2023-02-10
We have become accustomed of late to the to-and-fro between Parliament and the Free Speech lobby, with scarcely a week going by without some development or other making the news.
So it is this week too:
(a) "these malicious powers to electronically monitor protestors were defeated in the House of Lords" (Big Brother Watch newsletter 09/02/2023) re: the provision for ankle-tagging protesters contained in the government's Public Order Bill
(b) The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill as approved by the Commons will make employers "liable for harassment of their employees by members of the public that they come into contact with while doing their jobs" in addition to "harassment by other employees". What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, nobody but nobody will say the truth - that all these provisions and bills are in their entirety unnecessary, unwanted except by a tiny minority, and should be canned without delay. Instead they (deliberately?) start arguing for simplistic exemptions that just make it all so arbitrarily complicated that nobody will ever know where they stand.
So is all this "hate" speech legislation necessary and proportionate?
I would argue that most of the population has grown up without these "protections", they never missed them and are not asking for them, and it has become time to put what passes for Parliament back into its box.
