Picture the scene. Nigel Farage unwittingly shares an Instagram snap featuring a grinning man wearing a T-shirt with a noose on it, which jokes about Zack Polanski hanging from a lamppost. Imagine this happened only a few weeks after a Green grandee had been murdered brutally in her home, sparking a terror investigation. The response would be more than ‘outrage’. Farage would almost certainly be arrested. There might even be talk of making Reform UK a proscribed organisation.
Let’s be clear. Polanski was not inciting violence here in any meaningful sense
So I certainly understand the mix of horror and righteous indignation with which Reformers are responding to the latest skidmark that Polanski has left on British public life. For it was Polanski who amplified a post over the weekend, chortling about the murder of a political opponent – namely, Farage himself. Because of course it was. Polanski’s Greens now swim in waters full of anti-Semites, Islamists and the sort of neckbearded ‘progressive’ who, when he isn’t banging on about ‘compassion’, can be found laughing about right-wingers meeting a grisly end. When Zack ‘accidentally’ reposted that series of photos of activists, one showing a man in a black tee depicting a guillotine and the words ‘We’re only making plans for Nigel’, no one could really claim to be surprised.
But none of this means that Polanski should be arrested, as Reform is now demanding. Indeed, this would risk deepening the very culture of speech policing that many conservatives have made their cause for more than a decade now. Polanski is a massive, steaming hypocrite, of course. He was the only major party leader who defended the arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport last year, over a tweet joking about why women should punch ‘transwomen’ (i.e., men) in the balls if they refuse to leave the women’s lavatories. But the answer to hypocrisy, double standards and two-tierism is not sharing the authoritarianism around more evenly. If anything, this opens Reform up to charges of hypocrisy – particularly given its taking up of the case of Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who was given an obscenely excessive sentence for a sinister, ugly tweet she posted and then deleted in the wake of the Southport murders, saying ‘Mass deportations now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.’
Let’s be clear. Polanski was not inciting violence here in any meaningful sense. While you can certainly be arrested for a lot less in ‘Think Before You Post’ Britain, where people have had their collars felt for accurately gendering men and fuming about illegal migration, the line on incitement should be speech that is both likely and intended to cause imminent lawless action. That is the standard long established by the US Supreme Court – and it’s one we would do well to emulate. Anything beyond that risks criminalising hasty speech, hateful speech, ugly speech and even gallows humour. Plus, calling for party leaders to be arrested over what they have said risks a tit-for-tat that Reform is ultimately bound to lose out from.
Anyone who thinks our speech laws are being evenly applied at the moment should give their head a wobble. For one thing, we have a police force that appears to have become the armed wing of political correctness – harassing members of the public for even perfectly legitimate, legal speech, if it happens to transgress against modish left-wing ideology. But, in a sense, this is all the more reason for those on the right – or at least the anti-woke side – to oppose this from a position of unflinching principle.
Bolstering the notion that it is the job of the law to punish politicians for offensive speech is unlikely to redound to Nigel Farage’s benefit, at least given the crop of people who currently get to decide what is and isn’t offensive; and what is and isn’t deserving of police officers’ time.
To say that free speech must be for all is not to say that both sides are as bad as each other. There is a distinct problem on sections of the left at the moment. There is an alarmingly high tolerance for extreme, hateful sentiments – be they levelled against Jews, gender-critical women or populist-right politicians. Certainly, the casual derision of Ann Widdecombe, even immediately after her death, would have been unthinkable coming from the mainstream right had, God forbid, Jeremy Corbyn suffered a similarly awful fate. Postmodernism has rotted their minds – when you believe that speech is violence then violence becomes a legitimate response to speech. Meanwhile, intolerance has rotted their souls, leading some to luxuriate in the deaths of those they simply happened to disagree with. But this, in a sense, is one of the benefits of freedom of speech. It allows us to see who people really are. Let them hang themselves by their own hatred. And keep the law firmly out of it.
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