In the UK the current default is that words cause violence.

How the UK adopted a somewhat obscure and controversial American Social Psychological theory to justify removing freedom of speech and expression from its population.

Behind the assault on freedom of speech and expression in the UK is the claim that words hurt and lead to violence. This has come as a bit of a surprise to a population who thought that things like freedom of speech, nuanced discussion, hyperbole, passion and context were all important to public discourse and were the basis of our democracy. But apparently the authorities are working to a different rulebook, why is this? Do a bit of digging and it appears that a rather obscure and controversial theory developed by an American Social Psychologist in the 1950s to explain the causes of the Holocaust, has been adopted by the UK Police, Criminal Justice System, academy, institutions and employers and politicians and governments and bought wholesale. Core to the theory is that hurty words inevitably lead to genocide and violence. How has this happened and why?

At some point in the last twenty years, Police Forces, Politicians, Human Resource Departments and Educators decided that words needed to be regulated because they cause harm and can lead to ‘violent outcomes’. In doing this they have completely ignored three hundred years of liberal debate and philosophical discussion about why we allow Free Speech and have incrementally been chipping away at the principle that a pluralistic society is built on the ability of its people to speak freely, think freely and believe what they want. Since the days of Tom Paine and Edmund Burke this has been the foundation of our entire democracy. Yet, no more. If you were to tell me, in 1992 when I left University, that there would be British Citizens in prison in 2025 because they had written or said something that upset someone then I would have laughed at you. If you had told me that there would be evidence that suggests that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK had lost their jobs because of their opinions, I would have laughed at you, yet, there is.

There’s a lot of discussion about how our freedom of speech is being attacked, in particular by the police and HR departments. Contrary to the oft spouted claim by certain individuals in the mainstream media that populism is the biggest threat to ‘democracy’; the actual attack on our democracy is the targeting of our rights to freedom of speech and expression.

“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me”. I recall being taught this by my mother as a very small boy and I’ve tried to apply this principle to my life. It’s not easy, sometimes words can be very upsetting. But the point stands: it’s up to you whether or not you choose to be upset by words. It is entirely subjective.

We’ve had incitement to violence laws for a very long time - it’s the old ‘shout fire in a crowded theatre’ law designed to stop just that. It’s designed to stop rabble rousers from incentivising others to violence. In countries where Freedom of Speech is valued and protected, like the United States the bar to proving incitement to violence is pretty high. In fact, it is still pretty high in the UK, although to witness the rate at which the police and CPS seem to wish to charge people with it, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

About ten years ago, those of us plugged into the online world started to pick up on a worrying development. We were seeing it in Universities and form some activists: the idea that words can be violent, that language can cause ‘harm’ and that harm is equivalent to physical harm. A plethora of organisations claiming to be ‘Anti Hate’ or ‘Anti Fascist’ emerged and they specifically made the argument that ‘hate’ lead to genocide. These were blatantly hard left organisations whose definition of ‘hate’ essentially included any discussions about immigration, LGBT rights, racism etc. Over time ‘hate’ became ‘not actively supporting our position’ - ergo anything other than open support was ‘hateful’. In extreme situations we have seen this used to justify physical violence against their political opponents. ‘Punch a Nazi!’ It’s ok to physically attack a Nazi because if you don’t then genocide is inevitable. OK, so define ‘nazi’? And of course the answer becomes ‘anyone who disagrees with us’. Of course there were organisations which didn’t advocate actual violence, but the theory underpinning their entire argument was that the words people use inevitably lead to genocide.

Politicians like the then British Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron were ever so keen to sign up to support such organisations' initiatives, motivated, no doubt, because they thought it made them appear ‘nice’ or ‘tolerant’. Yet of course, no one would ever identify what they meant by ‘hate’. In 2010 Cameron had campaigned on a Manifesto promise to repeal the various laws that constitute the ‘Hate Speech Laws’. It’s why, despite many concerns, I voted for him. Only, when he got into power, he quietly dropped this promise. Subsequently both May and Johnson also promised to look at how these laws stifled freedom of speech and were being weaponised, yet they did nothing.

