speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Excesses of State Regulation
I. The Unhappy History of Regulation
The British government's response to hate speech is deeply discouraging.
Although Britain has a long history of prejudice against
Catholics (especially Irish), Jews, and now people of colour, state
remedies were infrequent and ineffective prior to the 1965 Race
Relations Act. 1 Imperial Fascist League leader Arnold Leese, who
applauded the rise of Hitler and insinuated that British Jews were
responsible for unsolved child murders, was acquitted of seditious
libel but convicted of public mischief. Yet he was not prosecuted for
repeating the statements after his release from prison. In 1947 James
Caunt wrote in a paper he edited:
[T]here is very little about which to rejoice greatly except the
pleasant fact that only a handful of Jews bespoil the population of
the Borough! ... If British Jewry is suffering today from the
righteous wrath of British citizens, then they have only themselves
to blame for their passive inactivity. Violence may be the only way
to bring them to the sense of their responsibility to the country in
which they live.
A jury took just 13 minutes to acquit him of seditious libel. Yet
National Socialist Movement leader Colin Jordan was convicted
under the 1936 Public Order Act for declaring at a Trafalgar Square
meeting: "Hitler was right . . . our real enemies, the people we
should have fought, were not Hitler and the National Socialists of
Germany but world Jewry and its associates in this country."
Opening debate of what became the 1965 Act, the (Labour) Home
Secretary, Frank Soskice, revealed his government's ambivalence
toward regulating hate speech—sounding very much like German
Social Democrats equivocating about asylum today.
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[C]riticism should be allowed, however jaundiced and one-sided
it may be. ... Nobody can be prevented from arguing, for
example, that particular groups should be returned to their
country of origin because their presence in this country causes an
excessive strain on our social services. What is prohibited ... is
the intentional fomentation of hatred of that group . . . because of
the origin of its members!,] by public abuse, however camouflaged
as motivated by a sincere intention!,] dishonestly simulated,
to promote discussion of the public interest. 2