Concern over what is happening to free speech

INZI Smith has an opinion. It’s not that she doesn’t have a point. She just expresses her views in ways that I find distasteful.

Some people agree with her. Others don’t. She’s also just an ordinary, average, person who expresses her opinion online. She’s not a politician, just a member of the public.

This isn’t news, surely? I have opinions too. I’m sure that if you’re reading this column, at some time or another you’ve had an opinion.

Perhaps you’ve even had a controversial opinion, maybe even an unpopular one. I’m not going to tell you what Linzi Smith’s opinion is, because frankly I don’t give a stuff.

Her opinion is no more, no less, important to me than the opinions of the other 60 million or so people in this United Kingdom.

What does bother me is what happened because Linzi Smith expressed her opinion.

Linzi Smith is also a football fan, a Newcastle United fan in fact.

When she expressed her opinion online, her opinion was passed to a unit within the Premier League – which secretly compiled a dossier on her detailing where she lives, works, and even walks her dog.

The dossier was handed to police, who knocked on the door before (naturally) concluding that holding an opinion is not in fact a criminal offence. The waste of everyone’s time was – frankly – staggering. Then she was banned from Newcastle United Football Club until 2026. She’s taking legal action, arguing that her opinion is protected in law, and that the ban amounts to discrimination.

I am not a lawyer. And I don’t really want to get into the ins and outs of what Linzi Smith’s opinion actually is.

When it comes to free speech, it matters not a jot whether the opinion concerned hails from the Left or the Right of politics.

You must have every bit as much right to express a pro-Palestine view as a pro-Israel one; to express a pro-abortion view as an antiabortion view; to be in favour of – or against – the legalisation of drugs; to take any of a range of opinions on sexuality, or immigration, or the NHS, or anything else for that matter.

You should have the right to express that view using figures of speech, making use of irony, hyperbole or sarcasm should you wish to do so.

Perhaps, unwittingly, you’ll reinvent some of the rhetorical techniques known since the time of the Ancient Greeks.

Free speech has limits, of course. We can probably all recite them off by heart: you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, phone in a bomb threat, or threaten to punch your neighbour, without expecting to hear from the police.

A threat of actual violence (amazingly, today it seems I need to caveat that violence means violence – it’s blatantly obvious that it’s not violence to disagree with someone else’s opinion or lifestyle choice) goes beyond the realm of free speech.

All Linzi Smith did, though, was express her opinion. When we police what people can and cannot do in life based upon their opinions, that is fundamentally repressive and profoundly illiberal. Say something “we”, whoever the illdefined “we” might actually be, don’t agree with – and just like that, your hobby is gone.

This should be a bigger scandal than it is. Decades ago, discrimination was rife. “No Irish”, “No Gays”,

“No Blacks”…signs excluded people from parts of society for no actual valid reason. I don’t want to live in a society where we replace that toxicity with a new and pernicious modern kind, where every opinion is a potential ‘Gotcha!’ moment.

As far as I can see, this ban achieves one thing: it makes it harder for people with Linzi Smith’s opinions, and their opponents, to actually talk to each other and have the kind of dialogue that helps to build trust.

It polarises, setting one side against another (which is why I’ve studiously avoided mentioning what her opinion actually is).

Some of us might even hold nuanced, balanced opinions which don’t fall completely on one side or the other. Perhaps that conversation could help. But it won’t happen if we try to suppress whatever the ‘other side’ says. This should matter to you. It should matter to us all. And why? Because if Linzi Smith has an opinion, maybe you have one too.