Americans realise freedom with the occasional bit of offence is OK – we seem to be going other way
“BACK in your day” has just entered the growing list of banned phrases.
According to an employment tribunal earlier this week, the expression is “barbed and unwelcome”, and harmful because it is “related to age”.
That’s a shame because I have always liked the phrase.
And besides, like so much of the speech-policing that goes on in this country, nothing real comes from it.
The woman who brought the case, one Margaret Couperthwaite, is in her sixties. And I have news for her.
You may be able to patrol the language but you cannot patrol the reality.
Being in your sixties definitely puts you in the area of being old.
But the police and other authorities keep ignoring this fact.
The Scottish Government recently created a new hate-speech law in Scotland that will see people charged not just for what they say in public but for what they say in PRIVATE.
Snitches and grasses
Humza Yousaf’s useless government in Edinburgh actually encourages people to inform on people if they say something offensive around their own dinner table.
What are those “offensive” things. They might be such things as “a man cannot be a woman” or the like.
If a parent says this, and their child has already been influenced by the crazy ideologies of our era, then the child could inform on the parents.
Something which was frequent in communist societies but not something that has tended to be encouraged in free societies.
Again, this attempt to legislate away “hate” has no impact on actual reality.
A man cannot become a woman, or vice versa.
They can sometimes approximate to look like a member of the opposite sex, but they cannot become the opposite sex.
That is just reality — like ageing.
Setting up some p**s-poor law to try to police people saying otherwise changes nothing.
Except that it turns your society from being a place where people can talk freely into one in which people are encouraged to be snitches and grasses.
All in the name of “tolerance”, obviously.
In other countries in the formerly free world, there are similar moves afoot.
A growing number of people in our societies seem desperate to be offended and indeed go out of their way to seek things that they can then say offend them
Douglas Murray
Justin Trudeau is trying to bring back the commissions in Canada which formerly saw journalists, writers and private citizens hauled before a quasi-judicial authority to explain their speech.
A friend who was once hauled in front of one of these pathetic commissions was asked to explain why he made a particular joke.
What were his motives for doing so, etc? What the hell business is it of theirs?, he asked.
In Australia, similar moves are afoot.
On a recent visit there I was warned I would have to be careful about what I said on stage and that I mustn’t say anything that could risk hurting any group of people.
Of course, that’s a pretty tall order.
Not least because a growing number of people in our societies seem desperate to be offended and indeed go out of their way to seek things that they can then say offend them.
It’s not really possible for a society to operate like this, because it makes everybody go at the speed — and the direction — of a small group of malevolent people.
America has plenty of its own problems, but it doesn’t have so much of this one.
Thanks to the first amendment, the right to freedom of speech has been enshrined in law from America’s founding.
And Americans take attacks on the first amendment very seriously.
It is baked into the American bloodstream that part of life is robust language.
They realise that of the two options available — policing language or being occasionally offended, but free — the second is far more desirable.
Other countries in the Anglosphere, specifically our own country, Canada and Australia, seem to be choosing a different route.
And there is something important to understand underneath this.
That is that governments tend to try to police language when they cannot do the basics.
In Scotland the government can’t even build a couple of workable ferries to get to the islands.
The basics of infrastructure seem to be completely beyond these numpties.
It can change
In the same way, Humza Useless and his friends seem to be able to do nothing about the poverty and rampant drug deaths in the East End of Glasgow.
Would you trust a government that can do literally none of the basic things decide what you or I can say? I’d hope not.
It’s the same with the police.
Half of this country has police forces which have solved NO burglaries in the last three years.
Yes, you read that right. They solved no burglaries. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
But these same forces will be able to turn up at your door and accuse you of once having waved a cross of St George in the wrong manner?
Give me a break.
We need to be better than this snitchy, grassy, informing country.
It can change, because it has done before.
Back in my day, things were different.