Excluding the foundations laid in Jerusalem and Athens, we’d hazard that no country’s contribution to the causes of liberty and justice for all has been greater than England’s. It was English barons at Runnymede who demanded their rights be protected from royal usurpation in the Magna Carta. It was English commoners in Parliament who wrote the Declaration of Rights to which William and Mary were forced to assent before assuming the throne. And it was, of course, English colonists who wrote the Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights.
The Scrapbook has thus been disheartened watching the U.K. slowly erode its citizens’ basic rights over the last few decades—in particular, free speech (which, to be fair, has always been more attenuated there than here). A candidate for European parliament was arrested in 2014 for quoting a scathing criticism of Islam—written by a young Winston Churchill. A 21-year-old student named Liam Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in prison in 2012 for posting “racist abuse” on Twitter. The judge who sentenced Stacey told him, “You committed this offense while you were drunk and it is clear you immediately regretted it,” but the judge had “no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done.” (The modern British judge, apparently, is guided by “public outrage”; that is, the mob.)
It must be noted that in British media coverage of these events, the offending remarks—which are obviously relevant—are virtually never quoted, presumably for fear of the legal consequences if they were.
One of the greatest Englishmen, John Milton, explained the primacy of free speech among civil rights: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” With free speech, Milton believed, he could demand and defend all his other rights. It was a claim he made in his Areopagitica, the attack on government censorship that laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment.
Now, though, England has crossed a new threshold in the slow-motion abolition of free speech. In Nottinghamshire, Chief Constable Sue Fish has announced a new, nonstatutory law: Henceforth, “unwanted or uninvited physical or verbal contact or engagement” of a woman by a man will be considered a hate crime. A police spokesman there told the Telegraph, “Unwanted physical or verbal contact or engagement is defined as exactly that and so can cover wolf-whistling and other similar types of contact. If the victim feels that this has happened because they are a woman then we will record it as a hate crime.”
To our English friends, The Scrapbook can only say: Never send to know for whom the wolf whistles. It whistles for thee.
