Roasting Nick Griffin: Free speech has to be free

I watched the much-heralded Question Time programme on BBC last night and I have to say that I was shocked by the open and undisguised hatred, intolerance and bias displayed by the moderator, the audience and the majority of the panel against one particular panel member. Who was the object of all this nasty behaviour?  Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party. Oh well, that’s all right then. Sighs of relief all round. We thought for a while there you were talking about another human being. The normal rules of civilised discourse can be suspended when we have such as Nick Griffin in our sights. We can be rude to him, we can interrupt him, we can make long ‘wrap the Union Jack around me’ speeches, if we are chairing this programme we can be snide and biased, we can bandy the terms ‘Nazi’ and ‘Fascist’ about freely – anything goes.

Before his appearance on the programme, the chatterati wondered if Griffin should be allowed on to it at all. Wouldn’t doing so provide a ‘platform’ for his and his party’s views. Wouldn’t his appearance on this programme give him respectability? With all the respect due to our social and political commentariat (which is to say very little) none of this matters at all. The only real issue is one of free speech.

Public discourse is filled with much cant and pious nonsense about a whole range of subjects. One particularly nauseating form of cant has to do with the whole notion of free speech, which is up there with motherhood and apple pie as an object of veneration. Yes, of course, we all believe in free speech, except for a few minor restrictions. You can say what you like provided you don’t say anything we don’t like about certain things or certain groups. Apart from these minor restrictions, go right ahead.

But these restrictions aren’t minor. Free speech that’s limited by legally enforced moral norms isn’t free. And it’s the confusion of moral and legal norms that is the root of the problem here.

Take the laws on libel and slander which vary in specifics from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but which, wherever they are to be found, constitute a serious infringement on a man’s freedom to speak and write freely. We must distinguish between what is morally opprobrious and what should be legally considered to be so. Traditional moral theology identifies the sins of detraction and calumny—the former being the unwarranted revelations of true facts about Philandering Man that have the result of damaging Philandering Man’s reputation; the latter being the spreading of untruths about Non-Philandering Man that have the result of damaging Non-Philandering Man’s reputation. Many people would agree on the general moral reprehensibility of such conduct. However matters may lie morally, should such conduct be legally prohibited? If so, on what basis? The legal basis of the laws on libel and slander appear to rest on an assumption that a man has a property right in his reputation but a man’s reputation is not something that can be owned by him since it is purely a function of the subjective feelings and attitudes held by other people and is therefore their property.

If we believe in free speech, does that mean that anyone can say anything he likes, anywhere he likes, anytime he likes? No. There are limitations on free speech but they don’t run with populist morality; they run with property. Liberty and property are conceptually linked and once this connection is established many apparently intractable problems can be resolved with relative ease. To put the matter somewhat crudely, we might express the liberty-property principle as “my house, my rules”. On my property, I have the right to say anything I like but no one else has the right to speak, organise a meeting, demonstrate, or picket—in fact, to do anything at all on my property—unless I grant him permission so to do. You, of course, have similar rights over your property.

The reason I am not permitted maliciously to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded cinema is not because there is some metaphysical zone beyond which my otherwise limitless freedom of speech fails to extend; it is simply a matter of determining what the appropriate property rights of any given situation are. When you purchase a ticket for a film, what you are granted is a licence peacefully to enter the cinema and to remain there for the duration of the performance. Your licence doesn’t permit you to set up a hamburger stand there or to begin to play table tennis with some other licensees. Similarly, it doesn’t permit you to disrupt the performance by loud conversations with your neighbours or to interrupt the performance by shouting word or words, including the word ‘Fire!’  You’ll be forgiven for so doing if there actually is a fire and your warning saves lives.

If we really believed in free speech we should be prepared to live with the consequences of that belief. Should we be free to say whatever we like about whomever or whatever we like? The libertarian answer, in brief, is yes—provided you do it on your own property or under licence from another property owner. Does believing in free speech entail that your friendly neighbourhood bigot has a right to publish letters in your paper, appear on your TV show, or hijack your public meeting? Clearly not. Only the owners of the paper, the TV programme and the public meeting have the power to determine who does and who does not make use of their property.

What we saw on Question Time last night was an appalling spectacle of herd morality in action. Griffin had no right to be on the programme: it was a matter for the programme’s owners to allow him on to it or not as they saw fit. However, having invited him to participate then, whatever one thinks of Griffin and his opinions—and in my case, that’s not much—the elementary rules of civilised human conduct dictate that he should have been treated with elementary courtesy.

The right to say what you like only as long as I like it isn’t much of a right.

Gerard Casey is a professor of philosophy at University College Dublin