Imagine if New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady were accused of hurling a racist remark at an opponent during an NFL game. Public condemnation would be swift, but it would be unthinkable — not to mention unconstitutional — for prosecutors to bring criminal charges against the Patriots’ signal-caller.
Not so in Britain, where John Terry — the captain of both the English national soccer team and Chelsea, one of the nation’s most powerful clubs — faces trial on February 1 for allegedly racially slurring an opponent during a recent soccer match.
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Terry is no stranger to controversy. In 2010, he was removed as captain of the national team after allegations surfaced that he’d had an affair with a teammate’s girlfriend; he was reinstated as captain a year later. England’s soccer authorities have yet to punish Terry for his latest alleged transgression, as they await the outcome of his legal battle.
If the accusations of racism are true, then the England captain should be swiftly and thoroughly censured. But his punishment should come from soccer’s governing authorities and the court of public opinion, not the criminal courts. Prosecuting Terry or anyone else for hateful speech is misguided and counterproductive.
Terry’s criminal prosecution highlights the gulf between American and British understandings of free speech, and the disconcerting extent to which the land of John Milton and John Stuart Mill is comfortable limiting its citizens’ freedom of expression. Although this is apparently the first time a British soccer player has been prosecuted for racially insensitive remarks made on the pitch, the principle is well established that Britons may be subject to criminal sanctions for taboo speech.
The charges against Terry stem from an October match between Chelsea and Queens Park Rangers. Terry, who is white, is accused of calling QPR’s black central defender, Anton Ferdinand, a “black c***.” Terry does not deny using the phrase but challenges the context in which it was said. His defense is that Ferdinand asked him whether he had used the slur, and Terry simply replied, “No, I didn’t call you a black c***.”
Prosecutors in England charged Terry with a “racially aggravated public order offense,” in violation of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. The act authorizes jail time, though Terry faces only a $4,000 fine.
Tragically, accusations of racism are not new in European soccer. Fans sometimes jeer black opponents with monkey noises. Only eight days before Terry allegedly slurred Ferdinand, Liverpool striker Luis Suarez was accused of slurring a black opponent in another English Premier League match. Suarez’s fate has been the inverse of Terry’s — he does not face criminal prosecution, but has been suspended eight matches and fined about $63,000 by the League.
Bigotry exists in America too, but we do not criminally sanction hate speech. We have a faith in the “marketplace of ideas,” the belief that truth is most likely to emerge through the free exchange of ideas and not through censorship. Americans tend to believe that the best way to combat hateful speech like Terry’s alleged slur is to expose it to the antiseptic of public debate, and we are skeptical of empowering the government to label certain ideas “right” or “wrong.”
He's a rather un-nimble defender whose career has been championed by England's powerful tabloid press. I think this is because the tabloids believe that their white, working-class readership identifies with Terry and views him as a talisman.
And boy do they need one. White, poor males are now the most neglected part of British society. They get the worst school results of any demographic group bar gypsies and Irish tinkers; they're vilified by the metropolitan liberal elite as racist because they oppose immigration, even though the great influx of Eastern European workers has been found by the government to have pushed up native unemployment. Many live in northern towns that the London elite barely knows exist. And they feel persecucted, because they seem to be convicted for "hate speech" when radical Muslims are not.
It is censorship and unfair to Mr Terry for the reader to not know what it was that he allegedly uttered. One is reminded of the Watergate tapes in which deleted mild expletives made Mr Nixon look like a foul mouth. Did Mr Terry say "*oon", "*ock", "*lit" or perhaps "*unt"?
@Doctor Robert: having played soccer myself for decades, I assure you that the most likely remark from an English soccer player (particularly if from Liverpool) would be the one that rhymes with bunt.
As for the article itself: Ah, but is it not the case that a frequent critique of our own court system pertains to "judicial activism"?
I prefer the parliamentary system myself, perhpas with a dose of moderation. I believe that Canada's system does allow judicial review of laws, more so than in England, but less so than in the USA. More knowledgeable readers may wish to comment.
I am told that in Italy, if a party or parties can muster a mere 20% of votes in parliament, then the issue will be put to the people via referendum. This has something to do with the historical (and actual) difference between northern and southern Italy. Interestingly, it is not used as often as one might think (compared to, say, California).
Thus, if England used the Italian system, a minority party (or coalition) could put the question of free speech, or a particular law, to public referendum, with the result falling where it may.
Thank goodness for the US Constitution and a representative republic vis a vis a democracy of constant referendum where the majority punishes the minority by sheer number.
Someone once that a pure democracy was akin to "Two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner".
I'll take what we have...flawed by man...over anything devised previously or since...
I find it hard to understand why you should prefer a parliamentary system to the American one, when the Terry case illustrates perfectly the danger to individual liberty when the government is unlimited, as the British Parliament is held to be. If the government is limited, than a temporary and perhaps local majority cannot dispose of the rights and lives of the minority whenever it wishes. Here in America the Constitution is Law, and therefore any legislative act which contravenes it cannot be. That is the basis for judicial review. An unlimited democracy is no better than any other form of unlimited government, and in fact worse than anarchy for the protection of Liberty. It reduces the security of property to force of numbers, with the majority able to gang up on any smaller group and seize their property or punish them for offensive speech. Anarchy would be preferable - at least the individual could then defend himself, as best he might, by force.
