Free Samuel Melia!

What is freedom of speech if it doesn’t include the right to shock, offend and disturb?

It’s pretty hard to end up in jail in today’s Britain. Usually one would need to have committed a string of offences, or a single crime of particular gravity, before seeing the inside of a prison cell. And sometimes not even then. We are, I am sure, all used to seeing media reports of violent criminals, sexual offenders and suchlike walking free from court, often with a slap on the wrist or some kind of suspended sentence.

Alongside the other obvious failings of our justice system – the police refusing to do their jobs properly, the lack of capacity in our prison estate, massive backlogs in the courts, and so on – the unwillingness or inability to incarcerate serious miscreants is another sign of the degree to which our country is undeveloping.

So when it was reported in the media this week that 34-year-old Samuel Melia was handed a straight two-year prison sentence at Leeds crown court, it would have been reasonable to assume that his crime had been one of real severity.

What, then, had been Mr Melia’s transgression?

Well, he hadn’t physically attacked anyone. Neither was he guilty of serious fraud or sexual assault or a crime involving children or any of the things that might – even in the minds of those involved in running today’s touch-feely justice system – have merited such a stretch at His Majesty’s pleasure.

No, what Mr Melia had done was to generate, via his social media platform, various stickers carrying an assortment of political statements. Those stickers were then displayed in public spaces by individuals who had downloaded them.

I don’t want to downplay the unpleasantness of the messages on the stickers. Some were unsavoury; others downright nasty. They included, for example, ‘We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066,’ ‘Mass immigration is white genocide,’ ‘Intolerance is a virtue,’ ‘They seek conquest, not asylum,’ ‘Why are Jews censoring free speech?’ and ‘Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back’.

There can be little doubt, then, that Melia’s personal politics are those of the far-right. (If the stickers weren’t proof enough of that, then his membership of the noxious nationalistic group ‘Patriotic Alternative’ ought to sway it.)

But in spite of all that, I do not believe that Melia should have been convicted. Still less should he have been sent to jail.

Melia’s personal politics appall me. As does the content of the stickers. But if freedom of speech is to mean anything at all, it must mean affording to individuals such as Melia the right to give voice to their genuinely-held political or moral opinions – irrespective of how shocking and objectionable the rest of us might consider them to be. And if someone cannot do that without feeling a tug on the collar and hearing the turning of a key in a prison cell door, then our society is not truly a free one.

I accept that an ‘absolutist’ approach to free speech is neither desirable nor practical. For example, people should not have the right to incite violence or engage in targeted harassment of individuals or defame or – the old analogy – shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. And I don’t see how a case could credibly be made that the denial of these rights somehow makes a society less ‘free’.

Neither do I believe – though I don’t suggest there should be a law prohibiting it – that individuals should engage in purely gratuitous abuse. As GK Chesterton said, ‘To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.’

But when it comes to the expression of sincerely-held political or moral beliefs, however insulting or contemptible, people must be free to say what they think and feel. And the rest of us must be free to argue with them – and, if we choose, upbraid and condemn them. I am unshakeable in that belief, and I think we should all be.

Society changes. Social and cultural norms change. Political and moral standpoints that were mainstream five minutes ago are today deemed unsayable. And views that are fashionable today may become taboo tomorrow. That’s why defending the freedom to express our opinions must be a constant – something we should seek to uphold at all times and for all people – and not a thing to be championed only when it is convenient for us to do so. Abandon that fundamental principle, and we could hardly complain if, one day, the censors came for us.

  

We are not expected to agree with, or like, Samuel Melia. Most of us probably wouldn’t. But allowing him to express his distasteful views without facing the wrath of the law is ultimately a small price to pay in the defence of freedom.

‘Safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not-very-nice people,’ remarked the former US Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter in 1950. We would do well to remember that observation.

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