Coconut placards and the truth about free speech in Britain

When you describe what happened, you realise how ridiculous it was. A woman was dragged to court for holding up a placard that featured a drawing of a palm tree with coconuts falling from it. Superimposed on two of the coconuts were the faces of Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak, who was Prime Minister at the time. And that was it. Hauled before magistrates for carrying a daft illustration through the streets. Anyone who doubted that our liberty to speak is in peril has surely been shaken awake now.

So, yes, I believe it is hateful. But should it be illegal? No

This is the case of Marieha Hussain, a 37-year-old Londoner and secondary-school teacher. Well, until she held aloft the infamous placard, which caused her to lose her job. Last November, Hussain, with around 300,000 others, attended a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo in the capital. She was keen to have a dig at Braverman and Sunak, so she depicted them as coconuts. Hussain said this was a form of political critique against what she said were ‘politicians in high office who perpetuate and push racist policies’. The prosecution said it was something uglier. But, even so, should it be a matter for the courts? Of course not.

Yet that’s how it was treated. Hussain was arrested on suspicion of committing a racially aggravated public order offence. She was subjected to a two-day trial at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. She was found not guilty on Friday. Oh, and she’s heavily pregnant. What kind of society forces a pregnant woman out of her teaching job and gives her a grilling in a court of law all because she expressed a sharp view in public? A cruel one, I’d say.

There are so many twisted things in this case. There’s the craziness of it. I find it terrifying that the Crown Prosecution Service thought it a good idea to prosecute a teacher for holding up an image of a palm tree and two politicians in the midst of a vast crowd. Clearly they caved to the mob: when a photo of Hussain’s placard was posted online, some right-wingers went nuts, morphing into a cancel-culture rabble and demanding she be punished. Yet surely the CPS should think coolly about what is in the public interest, not let itself be swept along by vengeful hotheads online.

Then there’s the hypocrisy. Leftists noisily stood up for Hussain and her birthright of free speech. Some protested outside her court hearings, holding placards similar to the one that landed her in trouble. Even the Guardian came out swinging for her right to be offensive. These people are far from friends of free speech. They’ve turned a blind eye, or indeed lent a foaming mouth, to many of the heartless cancellation campaigns of recent years. And now they want to pose as John Milton reincarnate?

Where were they when feminists who don’t believe people with penises are women were being hounded off campuses? Or when a man was arrested for denigrating the Pride flag? Or when cops warned various individuals to watch their words, and even to reorder their thoughts, on the issue of transgenderism? Or, indeed, when people have been arrested and jailed for making racist comments? If you’re so committed to liberty you will defend a person’s right to depict brown folk as ‘coconuts’, surely you will defend other people’s right to cause offence?

That’s the thing. Hussain’s lefty cheerleaders are not fighting for free speech but for me speech: the right to express ideas they approve of, and those ideas alone. This is not the ‘liberty to utter’ that so many of our forebears fought tooth and nail for – it’s a licence to utter, granted only to those who have taken the knee to chattering-class consensus. In this case the pretty vile consensus that politicians like Braverman and Sunak are racial quislings.

To my mind, ‘coconut’ is a racist insult. I believe that is the case because it is exclusively used against people of colour. It’s a barb built on racial stereotypes. It implicitly proposes that there is only one, ‘right’ way to be a person of colour: you must be leftish, rebellious, not too studious. Deviate from any of these decrees, dare to be a black person who’s reserved, conservative and not down with either mass immigration or ‘Palestinian resistance’, and you will be damned as a coconut, a racial failure.

So, yes, I believe it is hateful. But should it be illegal? No. We need to get serious about freedom of speech. Of course a line must be drawn where people are inciting violence. But if they are only expressing a belief, even a belief many will find offensive, their liberty must remain intact. We must always remember that the very freedom that allows people to say things we hate also allows us to push back against hatefulness.

It isn’t only the left whose hypocrisy has been exposed by the Hussain case. Many on the right had a Damascene conversion to the cause of cancel culture the minute they clapped eyes on her placard. Listen, we all know there are double standards on the ‘hate speech’ question. But the solution is not to call for a single standard of censorship to be applied without fear or favour to everyone who makes a distasteful utterance. It is to insist on a single standard of liberty, on freedom of speech for all.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/coconut-placards-and-the-truth-about-free-speech-in-britain/

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