In fact, even in England the judges used to strike down an act of Parliament if it was "inconsistent with natural justice" by which they apparently meant the natural rights of Man, but it seems no longer. The far quicker erosion of liberty in Britain than in America shows the wisdom of a written Constitution. Even in America, we plainly need more restrictions on Congress; in Britain, as we see, the situation is far worse.
Why do I prefer a parlaimentary system (not necessarily England's)?
1. The USA has had a regime of virtually unrestricted abortion imposed by its federal supreme court.
2. Various states have had same-gender marriage imposed by their own state supreme courts, regardless of any current or historical will of the people or social practice.
Now tell, me, which parliamentary European nations tolerate abortion as much as must the USA, and how many have had same-gender marriage imposed by courts?
As for two wolves and a sheep voting what's for dinner, here we might have 12 wolves and no sheep voting. Or, we may have only two wolves (the Republiwolf and the Democriwolf) weilding all the power, because others cannot get into the system.
"Now tell, me, which parliamentary European nations tolerate abortion as much as must the USA, and how many have had same-gender marriage imposed by courts?"
The UNITED KINGDOM -- for one. On both counts. You must know this?
It's sad and ironic that Terry is on trial for this, when his real crime relates to the state of the English soccer team.
Derb's thoughts about soft tyranny, and how the state is happy to give real criminals a pass while using the laws to abuse the law abiding, spring to mind here.
Sam Francis coined it "anarcho-tyranny". An example is the federal government granting illegal aliens free run of the land (anarchy), while putting the law-abiding into shackles by confiscating, via taxation, a substantial portion of what we earn, and regulating us into a strait jacket via devices such as Obamacare. A free hand (anarchy) granted to the criminal element, and tyranny imposed on the law-abiding.
Admittedly this is written for an American audience. But how many of them need convincing of the putative superiority of American society? Anyone doubting whether Britain enjoys free speech (as opposed to hate speech) ought to watch British television or read the British papers.
You've just proved the point of the article that Britain does not enjoy free speech by your juxtaposition of "free speech (as opposed to hate speech)..."
I hate to come to Newt Gingrich's defense just as he bids fair to shatter our hopes of retaking the Presidency, but Bedi and Marra are mistaken about a couple of things. First, the Judiciary is NOT supposed to be supreme in this country, and to the extent that Gingrich has pointed out the other branches are co-ordinate, not subordinate, he is correct. The courts have the last word on constitutionality only as it affects a specific case; they do NOT have the final say on constitutional principles.
Lincoln's discussion of Dred Scott, where he denied the Supreme Court had any right to finally determine the principle that a black man has no rights under the law, is instructive, and conservatives would do well to follow his example rather than Gingrich's, which predictably went from a correct observation on the limits of judicial power to preposterous overreach in the form of haling judges before congressional committees and abolishing and then re-constituting troublesome courts like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Second, the threat to free speech today comes almost exclusively from the Left. If we conservatives ever come to power, we're not about to start removing Free Speech cases from Federal Judicial review - abortion, maybe, but not free speech. Neither conservatives nor the general public wishes to suppress free speech. The Left does, but that's another story.
Also, even if Federal judicial review were somehow to be eliminated, the State Courts would have jurisdiction over the alleged speech offense and are duty-bound to strike down any unconstitutional infringement of the right to free speech.
Otherwise, the article was good at explaining the differences between the law in the U.S. and U.K. - we see once again just why America has been exceptional and well ahead of the rest of the world.
"The First Amendment categorically states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” By contrast, Britain’s Human Rights Act of 1998 (which codifies the European Convention on Human Rights) declares that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” but quickly adds that the freedom may be restricted as “necessary in a democratic society,” for example to prevent disorder or protect health and morals."
Whatever. You can start with "One cannot shout 'fire' in a crowded theater ..." and continue on with McCain-Feingold and numerous other elements in American case-law that have been enshrined in Constitutional law and arrive at a conclusion that the freedom to speak in the US is significantly abridged, perhaps every bit so as it is in Britain.
These sort of self-congratulatory articles trivialize serious debate about where things in the US are or should be going. It is akin to saying that the US deficit as a percentage of GDP is no worse than that of Greece. The lay reader might take some comfort that things may (or may not) be worse elsewhere, but that is hardly the standard by which we should be measuring ourselves.
What is the point of this article? To simply boast about how much better the US is than the UK? The US has decided to make speech absolutely free of government regulation. The UK has decided to restrict hate speech in order to have a more harmonious national atmosphere. Who's to decide which is the best? Let each country decide its own policy and enough with all this smug, supercilious arrogance about the First Amendment. No wonder we're hated abroad.
I'm far more concerned that the UK-supposedly with less vigorous freedom of expression-ranks 19 places above the US in the Reporters Without Borders' Freedom of the Press Index released today.
Ah yes! The harmonious society. Where have I heard that phrase before.
Perhaps Wikipedia can refresh my memory:
"The construction of a Harmonious Society (simplified Chinese: 和谐社会; traditional Chinese: 和諧社會; pinyin: héxié shèhuì) is a socio-economic vision that is said to be the ultimate end result of Chinese leader Hu Jintao's signature ideology of the Scientific Development Concept. It serves as the ultimate goal for the ruling Communist Party of China..."
