Freedom of Speech

I was interested to read of the arrest of Parliament Square's resident protester Brian Haw a day or so ago. Unlike some, I have never been impressed by this protest: it is typically "My view is so important that I'll do anything I like to ram it down everyone's throat". I don't like that attitude!

It's worth watching Haw's behaviour, and that of the police, in this video of that arrest, and then reading on...



Notice the belligerent attitude? That is shared by those who have criticised the arrest. They, like Haw, are quite happy with camping on someone else's property, being a loud and ugly intrusion into the lives of everyone nearby (and there are residences in the vicinity as well as offices and shops) and putting his single issue of contention ahead of everything else.

Of course this is much like the Trades Unions back in the 'seventies, for those readers old enough to have a good memory of those times and their behaviour. In fact, they were far worse, but based on the same "might is right" philosophy.

I suppose it's all rather like homelessness being considered by some to be "THE Big Issue", which of course it isn't. For that reason alone I never buy that magazine and never will. How dare they put themselves and their pet topic ahead of everything else! The survival of the entire human race is at least several million times bigger than their relatively minor issue, as are many others such as famine, war and over-population.

Anyway, it is exactly the same attitude here, considered to be a matter of "freedom of speech" by those complaining about this arrest. Yet those same individuals would slam anyone else in jail straight away if they dared to even express a view contrary to their own. There is absolutely NO "freedom of speech" for anyone with contrary opinions. Such people are generally labelled something derogatory, such as "racist" or "whatever-ophobic", yet their views are at least as valid as anyone else's.

This goes way beyond hypocrisy: it is the hallmark of the totalitarian dictator; which is why the Left as a group nearly always fall into that category as either practitioners themselves or supporters of this "I can do anything I like, but you can't do anything I don't like!" policy. It is their communal way, which they will back up with as much (often disproportionate) force as they can muster, as other police incidents have sometimes shown – such as the Monaxle affair here, or Tiananmen Square in China some years ago, and all points in between.

We must never be fooled by protests of conveniences for some, such as the claim of a "right to freedom of speech" by those who ever deny any aspect of the same to anyone else. Either it exists or it doesn't, for any topic, and for all people or for none. Those who can't cope with the "rights for all" side of that equation might as well emigrate to a totalitarian country – which Britain is no longer going to become, since the recent General Election.

The rest of us shan't miss them – or Brian Haw, for that matter...