An attack on free speech or just a bit of fun? SNP may not be best judge
It was, at the same time, both extraordinary and unsurprising. In the House of Commons, Scottish nationalists were defending the right of Extinction Rebellion to block distribution of newspapers they didn’t like. Critics of Saturday’s protest, declared SNP spokesman Kenny Macaskill (East Lothian), were simply “overreacting”. Extinction Rebellion, he insisted, hadn’t tried to “close down free speech”. All they’d done was “disrupt printing for a period of time” – and if anyone still wanted to read the offending newspapers (among them The Telegraph, The Sun and the Mail), they had “appeared online”. In any case, the protesters weren’t dangerous: just “a group of young people” who “care about the environment”.
Well, if they were young, then of course, that changes everything. It must have been mere high jinks. And let’s be honest, we’ve all done it, haven’t we? Who among us can truthfully say that, in our younger days, we didn’t blockade a printing press in Hertfordshire to prevent millions of people from reading the country’s leading newspapers, purely because we disagreed with some of the articles they may have published at some point in the past?
Still, good of the SNP to make their position clear. No doubt they would react in precisely the same way if, say, a group of Scottish unionists was to blockade a pro-independence newspaper. “There’s no need to overreact,” the nationalists would say, with characteristic equanimity. “These unionist protesters are just a group of young people who care about the Scottish economy.”
MPS were debating Saturday’s events after a statement by Kit Malthouse, the policing minister. All Tories criticised the blockade, as did most of Labour – although the protesters did receive support from Corbynite zealot Lloyd Russell-moyle (Lab, Brighton Kemptown). A gingery, whiskery little creature, bristling like an indignant squirrel, Mr Russellmoyle is a perpetual vision of spluttering hard-left righteousness, although the shrillness of his rants means they tend to pass beyond the range of human hearing after the first dozen words or so. From what I could make out, he considered criticism of the blockade to be “laughable”.
Mr Malthouse listened wearily. “If the honourable gentleman thinks there’s a market for his views, he’s perfectly free to start a newspaper of his own,” he sniffed. “Though I doubt that it would sell many copies.” The Daily Moyle. I can’t wait. For his part, Mr Malthouse argued that the protest had backfired, by preventing the public from reading a column in The Sun “from David Attenborough, no less, extolling the virtues of climate change”. Presumably this was a slip of the tongue because it sounds an improbable line for Sir David to take: “Attenborough: Stuff Polar Bears – Global Warming Means Hotter Hols and BBQS at Xmas!” Then again, I couldn’t get a copy of Saturday’s Sun, so I suppose I’ll never know for sure.