Is it really reasonable to call an MP ‘Tory scum’?

Isaw Sir Iain Duncan Smith immediately after he was accosted by anti-tory protesters at last year’s Conservative Party conference in Manchester. As someone who served in the Scots Guards in Northern Ireland, the former Conservative Party leader appeared characteristically unruffled by what happened. But his wife Betsy and her friend Primrose were clearly shaken by the incident.

On Tuesday, however, Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring cleared all three protesters of the charges against them. He ruled that evidence that identified Elliot Bovill as the person caught on CCTV putting an orange and white cone on the 68-yearold MP’S head was “weak” and “tenuous”.

The other two protesters had been accused of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress, with the case against them centring on the use of the phrase “Tory scum”.

The judge did not doubt that the protesters were “both insulting and pejorative”. But he accepted that their behaviour was “reasonable” in the context of Articles 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act – the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association.

“The courts do not criminalise free speech,” he said. “The Crown has not shown me it is proportionate to criminalise those words.”

Sir Iain is justifiably perplexed. He even fears that the ruling means that anyone “can now walk down the street screaming abuse at me”.

Indeed, in the context, many will ask whether it was actually “reasonable” behaviour on the protesters’ part. I’ve run the gauntlet at recent Conservative Party conferences and often what you are subjected to isn’t civil discourse but out and out hate.

I’m all for free speech, but since when did the right to protest trump the right not to be intimidated?