It must be every Englishman's right to call Prezza a chimp

By Quentin Letts
16 May 2012

Should a parliamentary sketchwriter be allowed to describe Lord Prescott (as I fear I may have done on more than one occasion) as ‘a chimp’?

Or should the bottom-pinching former Deputy Prime Minister (or, for that matter, the chimpanzee) be able to report the matter to the police on the grounds that it is ‘insulting’?

Should it be illegal to say of former Tory MP-turned-ballroom-artiste Ann Widdecombe that she has ‘the body of a 20-year-old — a 20-year-old Skoda’?

Should it be punishable by law to refer to the reproductive equipment of that fine figure of a man Nicholas Soames MP and to say that being made love to by him is like being crushed by a wardrobe with the key sticking out?

Or should the forces of law and order be able to barge down the door and make an arrest, citing the Public Order Act 1986 and marching one off to the local nick to cool one’s fountain pen?
Cowardly

I ask these questions not just out of naked and cowardly self-interest, although that is naturally on my radar. We sketchwriters are not known for our mortal bravery. Heaven knows, the way things are going with other parts of the media, it is no longer impossible to imagine a Fleet Street journalist being charged by a TV-hogging, glammed-up public prosecutor.

I raise the subject mainly because Members of Parliament and campaigners are calling for that Public Order Act to be changed so that such teasing can no longer be deemed a crime — and the Government may well be tempted to agree with them.

A remarkable alliance has been formed in favour of this change, one that unites souls as disparate as gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and the (so far as I know, solidly heterosexual) Tory grandee David Davis.

It includes Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and others, it embraces the so-called God-botherers of the Christian Institute and the hot-to-trot God deniers of the National Secular Society. This is, indeed, a ‘broad church’.

The alliance has noticed that the police have started to take it upon themselves to investigate people under the Act’s previously little-noticed Section 5, which makes it illegal to behave in a way which is deemed likely to cause ‘harassment, alarm or distress’.

To quote from that law: ‘A person is guilty of an offence if he uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.’

If you have insulted someone, and that person notices, you may be for the legal high jump — no matter what your intentions were. Gulp. We may not be talking about a judge donning the black cap, but police charges and the stress of legal proceedings may well follow, along with lawyers’ costs running to thousands of pounds.

All this in a country which supposedly has ‘freedom of speech’.

Mr Tatchell is greatly to be praised. He himself, in the course of a lively career of public protest, has often been called rude names. Yet here he is defending the right of his fellow citizens to call him precisely those names. The man is a good ’un.

He describes Section 5 as ‘a menace to free speech and the right to protest’. When you consider some recent examples of what has been done, it is hard to disagree.

As the Mail noted yesterday, City of London police swooped on a teenager who was protesting outside the HQ of the Church of Scientology, holding a banner that said ‘cult’. And yes, he really did spell it that way.

A street preacher was fined £700 after proclaiming Biblical teaching which, he felt, condemned homosexuality. Away he was led by the boys in blue, for ‘insulting’ gay folk. An undergraduate in Oxford was hurled into a police cell for a night for saying to a mounted copper: ‘Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?’ I do love the ‘excuse me’ part of that story, but the rest of it is Orwellian — an example of the once-sensible British constabulary over-reacting and, I suspect, using a bad law to gratify officers’ own sense of importance.

Most of us, surely, can agree that such examples are absurd, although perhaps not everyone. Mr Tatchell tried to make his case yesterday on Radio 4’s Today programme and was given a torrid time, facing repeated interruptions from the interviewer. For a broadcaster, the BBC is surprisingly eager to apply the bellows to the intolerant grievance industry.

It is surely also the case that the ‘insulting’ part of Section 5 devalues more serious issues of incitement to violence, racism and blasphemy.

I would never argue the libertarian case that you should be allowed to say and write whatever you like. To advocate the murder of another citizen should naturally be illegal. To whip up aggro against Jews or Muslims or Christians or other faiths is obviously horrible.

But what about a wider principle here: should Britain be a country where personal insults are avoided? Or are insults a telling part of our culture? Do insults coarsen us? Do they keep us sane?
Merciless

In my day job as a sketchwriter, I am occasionally assailed by minority nutters and by my victims’ chums for being ‘sexist’, ‘homophobic’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘xenophobic’ and so forth. What they actually mean is ‘disobliging’, to which I plead guilty. I mock. I tease. I take the rise out of politicians and society’s glad-handers.

I try, in words, to do what political cartoonists do with their drawings. The cartoon has a long and sparky history in British politics. Think of Hogarth with his merciless, rightly indignant depictions of Gin Lane. Think of Gillray with his satirical art in the 18th century which tweaked the snouts of the rich and powerful. Think, today, of Steve Bell in The Guardian, who loves to depict David Cameron wearing a condom over his head and who often drew poor John Major with his underpants outside his trousers.

Vicious? Of course. That is the whole point, just as it was with TV’s Spitting Image. But sometimes it can be funny. Sometimes it can be necessary.

Caricature may be unfair — it is, by definition, an exaggeration — but it gives vent to widely-felt irritation with or contempt for certain public figures.

Repression

Prevent that insulting art from being drawn and you may get what often happens when a vent is blocked: an explosion. Suppression of ad hominem attacks will not stop people thinking such thoughts. It will merely fuel anger at the authorities.

It is not such a long journey from that sort of repression to the scene of the dictator (think Ceausescu in Romania) being taken out and killed by the lynch mob.

Section 5 of the Public Order Act ignores the reality of the public square — the fact that human beings will always express their views, will always gossip, will always complain. Welcome to politics. The governed will gripe. That is the way of the world.

The doubts of Messrs Tatchell and Davis and others about the Public Order Act is of a piece with the debate about Press standards. Lawmakers need to ask themselves: to what extent can Canute stop the tide? If they write bad laws, might those laws not bring the whole legal system into disrepute?

[ed. They are not "Laws" but acts of parliament which require the consent of the governed under Common Law...it is VERY important that the public realises this distinction...]

Anyway, it is nowadays almost impossible to prevent vehement comment. The internet, from blogs to Twitter, has democratised the media to a degree little imagined even four years ago. And the internet is a place of raw vituperation.

Regrettable though that may be, it is simply not practical to offer anyone who has ever been the target of a few unkind words the prospect of legal redress.

Let natural justice prevail. Let the truth of the insult, or otherwise, be weighed in the balance by public opinion. That is the court where such matters should be decided.