Each country needs a national constitution that protects a) democracy, so one side can’t monopolise forever, and b) you, when the other side is in power.

This constitution outlives us and our egos.

Because so many laws and delegated powers have grown up since the 90s that have shifted power away from the voters, I sense the UK needs the populous (a large enough body that is representative of the British and Northern Irish people and therefore vastly outnumbers the extremists of left and right) to re-clarify our Constitution.

Think through then…what should it therefore contain, and what’s your own role in maintaining this ethos culturally over centuries, beyond the flimsy initial paper it is written on?

In the UK the group most likely to face hate crimes are Jews, by a factor of 3 per capita over the next group.

They are also only 0.5% of the British population.

We need robust free speech (not incitement to immediate or direct material harm) to avoid a) government censoring opposition voices (your government of your choice may be out of power next year so it needs to apply above party politics by consistent demand of the public), and b) because truth emerges from the debris of contested narratives, eventually.

Therefore this commitment to free speech (and hence learning) is the true progressivism. Government censorship or two-tier approaches are regressive as it restricts societal learning, not just speech.

There is no place for political or terrorist violence in UK democracy.

So I support the right of protestors to protest today in London and Manchester (subject to incitement as above), but condemn their lack of decency and respect at this particular moment. They do their cause no favours.

To maintain liberal democracy…

The question before us is not “What do you or I think is intolerant, and let’s apply laws to that?” – as we will all have our individual subjective views. The question is “Who decides what is tolerant or intolerant?”

And the answer must be Parliament. And specific laws. The Public Order Act 1986 and its further interpretations are far too vague. Vague law gives power to proximate political activists and their narrow-context ideas influencing the judiciary. This means free speech is already lost as no-one knows how they will be judged for anything – especially as we have made potentially criminal ‘anything that someone said that might cause a theoretical third party offence and distress’. What cannot meet this criterion?

So, a liberal society needs to be intolerant to the point that it needs to protect its liberalism from vague law and from importing illiberalism; equally it must, by resolve and vigilance in us all, maintain a constant battle to support itself through democratic means and insistence. We need to educate each other about the importance of free speech (within explicit defined legal limits eg defamation, harassment, fraud, libel/slander, genuine incitement etc) and ensure political parties that do not hold to this never get elected by popular vote.

The battle for freedom in society is a vital but never-ending one, as both left and right will only see the intolerance in the other; never in themselves – and then either side may enact laws and cultures of oppression of the other, not recognising they’ve destroyed freedom in general, in so doing.

Be a radical moderate!

That’s why its essential to seek out the views of your opponents”.

Yes. In the social sciences truth often emerges gradually and unevenly over time from the rough contact of opposition.

Passion and certainty usually sit on false assumptions and false morality.

And it’s why we need Voltaire’s attitude of, “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – limited by our traditions of proscribing harassment, fraud, slander, libel, defamation, incitement, of demanding mutual respect in the workplace, and of respecting the partial truth of the risk of ‘epistemic violence’ that perpetuates dominant power narratives at the expense of the more vulnerable.

It’s a mix, which won’t get me a lot of likes from the partisan politics of either side, but is how a lot of progress occurs in the end while pendulums swing around.

However without free speech (with its limits as above), the pendulum will inevitably stop at a totalitarian extreme.

So defend free speech and do as Gurwinder suggests even though it’s effortful and painful.

“Hate speech is back in vogue and hate speech is the bedrock of building Nazism”. Er…No.

That’s a dangerous inversion of what our fragile democratic rights are built on.

Accusations of US Nazism are floating around now that Trump has won the 2024 US Presidency, and with Elon Musk flailing his arms at a rally.

I read this week of one correspondent claiming that with Trump 2.0 elected, hate speech is back in vogue and hate speech is the bedrock of building Nazism. A picture of 1933-38 Nuremburg ensued.

I disagree. I disagree even though hate speech exists and (properly defined) I deplore it. Here’s why.

I focus here not on left or right politics, but on avoiding totalitarianism from either side. The big names of my childhood in genocidal totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century (with maybe around 2 billion people blighted by living under it) are Hitler (which many seem to associate with right-wing), and Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot (left-wing). I went behind the Iron Curtain and saw some of it.

They all built power, not by creating a society where political disagreement is respected as vital, but by expanding what could not be said.

The problem with attacking ‘hate speech’ is that it’s about this – what cannot be said. Rather than using the ‘90%’ test – i.e. defining the horrible excesses fully and accurately in a way that 90%+ of the population agree – the receptacle ‘hate speech’ always becomes an ever-expanding tool of left-wing totalitarians. Anyone disagreeing with anything they say is told, “That thought or disagreement is ‘hate speech’”. Much like a two-year old just demands what they want, irrespective of the rights or needs of others.

As an example, in the UK, Islamophobia is about to be ‘defined’ – potentially deliberately indefinably and broadly – and put in the aforesaid receptacle of ‘hate speech’. Any legitimate criticism of the State’s view and policy on matters even loosely connected to ‘Islamophobia’ (eg questioning immigration policy, housing policy, tax policy, benefits policy, schools policy) could become illegal, depending on a judge’s chosen interpretation of a vague law. The problem is, anything can be connected to the new law if the legislators and judiciary as political masters want to see it that way. Any dissenter can be accused of phobia and lose their livelihood, or be criminalised at will for a view that can be interpreted as adjacent to the new law.

This power is so, so attractive to the unconscious psyche of those who have the will to control others.

