Quote of the day 17th February 2020
"Free Speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, and the freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worthy having."
Mr Justice Julian Knowles, in a landmark High Court ruling which will be seen as a significant blow for freedom of speech. See extracts below of a report on the case.
Mr Justice Julian Knowles, in a landmark High Court ruling which will be seen as a significant blow for freedom of speech. See extracts below of a report on the case.
Comments
Free speech within the law means that nobody should try to prosecute you for saying something which is not illegal but it does not mean that you have to provide a platform for absolutely anything that anyone says, or that you cannot refuse to (continue to) employ someone who has expressed views which might make it impossible for them to do their job.
I've removed three comments from this thread because they made or referred to statements which might be seen as potentially libellous - as the warning on the pop-up menu which displays when you type a comment on this blog warns that I will do.
And yes, I do see the irony on having to do that on a post about free speech.
But there is nothing inconsistent in me saying that Mr Justice Knowles was quite right to tell off Humberside Police that they were being overly heavy handed for sending officers to interview someone at his place of work for expressing views which were within the law, and defending the right of anyone who didn't want those views to appear on their own blog or website.
Do I think this judgement will change the minds of some people who act like the "Thought police?"
I hope so, but probably not as much as I would like it to.
It was probably a good idea to push the limits of intellectual diversity in appointing special advisers in Whitehall, but there is such a thing as pushing the limits too far, and that appears to have happened.
You're not going to get any comment about the recent change of personnel at number ten out of me beyond the answer I have already given:
"It was probably a good idea to push the limits of intellectual diversity in appointing special advisers in Whitehall, but there is such a thing as pushing the limits too far, and that appears to have happened."
Thought Police? Who mentioned the Thought Police, Chris?
Can't tell you who he or she is because the individual concerned did not sign the post.
I had not heard Kwasi Kwarteng MP use those particular words. I agree with those of Kwasi Kwarteng's comments on the issue which I had heard, to the effect that we need to learn from this episode about how people are appointed.
Public debate in this country has for far too long erred on the side of throwing the most wounding possible insults at people. I think that it is about time we did the opposite.
I am not going to allow certain words to be used to attack people on this blog, even by inference (including in a question asking me if I agree with the use of those words) unless I am completely certain they are justified and proportionate.
This puts me in the position of having to say that I will delete comments which use immoderate language even if they are making a point which, when expressed in more moderate words, I might have agreed with.
I have already explained that I did not see Kwasi Kwarteng's TV appearance on the subject of Andrew Sabisky. It is usually very unwise to comment on a TV appearance which one has not seen or a speech which one has not heard and I'm not going to do so. And I have much, much more important things things to do with my time than to look up Andrew Sabisky's past social media posts.
I thought I had made clear however that I do agree with the comments from Kwasi Kwarteng which I had read, and what those were. And if the comments which the media have ascribed to Andrew Sabisky are an accurate representation of what he wrote then I strongly disagree with those views.
If you're not going to allow "certain words" to be used on here, then it would help if we know what those words are. It's obvious that "l**r" is one of those words. But, for example, can I use "untruth"? Or the horribly clunky "misspeak"? The irredeemably childish "fib"? Or Kellyanne Conway's risible "alternative facts"? Alan Clark's "economical with the actualité"? Should I employ the Churchillian "terminological inexactitude"? Or perhaps the more robust, Burkeian "economical with the truth"?
And please, please don't delete this post too - you led me into this verbal quagmire, and you are the only person who can issue the lexicon to lead me out of it.
I did temporarily ban the use of the word "liar" during the last election when I was particularly fed up with the gross over-use of it. I don't usually apply an absolute ban on the use of that word as there are a small number of cases when it is justified.
I refer you to my post on New Year's Eve referring and linking to an article by Lane Greene, the Economist's language correspondent, on when use of words like "lie" and "liar" are justified, which you can find at
http://chris4copeland.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-economist-on-difference-between.html
However, if my memory is not playing tricks on me, I have never once in the fifteen years I have been running this blog deleted a post because the author used a word like "untruth" to indicate their disagreement with something.
