Brendan O’Neill on Britain joining China and Iran in punishing free speech:
This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.
On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.
Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.
Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.
What kind of freedom of speech do you have when you can be punished for expressing unpopular and idiotic sentiments? None whatsoever. When you’re only free to mouth the mainstream popular opinions — or what the state tells you is acceptable — you don’t have freedom of speech at all.
When other tweeters complained to Stacey about his off-colour comments, he started to use racist language. He told his detractors to “f**k off”, and hurled pretty much every racial slur under the sun at them.
The Twitterati reported him to the police. And sure enough he got a visit from the cops, was charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offence, and now finds himself in the clink alongside burglars and rapists.
Yes, Stacey’s comments were horrible. But this was speech rather than actions, the use of words rather than the use of fists, and there should never be any state involvement, certainly not arrests and showtrials, in the arena of speech.
In finding himself incarcerated simply because he refused to “Pray for Muamba” and then expressed nasty racist thoughts, Stacey has effectively been punished for committing a thoughtcrime, or perhaps its modern equivalent: a tweetcrime.