The 20th Century shows that totalitarianism is created by:

1. an undemocratic elite drawing support and power to itself from abusing sympathy for, exaggerating, and distorting, just causes
2. taking power (or getting elected), then
3. banning criticism of itself (eg through widening ‘hate speech’ laws or ‘anti-State’ speech laws), and then
4. banning the election cycle (or making the election cycle irrelevant with constitutional reforms that emasculate Parliament).

So no, banning ‘hate speech’ is a reflexive, myopic response that is not the answer to the emergence of Nazism; but is, in fact, a key facilitator of it.

What to do instead then? I’ll have an attempt, in an area where left and right often do not (cannot?) reference each other…

Hate speech from both sides is awful (eg racism from the right or left; demonisation and livelihood-removal from the left).

Democratic society as a whole relies on the populous using their ‘free speech’ to call out the ‘hate speech’ for the majority to condemn. This makes hate speech unpopular and impotent, in anything but narrow, closed tribes. And the condemnations of, rather than the banning of, hate speech in a free speech society rightly propels society towards the evolving moderate view, and away from the extreme one (much as the language of racism in the UK declined significantly between 1960 and 2020, as most 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants attest).

So racism etc declines significantly over time in a liberal, ‘free-speech’ democracy, and despite those who abuse its freedoms. The problem is it takes time, and some can’t accept that.

Free speech based on individual rights and including protections (slander, libel, harassment, fraud, defamation, indecency) is not a panacea or immediate, it has imperfect outcomes on the way. Some people, and at various times of life, are more vulnerable than others to nasty one-off speech (any more is already harassment and actionable), and are more likely to receive it over time. But the alternative to free speech is terrible for everyone. We even stop thinking. We need our Galileos, we do not need to be reliant on the Government to be our only innovator – that would be a disaster for progress, the economy and for everyone.

What is not true empirically is the assertion made in some DEI programmes – that unless we have an attitude of silencing unpalatable language, then microaggressions lead to bullying leads to violence leads to genocide. The experience of the UK 1960-2020 has been the opposite. We were and are imperfect but we were getting there. Surveys support this view.

So call out bad speech where possible (or if you can’t, at least do not feed it and take action where and when you can) and the damage is reputational to the speaker. This gives the vast majority, including in minorities, the best chance of a great life over the generations to come. It requires the basic Christian ethic of “love thy neighbour as thyself”, to minimise the asymmetry of the effects of ‘hate speech’ on the vulnerable.

In conclusion then, no, to think ‘hate speech’ is the pathway towards Nazism is an inversion of reality. Because the definition of ‘hate’ gets diluted and expanded grotesquely for power. The definition of what is ‘hateful’ won’t stay in its box in any State which is full of flawed humans who don’t know their own limits.

The populous taking responsibility for maintaining its freedoms, for self and others, is the only way to avoid totalitarianism from either side.

A substack correspondent says of events since 2020:

“I was one of many who made the mistake of automatically conferring moral authority and compassion to those who espoused Leftist ideology, but I’ve since realized the danger of that. People who claim to be Leftist activists can be every bit as corrupted / corruptible, regressive, delusional, authoritarian, insufferably self-righteous, spiteful, devious, depraved, driven by envy, and narrow-minded as the ‘Right.’”

Well I’d agree that:

• Everyone is fallible and flawed, and potentially corruptible. That’s why we have institutions to limit dictatorship.
• There is always a non-trivial minority of awful people, or people who become awful through political extremism of either wing (hence Prevent in UK).
• These people will take Left- or Right-wing views. Neither wing has a monopoly on moral purity in their ranks (hence see first point above).

The fact that many made this mistake in the first place in and around 2020, is a cause for concern about how critical thinking (for clarity of definition: as opposed to critical theory) had already been eroded in the education system. Rational/emotional, liberal, critical education had been eroded a generation earlier in favour of assumptions and teaching about a left-wing morality which struggles to live up to its ideals.

Why would authoritarian leftism be more moral than liberal centre-rightism? Nothing actually supports that. Stalin and Mao were left-wing, but not moral. Just authoritarian, and genocidal in their fanaticism.

A new law is coming to the UK regarding Islamophobia. Only the main issue is not about Islam/ism/ophobia. I’m in favour of religious freedom and have many Muslim friends. It’s about how the State deliberately creates a catch-all vague criminal definition to silence legitimate debate and opposition to Government-speak on key issues.

If you don’t agree, and say you agree, with what the Government decides your opinion is, no matter how contestable, then your reputation and livelihood is at stake.

That’s not a far cry from the Gulag. They were deliberately terrible for those who were interred. Most Russian Soviet subjects did not go to the Gulag – they knew to self-censor, no matter how counter-productive the madness.

As someone who has been behind the Iron Curtain three times, this approach to ‘Islamophobia’ feels a bit like Stalinism.

The madness and authoritarianism will then spiral for two reasons:

1. madness – because any error correction mechanism is now absent – legitimate criticism is condemned as lacking care for a vulnerable group and – voila – the State has made itself immune to criticism.
2. authoritarianism – because the solutions don’t work and get worse from no error corection mechanism. And then the leaders then have to blame others for the failure and double down on their policy. It’s a classic result of “mis-attribution of causes to effects”.

If the British people allow such curtailments of important discourse (the freedom to express yourself and disagree peaceably in all conscience) then humiliation and “Man’s inhumanity to man” is not far away.

“Deeper principles are often more easily grasped away from the biases and assumptions of one’s own field of application. “
Sir John Whitmore, 1996.

An excellent reminder for coaches, leaders, educators, supervisors.

This is why analogy and metaphor can be so illuminating, and why an external coach can be a catalyst for insight so well.

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See article about McKinsey