And of course, Cameron went further, it was he who, in 2014 introduced the Non Crime Hate Incident - a license for the police to impose the old Stasi tactic of intimidation on the population - ‘zersetsung’. Why did conservative journalist Allison Pearson end up with a pair of Police Officers on her doorstep on Remembrance Sunday? Because a Conservative Prime Minister had effectively instructed the police to police our speech.

It’s a comedy moment, surely? There you are at home when the doorbell rings and plod is outside asking you to come down to the station to ‘check your thinking’. Victims of this police harassment like Harry Miller relate how they mention that this is deeply sinister and Orwellian. Miller relates that the officer who spoke to him clearly had no idea who George Orwell was. I can’t help thinking of those Russian intellectuals of the 1930, who found themselves trying to reason with thugs armed with rubber truncheons wondering why their point about betraying the revolution wasn’t understood by these people whilst they picked up their broken teeth from the floor.

If that seems hyperbolic then it’s not meant to be. Yes, our police may not be Stalin’s Cheka but like the Cheka they are our state’s physical arm. They are licensed to inflict violence including restraining, pinioning, arresting and detaining citizens. Victims of the Cheka would relate how they, having never been in trouble before, were hauled from their homes in the dead of night and would be in complete and utter shock, unable to comprehend what was happening, and then exposed to the true horror: the mundanity of the violence being inflicted on them.

There’s a powerful scene in Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil when the protagonist played by Jonathan Price is arrested by the Secret Police. Wrapped up in a rubber bag, restrained in chains he is hung, like the carcass of a beef cow, in the back of the Paddy Waggon with a dozen other victims, all hyperventilating in fright, as the police, with their boots and truncheons, have an inane discussion about family life, football or something. The horror is that juxtaposition between someone’s life being destroyed now being routine.

Again, the UK police are not the Cheka or the thugs depicted in Gilliam’s film, however, there is a sickening parallel here. Pearson and others have related how they were immediately in a state of shock, mentally undone, their defences down. The language of our oppressors isn’t the rubber truncheon, or the boot, it’s couched in the management speak of ‘safety’, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘care’.Following her arrest and detention last summer after she posted on social media following the Southport Murders, Bernadette Spofforth spoke at length about how she essentially mentally collapsed upon being arrested. She also commented on the mundanity, how a WPC, on her way up to search through Bernadette’s bedroom (no doubt looking for copies of Mein Kampf) commented on what lovely wallpaper in the stairwell. It is tyranny in a velvet glove. No, Police Woman, you cannot make this better, you are inflicting state sponsored violence and you are trying to sugar coat it by making small talk. It was enough to make a student of the history of totalitarianism like me, feel physically ill. That is where we are as a nation. Those entrusted to enforce our laws, making a mockery of justice and doing so under the commentary of a schmaltzy casual conversation about wallpaper.

The charges against Mrs Spoffoth were dropped, only after putting her through the wringer, but the chilling impact this has on public discourse in Britain cannot be under estimated. At a time when participation in elections is lower than it has ever been, those same politicians who express concern for this happily encourage the police to crack down on ‘hate speech’.

What isn’t often discussed is the impact this has on broader society. If the police decide that something is ‘hateful’ then of course, HR departments and employers do the same. In my role as an HR Consultant I have come across cases where employers have asked me if they should discipline employees who said they would vote Reform because other employees had complained about them. During the Brexit debate in 2016 a local authority rejected a couple as suitable to adopt a child because they voted UKIP. In our institutions and organisations it is now taken as gospel that ‘hurty words’ lead to violence and this is used to silence, discipline, expel and fire people from their jobs, colleges, societies and clubs.

If we are going to restore freedom of speech then we need to ask ourselves where all this came from. And it isn’t hard to answer this question. The fact is that our police, criminal justice system, government, society, employers and institutions have all decided to uncritically adopt a rather obscure and controversial 1950s American Social Psychology Theory as the justification to remove our right to freedom of speech. That last bit may not have been their intent but it has been the consequence.

The Scale of Prejudice.

