France and Britain: defending our freedoms. Aren't they?

Now that the first outburst of grief and solidarity’s past, we’re beginning to see what the longer-term impact of the terrorist action against Charlie Hebdo is going to be.

Make no mistake: they may be dead, the magazine may be publishing five million copies, the cartoons may be travelling round the world, but the terrorists haven’t failed completely. And sadly the measure of victory they’ll have gained will be through our self-inflicted defeat.

First of all, France that has proclaimed most loudly its passionate determination to defend free speech against this attack, has arrested 54 people and summarily jailed several of them, for voicing support for its enemies or merely criticism of the nation and its principles. It seems, for instance, that three men have been jailed in Toulouse, for shouting obscenities at the police, including in one case the sentiment that the Kouachi brothers (the Charlie Hebdo murderers) were “just the start.”

The police protect precisely those freedoms
governments feel we should be allowed

It’s a vile sentiment, and also a vacuous one – this is by no means the first terrorist attack the West has suffered, so it certainly isn’t the start, and if he was saying that there would be others, he was teaching us nothing we didn’t already know: we surely all realise there will be more attacks, and our jobs is to learn to resist and to face with fortitude whatever they throw at us. In any case, vile though the statement may be, we’ve rightly been loud in proclaiming that there is no right not to be offended, and indeed that the right to be offensive is essential to freedom of speech.

We should be above taking offence at such inept comments. But, above all, even if allow them to offend us, we should be asking ourselves about what right we have to jail anyone for voicing them.

This is part of a pattern. It was only last November that France tightened the law on what could be posted on the internet. In common with a number of other nations, it also has a law against Holocaust denial, a particularly bizarre limitation on freedom of speech: to deny the Holocaust is massively stupid but, taking my cue from A Few Good Men, being a moron isn’t against the law. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

In Britain, in the meantime, the security services have been quick to demand additional powers, “to protect us.” The government is calling for an end to encryption on the internet (which as well as being an unwarranted intrusion into our privacy, would destroy e-commerce that depends on passing encrypted credit card details). All this to ensure that the spooks can collect even more information about us all.

This is despite the fact that the French authorities knew about all three the terrorists, just as the British agencies knew the men who literally butchered Fusilier Lee Rigby, with knives and a cleaver. It isn’t that they have insufficient information, it’s that they haven’t found a way yet to identify the information that really matters from the mass at their disposal – or rather, not to identify it each and every time: a great many plots are foiled, but it seems impossible to stop them all.

Meanwhile the British government is calling on the British people to acquiesce in further erosion of its rights, on the grounds that this is the way to make them safer. While the French government, no doubt with popular support, sets out to mark its commitment to free expression by jailing men for expressing views it dislikes.

The fact that neither I not the vast majority of my compatriots on either side of the Channel (I’m a citizen of both countries) don’t like the views either, doesn’t make their repression any less of a blow against free speech.

Be careful. The terrorists will have won if we go along with our governments’ instinctive reaction to such an attack, which is to limit freedoms further. Now that the dust has settled, it’s our job to resist not just the terrorists, but government overreach too.

Newtown and free speech

Much of the debate since the Newtown shootings, as after every other such tragic incident in the States, has focused on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Nothing surprising about that, because this is the amendment guaranteeing the right to bear guns.
The fundamental problem may however lie not so much in this amendment as in the First, which guarantees freedom of speech, belief and assembly. It’s a powerful illustration of how something that on the face of it seems entirely good, can produce terrible effects in certain circumstances.

The ten amendments to the US Constitution form the Bill of Rights

Kierkegaard got it right when he said ‘people demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use’. All the same, most of us would probably agree that free speech is an important right. Certainly, I regard it as crucial whenever I want to exercise it, though I have to say I wish I could occasionally selectively suspend it for certain other people.


Desirable though it may be, however, the right to free speech can’t be open-ended. The classic counter-example is that there’s no right to shout ‘fire’ needlessly in a crowded theatre. Civilised societies also prohibit libel, incitement or conspiracy, thought these are also constraints on free speech.

There are other, more subtle aberrations in the application of this right. The First Amendment was the basis on which the US supreme court chose to allow the so-called super PACs to operate. These are organisations that can channel unlimited sums of money into political activity, allowing them to make or unmake politicians.

It is also the first amendment that guarantees that politicians can continue to back their campaigns with TV advertising. Funding the astronomic expenditure that involves makes them more than ever dependent on donors.

Those two effects create circumstances in which political lobbies flourish. And here we are back with the problem of guns and tragedies such as Newtown’s: no political lobby is as well organised, and few are as well funded, as the NRA, the main pro-gun lobby.

It is currently following its usual tactics, of saying very little in the immediate post-massacre period. It can see the writing on the wall, and the head of steam generated by Newtown is such that the writing is powerful: there seems a real chance of some significant steps towards tighter gun control this time.
So watch the NRA, once the dust has settled. It is going to give a master-class in the use of lobby muscle in a political system more prone to it than any other in the world.

At which points its opponents will need to ponder the effect of abuse of not only the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but the First as well.