The State Doesn’t Care About Protecting Free Speech
The ruling class loves to cry ‘free speech’ when it serves its culture war. The arrest of republican protestors this week has proved just how superficial that commitment really is.
A republican protestor holds up a placard during a Accession Proclamation Ceremony at Mercat Cross, publicly proclaiming King Charles III as the new monarch, on 11 September 2022 in Edinburgh. (Robert Perry / Getty Images)
Symon Hill, a 45-year-old teacher, is a member of the Baptist Church in Central Oxford. He attended the church service last week as he does every Sunday morning. When he came out of the church, he asked police about the best way to get home, as many streets were cordoned off due to the royal procession.
‘I made rather casual and mild criticism of the monarchy and the proclamation. I have big problems with the idea of a head of state being proclaimed without our consent in the same way we have a new prime minister who almost nobody voted for,’ he says. ‘The police got very defensive and declined to talk to me when I asked about directions.’ Shortly after, the High Sheriff of Oxfordshire began to read out the proclamation of King Charles from outside Carfax tower.
‘I didn’t interrupt that. I wouldn’t intrude on grief or interrupt an act of mourning,’ Symon points out. It was when the High Sheriff proclaimed Charles to be ‘the rightful and lawful liege lord’ that Symon called out: ‘Who elected him?’ ‘I objected to this idea—that in the twenty-first century, we have a bloke in medieval costumes telling us to accept a new lord, and that we are in obedience.’
Symon was stood near the back of the proclamation, and his remarks were more or less drowned out by the voice through the microphone. But security guards appeared, stood right in front of Symon and told him to be quiet. ‘They physically started pushing me backwards, and then the police arrived,’ he says. ‘It was all very sudden and very confusing.’
At this point, the police led Symon down the road, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of a police van. ‘I kept asking them under what law I had been arrested. They refused to answer. I was surprised and shocked by what had happened.’ Two people who had been cheering on the monarchy in the street tried to intervene, asking the police why they were arresting him, and saying that although they didn’t agree, he had a right to free speech.
‘Then we had this whole bizarre thing where the police said they were taking me to the police station. Instead, they drove me a few yards down the road and kept me in the back of the van. And one of the police officers told me I might be taken into custody, or I might not, and he was awaiting further instructions. I was gobsmacked, really.’
Sitting handcuffed in the back of a police van while the ceremony went on, he kept inquiring as to the legal grounds for the arrest. After much deliberation, one of the officers spoke to his sergeant and confirmed to Symon that he wouldn’t be taken into custody. Instead, they would take his details in the van, and then de-arrest him. It was only when police officers were driving him home that they finally gave me an answer as the law under which he’d been arrested.
Symon was told he’d been arrested under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, a controversial piece of legislation passed earlier this year. Ever since then, however, when journalists have contacted the police for comment, Symon alleges that they’ve been told that he was arrested under the Public Order Act 1986.
‘The police are giving different accounts of why I was arrested. To me sounds like an arbitrary arrest,’ he continues. ‘In a democratic society, there must be due process and accountability for arresting people. There needs to be clear legal grounds for arresting someone. It’s quite frightening that that wasn’t happening. And the police didn’t seem overly bothered.’
The Fallacy of Free Speech
Such an overreach of police power is, of course, nothing new to many marginalised communities—something Symon is keen to point out. ‘As a middle-aged white bloke, I’m not the demographic that’s usually subjected to unfair arrests. The disproportionate targeting of young Black men by police is deeply concerning, as is the Prevent agenda which targets Muslims.’
In 2015, the government passed the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, making the controversial counter-terrorism programme Prevent a statutory duty. Public sector workers including teachers and doctors were required by law to make referrals and spot signs of ‘radicalisation’, often with vague and inadequate guidance. Such legislation deterred many British Muslims from expressing their grievances on various political issues such as foreign policy for fear of being branded as extremists and targeted by the programme.
Symon, who as a teacher has to be trained on the Prevent agenda, describes it as an ‘outrageous’ attack on freedom of expression. ‘I try to resist and challenge that agenda because it’s basically about reporting people to the state for expressing opinions, which is really frightening. And clearly, overly used against particular communities.’
Such authoritarian legislation has recently expanded in scope. In June 2019, political organisations such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and Greenpeace were featured in a Prevent guidance document which was distributed to teachers and medical staff by counter-terrorism police.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act is an extension of that authoritarian tendency. A vague piece of legislation open to police interpretation, but with provision for a sentence of up to ten years for any demonstration that causes or might cause ‘serious annoyance’ or ‘inconvenience’, it was a clear attack on the right to protest. Protests can now be shut down on the grounds of ‘noise level’ alone. As, Francesca Newton noted in Tribune last year: ‘The bill threatens to criminalise nomadic Gypsy and Traveller communities by making trespass a criminal rather than civil offence, commits to expanding racist stop-and-search powers, and introduces another ten-year sentence for damaging a statue. In essence, it gives generous expansion to the worst bigotries and excesses of the British police state.’
Symon was heavily involved in the campaign against the new police bill this year and last year. At first, it was a theoretical concern—but being arrested hammers home just how dangerous such legislation is.
‘We’re on a very dangerous road if we’re going to a place in which the police can pretty much arbitrarily arrest somebody who says anything anti-establishment,’ says Symon. ‘There’ll be people who fear being arrested and will not want to speak out. They’re frightened of it. This is having a damaging effect on free speech.’
Symon’s arrest this week is not an isolated incident. A 22-year-old man was arrested in Edinburgh after heckling Prince Andrew and referring to him as a ‘sick old man’—in reference to his controversial association with the convicted sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell—and in Westminster, a barrister was threatened with arrest over a blank piece of paper.
In fact, when it comes to the monarchy in particular, the police have always had an agenda of cracking down on even the mildest form of dissent. During the royal wedding in 2011, Met police were criticised for using blanket stop and search powers to arrest 52 people across London. A protestor who sang a rendition of the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ at a small peaceful gathering was handcuffed and bundled away, causing outrage amongst those gathered there. Others were arrested for carrying anti-monarchy placards.
The Hypocrisy of the Right
So where are the self-proclaimed free speech martyrs determined to defend to the death right to offend people? Is this not a case of ‘political correctness gone mad’?
‘There’s plenty of people who will write in the Daily Mail about free speech at universities and criticise so-called cancel culture. They don’t seem to believe in freedom to protest,’ says Symon.
This irony, of course, also extends to our government, whose selective interpretation of ‘free speech’ is often used to drive a wedge between communities in a manufactured culture war. This is the same party which has threatened to fine universities over free speech and spoken at length about the harms of cancel culture while introducing legislation clamping down on the very thing they claim to champion.
The reality of freedom of expression is that it a privilege protected for some and denied to others. As long this contradiction remains, the government’s faux concern about free speech must be called out for what it is: complete hypocrisy.