If I ever saw an advertisement in which libertarians were portrayed as ugly numb-skulls with small penises (including the women) would I be offended? No, not even a little bit. I respect the rights of all people to express themselves and speak their mind, and I’m not going to get all emotionally upset about it. […]

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It’s been a good week for freedom of speech. I wrote an article a few weeks ago about the restaurant Goodfellas taking the Irish News to court for defamation because of a bad review they printed. You can read my article on the matter here:
http://www.john-wright.net/2008/01/25/bad-laws-bad-restaurants-and-bad-coke/
Today the Court of Appeal quashed the original High Court decision […]

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God bless the House of Lords. As much as I struggle with the fact that they aren’t elected, I can’t deny that they make some very good judgments. The most recent came earlier this week when they refused to hear a case brought by the activist group Christian Voice attempting to prosecute the BBC for […]

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As a child I was always told to eat my dinner and keep my mouth shut; ask no questions, no derogatory comments about greens, no complaints or smart-arsed remarks. Seemingly as an adult that advice might remain shrewd. A year ago a ruling in Belfast’s High Court had journalists, newspaper editors, and commentators choking on […]

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On Tuesday last week, I wrote a piece disagreeing with Crawley’s suggestion that it should be illegal for record stores to sell music containing lyrics which call for violence against gay people. The idea that this constitutes clear, direct incitement to violence is, as far as I can see, unsubstantiated. I later went […]

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I made a brief stopover on PlayRadio UK yesterday during Tommy’s show, where the familiar matters of freedom of speech were being hashed out in Boyd’s own inimitable way. I came on for a couple of minutes to discuss Beenie Man, a topic prompted by William Crawley’s article last week. (Incidentally, William links […]

 

 John Wright, Tommy Boyd on Beenie Man: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Today I take issue with my old friend William Crawley, who uses the opportunity of the Oxford Union free speech debate to raise another issue of free speech:
“Into the mix of questions about what limits we should place on public speech, let’s add this: ‘Hang chi chi gal wid a long piece of rope’. That’s […]

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Yes, blasphemy is illegal in the United Kingdom, under common law formed in the 17th century. Yet Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the right to free speech, whether sacred, profane, secular, or whatever. Is anybody still in any doubt that the UK needs a complete legal overhaul? […]

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‘Don’t worry, everyone, we’re not cancelling Christmas!’ That’s the message from IPPR’s Rick Muir after some accounts were made public of the think tank’s upcoming report, to which I responded in this post on Thursday last week. Muir responds with an article in today’s Guardian (some pre-publish damage control).

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‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’ is no more. The show was shelved by the A&E network on Friday, which is something I feared would happen when I wrote this post on Thursday. The network “stopped short of saying” they’d cancelled the show, although I’ll tell you in a few minutes what I’d expect to […]

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You may think it a ridiculous question. I do. The people who should celebrate religious festivals are the people who want to celebrate them. The people who should not celebrate religious festivals are people who do not want to celebrate them. We’re all individuals with different values, different religious beliefs, different […]

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Black men can generally run faster than white men. Black men are also generally better boxers. Asians are generally more intelligent than whites. But white men are generally more intelligent than blacks.
How many readers glazed over the first three claims only to find themselves jarred by the fourth? The fourth claim tends to stop people […]

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I shit you not. The man in the picture is David Pratt, an American who moved to England and is finding life rather less free on the other side of the pond, where he’s been hoping to apply for citizenship.
He bought the T-shirt in Venice, California, where such shirts are common and wouldn’t get […]

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