The Thoughtcrime Lottery: A Liberal Proposal

A call for liberals to organise around freedom of expression itself.

(Audio version here)

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British Liberals and consistent defenders of free speech who do not consider themselves liberals must do something in an organised way to defend freedom of belief and speech. We have organisations to defend free speech, most notably the Free Speech Union, but I think we also need a popular campaign. What the UK urgently needs is an organised liberal resistance to the criminalisation of speech - one that defends freedom specifically, not just the particular things we happen to want to say.

We have seen people investigated, arrested or prosecuted for expressing strong views on a wide range of subjects. Some have been gender critical, challenging the tenets of gender identity. Others have been critical of immigration, or of Islam. A Muslim man was arrested for burning a poppy he owned and posting a video of it online and another for saying British soldiers should die and go to Hell. A ‘woke’ pro-Palestine protester was tried for called the Prime Minister and Home Secretary “coconuts.” None of these forms of expression should have been considered a police matter and the fact that they all have been is ultimately a liberal (freedom) issue.

The vital freedom issue can get lost because people tend not to defend it as such or not do so consistently. We are naturally inclined to notice denials of free speech when they pertain to an issue we think is right and good. Consequently, arguments that the criminalised speech should be able to be expressed because it is right and good tend to drown out arguments that we should not be criminalising speech.

While many people objecting to a specific incident or kind of suppression of free speech do make good arguments defending that freedom, they frequently do so in relation only to their own issue. Left-wing gender-critical feminists seldom team up with staunch cultural conservatives. Pro-Palestine ‘wokeists’ will not align with critics of Islam. We are not going to convince these groups to unite, nor should we expect to. They are fighting for their particular causes, not for the principle of freedom of speech.

But what is our specific social cause, liberals? I believe it is freedom, is it not?

Liberalism centres around the principle, “Let people believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided this does no material harm to others, nor denies them the same freedoms.” That principle is being eroded across the spectrum. The arrests themselves are not purely left-wing or right-wing phenomena. They are expressions of a deeper cultural malaise - an illiberal tendency to punish speech on the grounds of offence, disruption, perceived hatefulness, or political convenience. And yet the response to this threat is fragmented, because most people only defend speech when they agree with it.

Liberalism demands more. It asks us to defend the right to express views we do not share and even actively dislike, so long as they do not incite violence. Very many people support this principle and yet we lack an organised campaign to address suppression of freedom of speech consistently, rather than in relation to specific issues. This keeps the specific issues in the spotlight, while the broader principle of free speech is sidelined or instrumentalised when it is, in fact, both vital and urgent.

Liberals seldom get arrested. ·We tend not to express views that should be able to be expressed in liberal societies in strongly provocative and blanket terms. Rather than announcing "Trans women are lying or delusional men!" on banners and social media posts we tend to say something like, "People must be able to identify and present as they please, but we need to recognise biological reality for reasons of safety and fairness." Likewise, we don’t say: “The UK is becoming a shithole because of immigrants.” We say things like, “Individuals should not be evaluated by their race or national identity, but we do need to discuss cultural compatibility and the preservation of liberal values in diverse societies.”

This is good. It means that we make points thoughtfully using consistently liberal principles which are likely to be persuasive to a majority of Brits who are tired of extreme positions and just want reality, reason and fairness to be considered. But it also means we rarely draw the kind of attention that results in arrest or prosecution. We are not seen. And so the opposition to any incident of denial of free speech is almost always issue-based not principle-based.

Liberals do defend the rights of people who take strong - even absolutist - views on particular issues but who are not inciting violence to do so without being arrested, even if we disagree with what that position is. We are then typically suspected of supporting that view.

The problem is that this keeps us reactive. It is the more radical people who are loudest and most visible and what is being made visible is their particular issue rather than the principle that people must be able to hold and express strong views. This is the freedom issue. The liberalism issue. Our issue.

I’ve been thinking about what we can actually do and I’d welcome suggestions from readers. One idea occurred to me.

What if we formed a large-scale campaign specifically for defending freedom of speech itself, regardless of content? What if we had a virtual “hat” full of statements that people have actually been investigated, arrested or charged for saying but which should be speakable in a liberal society? Participants could draw one at random, and then post it publicly not because they believe it, but because they believe it should not be criminalised. They would do so explicitly and demonstrably as part of a campaign for free expression.

This could potentially bypass the problem many of us face: we want to defend the rights of others to express strong or blanket views but actually have more nuanced views ourselves along the lines of, "Treat people as individuals and let them do what they want as long as they're not harming anyone." A campaign of this kind would allow people to make that case clearly: “I don’t necessarily believe this, but I do believe that people who do should be able to say so without being arrested,”

It would also expose the absurdity and ambiguity of the current hate crime framework. It is not plausible to accuse anyone of “hate” when they've selected a random forbidden utterance as part of a campaign against there being such a thing as forbidden utterances. The only way that things said in the explicit and demonstrable service of such a campaign could be considered a hate crime would be if defending freedom of speech consistently, including for those with whom we disagree, is a hate crime. If consistently defending fundamental liberal principles is a hate crime.

Could something like this be helpful? Only if done at scale. A handful of people doing this alone would just be vulnerable. But if enough people joined in, it could flood the system, disrupt the narrative, and force a national conversation, not about trans rights or immigration or Islam, but about freedom.

Recently, Maya Forstater won a significant victory regarding the protection of gender critical beliefs. They were determined to constitute a philosophical belief worthy of respect in a democratic society. Is liberalism and consequently freedom of belief and speech not a philosophical belief worthy of such respect? In a liberal democracy? If it is not, we are, frankly, screwed.

Imagine thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people doing this. Spreading the risk. Making it impossible to arrest everyone. If someone were arrested, they could show that they were participating in an organised campaign and had expressed a randomly assigned statement to make a point about the dangers of censoring belief and speech.

I don’t know if this campaign is practicable. I have concerns. Could a marketplace of ideas function if people flooded it with statements they don’t actually endorse? Might this not risk degrading the state of public discourse even further and add confusion to fractured public conversations? Maybe. But if those statements were made explicitly in the service of free expression, and framed as such, then it might actually improve discourse. It could bring us back to the core question for liberals: that of freedom.

One thing is clear: liberals and consistent defenders of freedom, whether they call themselves liberal or not, must act. We must do something, together, and do it in an organised way. Not to defend one issue or another, but to defend the liberal principles that were foundational to our liberal democracy but are becoming sadly degraded. Because if we don’t, no one else will.