Censorship in Edinburgh. Again.

The censors and the censorious threaten everything.

Comedy Unleashed’s Free Speech Edinburgh gig will be this Monday. Join their Newsletter to get further details and book a ticket.

Free Event! 18th April, Edinburgh. “Trauma, Initiation and Transformation. A psychological perspective on the times we are in.” Rachel Maisey is a therapeutic counsellor working in private practice with adults and young people. She is a member of Therapists For Medical  Freedom and also has over 10 years of working in the voluntary sector. Ticket here.

Comedy Unleashed returns to Edinburgh on Monday the 1st of April with a gig intended to defy Scotland’s new Hate Crime legislation. The gig will not be openly provocative, however, it is attempting to bring attention to possible perniciousness of the law.

Without getting into the weeds - Spiked-online does a sufficiently good article on it - the three major injustices I can glean from reports on the Bill is that it permits an individual to be found not guilty of a hate crime yet can then find themselves recorded on a police database recording names of those who have been accused; the nod it gives to encourage mendacious accusations, made by individuals or groups, to punish speech - and speakers - they do not like; and, in rare application of a generally considered unjust principle of jurisprudence, the reporting of offence is ahistorical. A person can be prosecuted retrospectively.

As far as I know, there is no remediation for the first violation of your rights and the second, potentially far more serious abuse, turns on the interpretation of what ‘a reasonable person’ may or may not consider to be a hate-inspired and inciting attack on an individual, or group, with protected characteristics.

The clarification of that reasonable person’s position will be made by a judge in court. (A judge who, like all the others in Scotland, spent two years or more sitting in a cinema with a surgical face mask on trying to ‘stop the spread’. My faith that they are the best people to pass a judgement that is ‘reasonable’ while protecting the wider issues of free speech and democratic dialogue is smaller than a mustard seed.)

The term ‘reasonable person’ might be better replaced with 'de-politicised person’ because it looks like the judiciary, given its failure to resist the greatest breach of human rights in this country for decades, has been co-opted and is no longer serving justice but only administering, with heavy exo-political influence, the law. (‘Exo’ being the term used for forces acting outwith what we generally consider to be within the limits of the meaning of a specific term. Politicians meeting privately with international billionaires would be ‘exo-politics’.)

However, and sadly, it is not our judicial institutions’ pliancy or lack of police protocols that make the possibilities of this rotten new law so nefarious; it is the malignity of activists intending to settle scores and the capitulation of people at that prospect. (Some with an agenda are openly frothing at the mouth on social media at the budding opportunities for anonymous, unaccountable ‘revenge’.)

The original venue for Comedy Unleashed’s ‘Free Speech’ night cancelled. I do not know why but it would not be a surprise if it was because the venue feared some form of accusation or vendetta against the owner(s) by objecting Third Parties or a potential retribution by tribal councillors - most likely through the licensing committee of Edinburgh Council.

Common Knowledge too has been censored and prevented from holding events at multiple venues in Edinburgh for nothing more than offering a different perspective on issues. Tax-paying citizens have been barred from council-funded venues and intimidated - through victim-appropriation (‘we are being bullied by…’) - by local public officials even.

The fear of accusation by a person who has nothing to gain from making one except that in their own deluded mind they think that they are advancing a cause - or more likely destroying an enemy - intimidates fair-minded venues and is doing the work of the censors for them, before a word is spoken. It is a sad sight to see in a city built on the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment, let’s not forget, established through suffering.

When a naked, filthy man was dragged in to the Roman square of Campo De’ Fiori in 1600, having suffered imprisonment and torture for seven years, then was tied upside down to the stake, following which, he had his tongue nailed to the wooden post and then sliced off, and, finally, after this horrific abuse, was immolated. His punishment and death was meant as a warning by the Inquisition, and by extension the Papacy and the Holy Roman Catholic Church, to anyone who would speak or publish freely on Articles of Faith.

Giordano Bruno was sacrificed to an ideology that we would hardly give credence to nowadays, not even Catholics or the Church do so. His support of Copernicus, belief in an infinite universe and espousal of cosmic pluralism - the possibility that circulating around these stars, which were in fact suns, were other planets and on these other planets life and civilisations may exist - was too much for a rigid dogma that had Earth as the centre of the universe and Jerusalem the centre of the Earth.

The Inquisition spent seven years trying to break Bruno and make him recant his views. Given his popularity across Europe at that time, his recantation was politically and culturally significant. Yet Bruno refused to give it. He had an unyielding, heroic commitment to his right to speak and write what he believed to be true. So they murdered him.

It would be overly dramatic to draw a parallel between the Hate Crime Act and the Inquisition. Yet, this Act does not help the cause of free speech and throws salt on the soil of culture where ideas grow, thus enforcing a barren self-censorship on artists, scientists and institutions. It potentially fuels the growth of cultural victimhood and industrialises the ‘whataboutery’ and pettiness of the permanently-resentful, adding teeth to the constant snapping of their ornery beaks.

Indeed, given that Hate Crime has been falling for years - a fact gotten from a website that is scurrilous and satiric of the Powers-That-Be, in the finest traditions of open debate, reasoning and fun but which is deleting its previous posts and shutting down its website, possibly only temporarily, given the subterranean authoritarianism concealed within the legislation - one has to wonder what the point of the Act is, if not just a further vector of toxicity injected straight into the artery of Scottish citizenry (similar to the medical one many took recent history).

Comedy Unleashed, at the moment, has secured another venue. Still, it is incumbent on all of us to join this fight for free speech. Only a severely impoverished imagination cannot conjure the past attitudes and the thirst for continued hegemony which burned Giordano Bruno being transposed to a future, intolerant, ideologically subsumed, bio-tech feudalist state.

Fortunately, currently, none of us have to go to the stake; all we have to do is join the protest, make our money talk and speak freely in our daily lives. If we cannot summon the courage to do that now, will it be easier further down this path?

There will be a protest against the Hate Crime Act on Monday 1st April, 1.30pm at Holyrood, Edinburgh.

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