The theory is The Scale of Prejudice, and the psychologist was Gordon Allport. The theory is that if you allow ‘hateful’ words or opinions they will inevitably lead to atrocities like the holocaust. Ergo: criticise the government’s immigration policy using blunt language = inevitable genocide. Allport was, like many intellectuals in the 1950s and since, trying to work out how a civilised society like Germany, the nation of Schiller and Beethoven, could end up murdering six million Jews. The theory was not and is not without its critics, the causes of genocide and the holocaust are nuanced, and yes, the normalisation of antisemitism is a part of that, but it was by no means the only reason. Context is vitally important. Under the logic of Allport’s theory, Mell Brooks’s musical The Producers would lead to genocide. Ignoring the role of satire in doing precisely the opposite. In fact, there is very little empirical evidence to suggest that the Scale of Prejudice has any validity at all, and plenty to suggest that when adopted it is weaponised to silence dissent and discourse.

How much has Scale of Prejudice Theory been adopted across our society? Well, occasionally the mask slips and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it has been accepted as Gospel by many in our society and most concerningly, many in positions of power and authority. It’s behind the logic of the Online Safety Act that is only now ravaging the internet as hobby forums in the UK are closed down and social media companies consider their future operations here. ‘Harm’ of course isn’t ever specified. But as online discourse is always words: written or spoken ‘harm’ essentially means words. We’ve all seen videos of radical students screaming about how ‘harmful’ or ‘violent’ the mere presence of someone who may hold contrary views is to them. We’ve watched in horror as the Police arrest Christian street preachers and Jewish protestors ‘for their own protection’ when they are targeted by mobs.

Have you also noticed how activists immediately make the leap: words are violence - that if you criticise biological men participating in women’s sports then your are literally advocating for the death and genocide of trans people? We saw a rare example of common sense last week when an Employment Tribunal in Scotland ruled that a hearing where a nurse at a Fife NHS Trust was claiming discrimination against the trust for allowing a biological man to change in the woman’s locker room must be helf in public. The Trust had claimed that unless it was held behind closed doors the trans person in question would be in physical danger. It came as quite a shock to the HR activist and to the trans right lobby when the Judge rightly called the claim out as patent nonsense. Yet this is a rare exception. Educated people actually nod along in agreement when these claims are made.

We saw this last week in the reaction to Elon Musk’s strong criticism of the UK Safeguarding Minister, Jess Phillips. Yes, Musk was blunt, rude and hyperbolic but those reacting to him, including our own Prime Minister were quick to accuse him of putting Phillips in physical danger with his comments. To Mr Starmer, a true believer in the theory, this is irrefutable, never mind the context, never mind that Musk was clearly being hyperbolic. (Ignoring hyperbole used to be a sign of idiocy, deliberately ignoring hyperbole used to be so disingenuous in the art of debate that no one would do it.) And Starmer’s outrage has worked: apparently Musk is now being investigated by the UK Anti Terror Police no doubt for inciting violence by calling for Phillips to be thrown in prison for letting down victims. Never mind the absurdity of the UK police investigating an American citizen for excising his right to freedom of speech in his own country; once again, here we have the application of the Scale of Prejudice. Phillips apparently received a death threat and the leap the police are making here is that Musk’s tweets must have incited the suspect. That’s some leap.

If we are going to restore freedom in the United Kingdom, we must challenge the root of the problem: that our institutions and in particular our police and government have bet the over taxed farm on a single Social Psychology theory that was controversial to start off with and it has now become carved in stone and is being used as the basis of laws. The scary thing is that they all believe it, from our Prime Minister, to Chief Constables to the Judiciary ‘hate’ (never defined of course) is the sin and anyone expressing it must be excised from society. How on earth we dismantle this is going to be a huge challenge but first and foremost the public must demand, loudly and clearly, that you do not take freedom of speech and expression away from the people and you do not get to do it by empowering Plod by weaponising a dodgy theory and applying it out of any context.

In my next article I will be looking at how the Scale of Prejudice came to be adopted by the police and who was behind it.