Section 14

Many British football clubs have their origins in communities that were for years divided by religion. In Glasgow, Celtic is the Catholic team and Rangers is the protestant team. In London, Tottenham Hotspur has traditional links to the Jewish community and for decades the fans have referred to themselves as the “Yid Army”.

Last week, eight schoolboys were arrested and questioned for ten hours by Hertfordshire police after singing a football chant at a Jewish teacher’s leaving do. Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is already in consultation with an array of busybodies over concerns that fans might be being racist towards themselves.

Fans and club historians point out that the use of the words “Yiddo” and “Yid Army” by the fans to refer to themselves has developed over decades and stopped some of the real racial abuse that used to occur at football matches.

Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill has coined the phrase “mate speech” to describe this new assault on free speech.

if recent cases in Britain are anything to go by, the language police are turning their attentions to what we might call ‘Mate Speech’. They’re cracking down on banter between buddies, throwaway chants at football matches, and words uttered in informal, behind-the-scenes settings, on the basis that someone somewhere, if they ever caught drift of these words, might possibly be offended by them.

Welcome to the humourless society, where no off-the-cuff remark, gag or utterance is beyond the sanction of the sanctimonious word-watchers.

UPDATE: More from Spiked on the ‘Yid Army’, including this sporting-rivalry gem:

Chants at sports stadiums should not be interpreted literally. An obvious case in point are the basketball games between Hapoel Jerusalem and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Israel, where a common chant from the Jerusalem supporters is ‘Ya Saddam ya habib udrub udrub Tel Aviv’. Hapoel fans adopted it after news programmes showed Palestinians chanting it on rooftops during the Gulf War. It means ‘Saddam, darling, bomb Tel Aviv’ in Arabic.

Another story for the ‘pathetically-thin-skinned’ file came out of Oxford University this week. Spiked has the story of Merton College at Oxford, where all the students got a good lecturing about refraining from “unacceptable and extremely offensive” behaviour.

The vile crime that provoked this stern crackdown? During a pool game, someone used the word “gay” in a derogatory way, as in “that shot was so gay”. Says Spiked:

The idea that students should behave according to some predetermined college ethos stands in stark contrast to the old idea of universities as places where young people should be free to experiment, to think, to argue, to learn, to say what they please in a student common room…. Enforcing an official dogma about words, phrases and actions betrays an elitist view of what sort of behaviour is appropriate, and what is not.

Worse, it treats students as children who either must be reprimanded for saying naughty words or who must be protected from the jokey words of big ‘bully boys’ by student officials posing as social workers. This infantilises students – which is hardly conducive to creating an atmosphere where students can grow, both educationally and personally.

Merton College, founded in 1264, boasts the oldest surviving working library in the United Kingdom but sadly their copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty seems to have gone missing.

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

This “harm principle” defines the boundary of what should be permitted speech. The “harm” caused by speech should be palpable if that speech is to be banned. Being a bit miffed at a throwaway comment does not constitute palpable harm.

A group of science fiction authors in Britain has written an anthology of short stories to deliberately break the new Terrorism Act.

The Act prohibits behaviour which “glorifies the commission or preparation” of terrorist acts.

The book, Glorifying Terrorism, features stories which praise “terrorism” from the likes of Nelson Mandela.

Welcome to Rackstraw Press, created in response to the Terrorism Act of 2006 - the controversial ban on the glorification of terrorism in the UK.

This Act is opposed by people from many political parties as an attack on free speech. Government protests that it will only be used if someone “directly incites” terrorism have been regarded as implausible by lawyers who point to the many other laws which currently cover this action.

Science fiction is a political genre. There are many science fiction writers who have already written novels and stories which could be considered in contravention of the law.

Everything evil that terrorists might get up to, like blowing stuff up or planning to blow stuff up, is already illegal. There is absolutely no justification for criminalising the expression of opinion; if the battle aganst terrorism is a battle against those who would destroy our freedoms, this sort of legislation is a scorched earth policy.

There is no value in the Jim Anderton approach (used when discussing media censorship of suicide stories) that sweeping censorship should be used to keep the “lowest common denominators” in line. Criminalising everyone with wide ranging laws and then picking and choosing who to prosecute is police state behaviour.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.