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be banned but not for bans on the Koran, despite the enormous amount of Jew-hatred contained in the latter book.
Unfortunately, Hope Not Hate are not as self supporting as other far Left authoritarian groups are. They are not, as the Socialist Workers Party is, funded by membership fees and donations and by the income from sending the more lowly in party status members out to sell copies of the Socialist Worker, Hope Not Hate has in the past, got a significant amount of money from the State for specific purposes such as silencing the English Defence League, an action that many of would see as an act of censorship of voices that some in government and many on the left are uncomfortable with. In 2012 and 2013, the ‘charitable’ arm of Hope Not Hate received three tranches of funding totalling £66,000 from the Department of Communities and Local Government (the same funders as support Tell Mama) in order that Hope Not Hate could ‘establish community partnerships in four key areas which were prone to EDL activity, including sharing positive local stories and strengthening community bonds’. In other words Hope Not Hate was being paid by the taxpayer to propagandise and get up an opposition to Britons whose primary complaint was against the grooming gangs and religious extremism that has blighted many of the areas where there was ‘EDL activity’. Hope Not Hate were in effect censoring the voices of those who spoke uncomfortable truths.
Hope Not Hate now claims that they are not in reciept of any UK Government and EU money, something they may or may not be telling the whole truth about. Their current funding comes from a number of different sources including from church charities that have in some places such as London where the Catholic Caritas charity has been coopted by leftists to promote Leftist ideals and to support anti-British and pro-migration groups like Citizens UK. Hope Not hate claim they get money from Parochial (Anglican) sources, trade unions and individual donations. I must say that if I was an Anglican I’d be pretty pissed off right now to find that money from the church plate has been granted to an organisation that is dedicated to censoring the voices that they do not like. Similarly if I was a trade union member as well as a supporter of free speech and found that money from my subs was going promoting censorship, then I’d be equally pissed off.
We move on now to Stop Funding Hate another of the plethora of groups, some funded with taxpayers money and some from church and civil society groups and some from well meaning citizens that are dedicated to censorship of views and platforms that they do not like. This organisation, that I have previously written about in some great depth in a two part article that can be found HERE, has been described by Brendan O’Neill writing in The Spectator as “ a nasty, elitist campaign for press censorship”. Stop Funding Hate started out with a middle class left wing activist who took umbrage with how the British press treated the story of the death of his sister, a voluntary worker in a less than safe area of Africa. However instead of trying to counter the narrative that he saw as false, he went on to form Stop Funding Hate so that no newspaper could publish anything that him and his middle class Left pals didn’t like. This organisation has also worked with the Citizens UK organisation to target publications that they don’t like and has successfully managed to bully some companies into withdrawing advertising in newspapers like the Daily Mail. Unlike the other groups, Stop Funding Hate does not seem to be getting money from either the State, as with Tell Mama or from left leaning grantmaking organisations as is the case with Hope Not Hate and is probably the poorest in finance terms of the three major censorship organisations highlighted in this piece. Most of their money seems to have come from crowd funding and at £130k assets and £130k liabilities it seems that most of this money may have dried up. However that has not stopped this group from being a threat to free speech. Despite the relative impoverishment relative to other censorious groups, Stop Funding Hate is still very well connected and can call on members of other leftist groups to publicise their censorious campaigns. Stop Funding Hate seem to be motivated by the idea of withholding news from the public. They are unhappy that some newspapers are none too happy with mass migration or those outlets who question the legitimacy of the ‘refugees’ that the middle class Left has invited to the UK. To give an analogy: If the press was warning the public about wolves roaming the British countryside, Stop Funding Hate would be campaigning for the word ‘wolf’ to be forbidden in the national press.
So what should we do about these groups, not just the ones named in this article but the other groups like them, groups that are less high profile but still dangerous to the concept and indeed the practise of freedom of speech? Some of them are heavily embedded in the state and its agencies whilst others use their online presence to build a phantom army of supporters (many of them from equally unrepresentative leftist groups) to bully companies into complying with their desire for censorship.
My own belief, strengthened in myself as well as I believe in others, by the treatment of Mr Stewart and Ms Hopkins along with the threats that are being made against George Galloway (who I would like to say is not someone who I support) is that this is the time when individuals and groups who are in favour of US style free speech, need to come together to metaphorically defenestrate the censors. These two high profile cases have, despite the Mainstream Media spin on the stories, shown the public how dire the situation is for free speech in the United Kingdom. This is a time for effective and peaceful protest against the censors as I believe that the recent change in government may make free speech campaigning more effective than it has been in the past. There are a variety of peaceful protest techniques that could be employed to counter groups that are campaigning for censorship. If you are a practising Anglican for example and you object to your church plate money being spent on Hope Not Hate’s censorship activities, then say so, if you are ignored by your clerics then find more parishioners of similar mind to press the case. A similar technique can be used by TU members to try to cut off funding for censorious groups from this source.
There is or rather could be a place for street protest when it comes to countering censorship friendly entities, but these must be kept peaceful, civil and not present an image to the public that does damage to the idea of free speech. If we want more people on the side of free speech then we mustn’t frighten the normies. I thought that the Day for Freedom event that was put on by Tommy Robinson and associates was a classic example of how to do things right and it is a damn shame that this event did not become more regular or even travel around the country. The Day for Freedom was notable as it encompassed people from a number of different political strands both on the stage and from what I could see, among the regular attendees, there was even a Remainer there LOL. People put aside their political stances and instead stood up for freedom of speech and I believe that that is what free speech campaigners should do wherever possible. I may not agree with some people and I’m certainly not bound to agree with others or publicise their words, but I do have to support their right to speak.
All of us who are worried about the way things are going when it comes to freedom of speech should, in the first instance, make use of the usual official channels such as complaining to your clerics, TU branch officials and to your MP about the dangers of pro-censorship entities. But, we should also consider whether sensible, civil, peaceful and well targeted protests against not only the censorship enties themselves but also their funders could be effective? Many of the censorship campaigners are adept at hiding their operating offices (many of them are ‘brass plate’ companies where only the registered address for service of documents such as the office of the organisation’s accountants is publicly available) which means that they can often dish out lies and disinformation as well as calls for censorship, safe in the knowledge that freedom campaigners will not be outside their office doors demonstrating against them. It’s a very one sided campaign that groups like Stop Funding Hate run. SFH for example are a ‘brass plate’ company that operates in effective anonymity whilst they send demonstrators to the operating offices of British newspapers that do not have the advantage of such anonymity. It is because so many of these censorship organisations operate with the sort of anonymity that they would deny others, that I believe that targeting the funders of these organisations, whether they be government departments such as the DCLG the Dept of Health, in the case of Citizens UK or Church parochial funders with peaceful protest, may be a way of curtailing the activities of pro-censorship groups. Please note here that I’m not calling for any techniques that have not been used by censorious groups themselves. They also have lobbied religious groups, parliamentarians, local government, grant making organisations and private companies and engaged in peaceful protest and I see no reason why those who are opposed to restrictions on speech should not do the same.
If I do not speak up for the likes of Stewart, Hopkins and even Galloway and against those who wish to impose censorship, then there will in the future come a time when there will be nobody to speak for me. If you lazily think that such censorship only applies to those involved in politics, or to those whom you believe ‘deserve it’ then think again. Tomorrow it could be your turn to be silenced and you could be silenced for speaking a basic truth, as some have, such as for example saying that ‘women don’t have penises’. Censorship never stops when the censor has achieved their initial objective, it grows and grows until it strangles a society and its culture to death.
