Linehan's Law

When Graham Linehan was detained by the police at Heathrow Airport recently it generated some predictable warnings about the chilling effect of hate-speech laws on the exercise of free speech, which was ironic given the amount of media coverage then given to his tweets and his defence of them. The event was also marked by his supporters' hyperbolic claims, such as JK Rowling describing the UK as a "totalitarian state." The fact you can make the claim without consequence suggests the opposite. Now that the dust has settled, it's worth going back to the incident and reviewing Linehan's reaction to the police officers: "You know what this country looks like from America? I am going to sue you into the ground, I am going to sue you into the ground. Fucking bastards, how dare you. I won’t fucking calm down." What stands out here is not just his sense of entitlement (I'm surprised he didn't say "Do you know who I am") but his insistence that what matters is how this looks from the US, where he has now apparently relocated permanently.

The significance of that perspective becomes apparent when we consider the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the American rightwing provocateur. This led British politicians, including the Prime Minister, to decry political violence and offer condolences, despite Kirk being a nobody on this side of the pond. Insofar as Kirk had a British audience it would be a subset of the far right groups that coalesced on Saturday for the "Unite the Kingdom" march in London organised by Tommy Robinson and graced by a video-call from Elon Musk who called for the overthrow of the government. This predictably led to violence directed at both anti-Fascist counter-protestors and the police. For Robinson's supporters, violence is a form of expression. They believe that they have a God-given right to get bevvied-up and chuck bottles at other people. Again, what we're dealing with here is a monstrous sense of entitlement. The flags that have been such a feature of the summer in England aren't symbols of inclusive patriotism but of exclusive ownership: this is ours; keep out.

Linehan was in the UK to defend himself in court against a charge of harrassment arising from another set of abusive tweets he had sent. In a prepared statement, he described himself as a "journalist", presumably not because he's actually doing journalism in any normally-accepted sense of the word, but because he imagines that journalists have a special dispensation that allows them to circumvent the laws on hate-speech. When you look at British newspapers, you can understand why he might have thought that. Alison Pearson's crusade in the Daily Telegraph to have Lucy Connolly, a self-confessed criminal racist, recognised as a political prisoner is a recent example of how mainstream conservatism in Britain has now imported the American right's instrumental contempt for the law. Two-tier justice is real, but it's an aspiration rather than a criticism, and one still best captured in Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The undercurrent of a number of recent "political" cases has been the idea that the law should recognise and reinforce particular hierarchies, such as the superiority of biological women and the inferiority of trans women. This has even led to inverting class hierarchies. For example, in the Sandy Peggie case it is the traditionally subordinate nurse who is deemed to have superior rights to the doctor because of her biology, thus justifying her impertinence. This highlights that the right are instrumental in their defence of established hierarchies, just as they are selective in their observance of the law. The division between the far-right in the streets and in electoral politics reflects not simply a sociological gulf - former football hooligans versus former Conservative Party activists - but a strategic division of political labour based on the prioritisation of different hierarchies. On the street, the dominant hierarchy is race, with religion as a proxy. In the media, the dominant hierarchy is class. For all the focus on immigration, Reform's programme is fundamentally Thatcherite, and for all their vocal anti-racism, liberal commentators cannot hide their contempt for the street. 

The problem with this race/class dichotomy is not that it creates a fatal tension between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage - the far-right has always melded the street and the legislature - but that it is destabilising of mainstream conservatism, for which political violence must remain a monopoly of the state. Just as middle-aged "lads" imagine that being draped in an England flag means that rucking with the police is patriotism, so the traditional hierarchies that conservatives defend can quickly be compromised when other hierarchies come to the fore. The incident of an almost parodically articulate young middle class man being chased by working class louts, forced to seek refuge at a refugee processing centre, is an example of how events can spin out of control. Lucy Connolly saw asylum-seekers as inferior to herself and thus their lives of little value. Alison Pearson's framing of her as a politcial prisoner is an attempt not only to obscure this bigotry but to re-establish the authority of the upper middle class to define our politics for fear that rage against the "liberal elites" might wash over the establishment more generally. You can punch down but not up.

No British government is going to curtail immigration, or commence deportations, to the extent that would satisfy the far-right. As a result, the cross-party strategy appears to be to indulge and hopefully contain racist protest. This goes beyond legtimising "concerns" to turning a blind eye to low-level violence and intimidation. Holding a sign saying "I support Palestine Action" will get you arrested. Shouting "paedo" at anyone who supports refugees won't. The political issue of the moment is the collapse of the Conservative Party under pressure from both the far-right (which it vainly apes) and a Labour government keen to occupy the Tories' traditional centre-right space. This rightward shift has been enabled by the cartel's refusal to accept the left as legitimate, which has evolved from the false charge of antisemitism to a more sweeping criticism of leftists as "groomers" and "traitors": language no longer limited to the fringe but regularly deployed by the press and increasingly directed at the most conservative Labour government in history. This is a direct import from the US where the bogies of "antifa" and the "radical left" are routinely conflated with establishment Democrats.

Predictably, British centrist commentators responding to the Kirk assassination have been quick to insist that political violence is a problem equally on the right and the left, despite the obvious disproportion between the two. Some have even gone so far as to devote the majority of their attention to the perceived incivility of the left, seeing it as the ultimate cause of rightwing violence, which dangerously echoes the position of Donald Trump and others in the US. What this centrist reaction makes clear is that they too care above all about the preservation of traditional hierarchies: civility is not about your manners but about your authority. But just as the hierarchy of class can be undermined by the hierarchy of race, so the hierarchy of liberal virtue can be swept away in the mistaken belief that dumping the European Convention on Human Rights in favour of an American-style protection of hitherto illegal forms of hate-speech is an advance for all of us, rather than just a minority of angry, middle-aged bigots.