In February, Stephen Edginton interviewed Toby Young for The Sun on his new Free Speech Union (FSU), designed to defend victims of “cancel culture” like himself, from a moral crusade that both consider to be threatening decent livelihoods and innocent lives in the UK.
The core question regarding both free speech and hate speech is who is to judge whom? and Young is pressed twice on this by Edginton. The direct answers yield little by way of definition. Young replies: “If you go up to a black person in a shopping centre and scream the ‘n’ word in their face – then that is a direct incitement to violence and that should be unlawful. But I would draw the line where the framers of the first amendment of the American Constitution drew the line – which is, everything is acceptable within the law providing it is not a direct incitement to violence.” Consequently, for him, Boris Johnson’s “letterboxes joke” scarcely qualifies, since “the evidence is extremely threadbare that people reading that joke… would go out and attack burqa-wearing women”.
Both examples are deeply problematic: the first representing racist ‘incitement to violence’ as speech which provokes black violence rather than speech which incites racist attack; and the second aimed somewhere between humourless anti-Muslims and humourless Muslims, with an uncomfortable echo of an earlier humourless response to “Mohammedan cartoons” that did not end well. But the main problem with drawing the line here is that hate speech legislation has moved on considerably in recent decades, and Young’s reply wipes out in one go, for example, the huge edifice of antisemitic speech accusations with which we now live.
