Save Jan Moir?

Britain’s Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has received a record 22 000 complaints about Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately since it was published on Friday. This amounts to more complaints about a single article than the PCC has received about all other articles combined in the past five years. Not only have people completely lost their sense of perspective, they have also decided that (some) people’s feelings are more important than the right to express oneself.

As Brendan O’Neill wrote here on forth this past weekend, the fact that the Mail published a sneering, questionable story is hardly a surprise: “It was a fairly nasty column, full of snide comments and innuendo. But that is what the Daily Mail does,” he wrote. (1) This fact appears to have not given many people pause for thought before firing off their (presumably 140 character) complaints to officialdom, demanding Moir ‘faces justice’ for the ‘crime’ of writing a petty and ill-informed article about the death of a former pop star.

Apart from the self-congratulatory tone of the ‘twitterati’s’ attempt to claim Moir’s scalp, the most noticeable thing about this net storm is the fact that people want her and her employer to be censured for expressing an opinion, albeit one that offended a lot of people (and many more by proxy, it would seem). Such an idea runs completely contrary to the basic principles of liberal society. Moir is as entitled to her views as anyone else. It’s simple: there is no such thing as free speech-lite – speech is either free or it is not and a commitment to free speech. Being offended is not enough of a reason to shut anyone down. If free speech only applies to views we like then it’s not free. Guaranteeing everyone the right to hold and express their opinions, including on internet sites like Twitter, would have the effect of making adult of us all: we’d have to live with the consequences of our words.

There is another myth associated with free speech, though – that we must actually have to pay any attention to anyone’s musings. We don’t. Just because someone says, writes or publishes something does not mean that we have to give it any credence whatsoever. Indeed, in a society in which freedom of speech was guaranteed people would be forced to discriminate between those whose opinions were worth considering and those who weren’t.

True, as a newspaper columnist Moir is in a privileged position, but that doesn’t mean anyone was lacking the right or the ability to give her a verbal slap-down.

In fact, just about any person or group whose words lead to widespread gagging orders is usually being paid too much notice in the first place. Take the endless complaining about the possibility that, horror-of-horrors, the right wing British National Party (BNP) might be invited onto television, for example. Labour MP, Peter Hain, who as a young member of the Liberal Party during the 1970s was active in fighting the apartheid regime in South Africa has some funny views for a liberal: he had darkly hinted that he might see the BBC in the dock if the BNP is invited on – so now some views are illegal? (2)

What are these censorious critics afraid of? Do they really think that people will be hoodwinked by Nick Griffin’s ‘man of the people’ act or that prolonged exposure to Jan Moir might somehow make people anti-gay? Ironically, this kind of idiotic view is the mirror image of the outdated notion that exposure to gay people turns people homosexual – a view that prominent British politicians supported until recently, and not just fringe nutters like the BNP. (3)

(1) Jan Moir: death by a thousand tweets, Brendan O’Neill, forth, October 18, 2009

(2) Hain BNP warning rejected by BBCBBC News, October 19, 2009

(2) The Section 28 battle, BBC News, July 24, 2000