And it was Farage I was going to call a mountebank - which seems entirely justified.
Hence "untruth" is acceptable as it can mean a deliberate or accidental false statement.
However, I take exception to being called a liar, whether you use that word or an equivalent word such as "deceit" and any comment containing such an accusation will invariably be deleted instantly I see it.
You're not seriously suggesting you never lie, are you?
And there are ALWAYS ways around this. Did you notice in my list of Leave lunacies I used the phrase "gasp and stretch ones eyes"? That's a direct quote from Hillaire Belloc, "Matilda (who told such dreadful lies)". I was calling them liars, Chris!
Childish? Certainly. Necessary? Maybe. But banning people from calling out lies when they see them simply doesn't work - the truth will out!
If made my position clear on this time and again - political discourse in the UK (and elsewhere) is being poisoned by an epidemic of people accusing those who express an opinion they disagree with of lying.
It is my honest opinion that the VAST majority of such accusations are unfair - not usually made by people lying themselves, just wrong.
For what it's worth, I did an informal study of accusations of lying made against the material put out by both sides during the EU referendum (for most of which I was a floater before coming off the fence for Remain at the very end, and during which I was deeply depressed by the amount of rubbish published, with some honourable exceptions, by both sides.)
I concluded
1) about 50% of accusations of lying were made about statements which in my opinion were the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
In other words these accusations of lying were completely and utterly unjustified.
2) Of the 50% of casas where I did not myself agree with the statement accused of being lies, I was pretty sure that the people making them were entirely sincere more than half the time - let's say about 60%.
So in these cases it was, in my opinion, right to call out these people as being wrong but probably unfair to accuse them of lying.
3) That leaves 20% of cases where I thought that the statements called out as lies were wrong or misleading and suspected the people who had made them of knowing as much.
Even of these, the majority were misleading statements, often true ones calculated to deceive, rather than direct lies.
You say Paul, unfortunately in my opinion, that "economical with the actualite" is a euphemism for lying.
You may use it that way, but the original comment by Sir Robert Armstrong which it is derived from did not mean that. He specifically denied that the statement he admitted was "economical with the truth" and "contained a misleading impression" was a lie, he meant to tell the truth and nothing but the truth but not the whole truth.
As Blake put it, a truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
So it was right to accuse the people concerned of being disingenuous, misleading, or to use quote a few of the expressions which you, wrongly in my opinion, think are euphemisms for lying, but not strictly correct to call them liars.
The proportion of cases where someone on either side of the argument was accused of lying in which I thought that expression was fully justified was less than ten percent.
Sadly, I think that's about par for the course.
I cannot stop people from being far too quick to assume that anyone who says something they disagree with is a fool or a liar.
I can, and will, enforce on this blog the old-fashioned courtesy that people should give those they disagree with the benefit of the doubt and not accuse them of being liars unless there is actual evidence that this allegation is justified.
On the very day that Treasury civil servants released a paper showing in detail that Johnson’s E.U. withdrawal bill would indeed involve businesses in mainland Great Britain needing to file customs paperwork to send goods to Northern Ireland, the prime minister in an interview simply declared that this was untrue.
Can you explain this contradiction, Chris?
I don't generally comment on speeches I have not heard or read.
There does seem to be a disagreement on to what extent customs paperwork will be required by businesses shipping goods between the mainland and Northern Ireland.
My personal view is that it should be as little as possible and since the PM seems to be saying that, I hope he is right.
This is what Johnson said:
“There will be no forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind. You will have unfettered access.”
Yet you are putting up the fiction that the PM "seems to be saying" that there should be as little paperwork as possible?! He's not, is he, Chris?
Was he mistaken? Poorly advised? "Tired and emotional"? Because he clearly wasn't telling the truth, was he now?