The Tongue Is a Fire

Summary

It’s​ puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on the right: campaigners against immigration, Brexiters, the enemies of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that words, phrases and concepts thought to be their property … have been appropriated by the forces of neoconservatism. This is particularly true of the concept of free speech.’ Today, alleged infringements of free speech that would once have outraged Guardian readers are splashed all over the Daily Telegraph. As I write, the Telegraph front page leads on an apparent threat by the US State Department to scrap a trade deal with the UK, because it was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the UK’, in relation to criminal charges against a Christian anti-abortion campaigner in Bournemouth. This concern echoed a statement made by Vice President Vance the previous month that he feared free speech ‘in Britain and across Europe’ was ‘in retreat’. The other stand-out feature of the debate today, and something it is hard not to see as ominous, is the growing gap, in law and practice, between the United States and the rest of the world which calls itself free.How did all this come about? There could be no better guide than Fara Dabhoiwala: of Indian descent, born in England, ...