WRITER argues that controversial football laws put free speech at risk.
WHY worry about free speech in Scotland and the UK today? After all, we don’t live in Saudi Arabia, where an insolent blogger has been sentenced to a thousand lashes.Nor are we in China, where a dissident poet has been locked up for taking a selfie in possession of a yellow umbrella (the symbol of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests). No, we live in the democratic UK where, to mark the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta, a 24-year-old man was jailed earlier this year for the crime of singing an offensive song. No, it wasn’t in “Tory England” but in SNP-ruled Scotland.
In March, Scott Lamont, a numpty and Rangers fan, was sentenced to four months in prison for bawling the sectarian classic The Billy Boys on a Glasgow street before the Old Firm League Cup match. Just to be clear, Lamont wasn’t “up to his knees in Fenian blood”, he was just singing that gory old line. Yet the sheriff jailed him because “a message has to be sent” that “this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated”.
When the authorities start using laws not to dispense justice but to “send a message” about what people can say or sing, we are playing on the home ground of tyrants.Whatever anybody thinks of the antics of some Old Firm fans, says Waiton, “arresting people for being offensive at football is stupid, embarrassing and unnecessary”. Yet such stupidity is not confined to Scotland. Football has become an unlikely battlefield in the new free speech wars across Britain. Where once the game was seen as a place people could let rip in a way they would not do in real life, now fans are expected to meet higher standards of etiquette than others, with football dressed up as a “role model” for the rest of society.
In England, Kentish coppers arrested Gillingham fans for a “racially motivated public order offence” – for calling the rotund Glaswegian boss of Rotherham United a “fat Scottish ****er”. The crusade to sanitise football has become a symbol of how free speech is being encroached upon everywhere from the football stands to the internet and science labs, where Nobel laureate Tim Hunt has just been driven out of his profession for making some very bad jokes – but jokes all the same – about women in science.
The threat comes not from jackbooted political censorship but from a stifling atmosphere of conformism and speech codes, where the chant from authorities and the online lynch mobs is always: “You can’t say that!”
Instead of Voltaire’s classic attitude of support for free speech, we now live in the age of those I call the reverse-Voltaires, who turn his principle on its head and declare: “I know I will detest what you say and I’ll fight to the end of free speech for my right to stop you saying it.”
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/real-life/billy-boys-awful-offensive-song-5961642
WHY worry about free speech in Scotland and the UK today? After all, we don’t live in Saudi Arabia, where an insolent blogger has been sentenced to a thousand lashes.Nor are we in China, where a dissident poet has been locked up for taking a selfie in possession of a yellow umbrella (the symbol of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests). No, we live in the democratic UK where, to mark the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta, a 24-year-old man was jailed earlier this year for the crime of singing an offensive song. No, it wasn’t in “Tory England” but in SNP-ruled Scotland.
In March, Scott Lamont, a numpty and Rangers fan, was sentenced to four months in prison for bawling the sectarian classic The Billy Boys on a Glasgow street before the Old Firm League Cup match. Just to be clear, Lamont wasn’t “up to his knees in Fenian blood”, he was just singing that gory old line. Yet the sheriff jailed him because “a message has to be sent” that “this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated”.
When the authorities start using laws not to dispense justice but to “send a message” about what people can say or sing, we are playing on the home ground of tyrants.Whatever anybody thinks of the antics of some Old Firm fans, says Waiton, “arresting people for being offensive at football is stupid, embarrassing and unnecessary”. Yet such stupidity is not confined to Scotland. Football has become an unlikely battlefield in the new free speech wars across Britain. Where once the game was seen as a place people could let rip in a way they would not do in real life, now fans are expected to meet higher standards of etiquette than others, with football dressed up as a “role model” for the rest of society.
In England, Kentish coppers arrested Gillingham fans for a “racially motivated public order offence” – for calling the rotund Glaswegian boss of Rotherham United a “fat Scottish ****er”. The crusade to sanitise football has become a symbol of how free speech is being encroached upon everywhere from the football stands to the internet and science labs, where Nobel laureate Tim Hunt has just been driven out of his profession for making some very bad jokes – but jokes all the same – about women in science.
The threat comes not from jackbooted political censorship but from a stifling atmosphere of conformism and speech codes, where the chant from authorities and the online lynch mobs is always: “You can’t say that!”
Instead of Voltaire’s classic attitude of support for free speech, we now live in the age of those I call the reverse-Voltaires, who turn his principle on its head and declare: “I know I will detest what you say and I’ll fight to the end of free speech for my right to stop you saying it.”
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/real-life/billy-boys-awful-offensive-song-5961642
