BY JOE NUTT

If you can’t speak freely you are someone else’s puppet. In that brief sentence alone, any genuinely well-educated reader should find delicious food for thought, because words aren’t the innocent little toys the ex-hippies the BBC loves to sell as language experts, insist they are. They are a constant battleground of chemical reactions that link me to other English speakers like you. Tiny, infinitely potent triggers we exchange across time and space, that make us human. English words connect me to Grendel, to Jerusalem and the battlements at Elsinore. They infuse me with a unique identity. They make me the person my colleagues, friends and family recognise.

What they don’t do is merely colour my skin or label me so some witless sociologist can heap more trash thought on a mountain of unwanted and unwarranted research. Without them we are just gurning chimps.

I’ve been writing about how badly words are treated by so many people for the past five years and even did a radio programme on the topic for the BBC, against all the odds it increasingly seems to me, considering their preference for the ex-hippies. But recent events across the West have cast a lurid spotlight on this profoundly important corner stone of democracy. Free speech is under attack in a way no Englishman who feels any pride in his nation, can ignore.

We have a new government in the UK that in a matter of weeks has demonstrated repeatedly, on line and on screen, its absolute dedication to the ex-hippies’ linguistic faith. They have made it clear they neither value, nor wish to support, our free speech. Meanwhile in that other great English speaking nation, someone who thinks a situation in which social media companies “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation…has to stop” is actually standing for election as President of the world’s largest democracy.

Words, to these poorly educated wannabe autocrats are just cheap, disposable toys to play with for an hour and then discard. This infinite plasticity means they can feel free to declare their abhorrence of street violence one day, while cheering it on the following. Free speech to these people means something entirely different to its historically famous defenders like John Milton and John Stuart Mill.

Once you have absolute faith in the idea that words are insubstantial, ephemeral things, subject entirely to men’s will, then of course it follows that telling lies is fine. It’s just the way of the word.

If we are to defend free speech today in the English-speaking world against those who would steal it from under our noses, we have to expose this stinking difference to some fresh air. Free speech to them: is merely and always the freedom to lie.

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Yet it is also all that ever stands between us and those monstrous individuals throughout history who, empowered and enthroned by its absence, drag whole populations into war and horror. Look around you.

Across the world, people previously unconcerned about any of this were drawn ineluctably into the linguistic fray recently by the ugly reality of a spectacularly ill-matched Olympic boxing match. The remarkably few punches thrown in the ring in Paris, spawned a global linguistic brawl centring on the precision of the words man and woman to describe two individuals thumping each other. 

Until now sociolinguists had swept the board and condemned us all to a Humpty Dumpty world in which a word means just what I choose it to mean. Dodgson was a great writer and I’ve no doubt he chose that verb choose instead of the more obvious want, because he knew the difference mattered. What people need to grasp today is that the act of choosing tells us much more than the word chosen. Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer share one thing at least; they have swallowed the sociolinguists’ toxic Kool Aid with glee. They choose their words very, very carefully before they come out to play with them.  

You can see it happening, actually watch their constant struggle to avoid truth telling and honesty physically troubling their countenances as they speak. It leaks from their eyes and lips. The wicked paradox is that for them, speech is only free when it’s constrained, controlled or denied. The idea that they would give spontaneous voice to their thought, participate in the natural process that attends all intelligent communication between mutually respectful humans, is anathema. It is so alien to them, they proceed on the basis that no one does it. They probably think the ninth commandment is a Ukrainian infantry regiment.

However…(isn’t that just a lovely, liberating word? Doesn’t it just reverberate with optimism and delightful possibilities?) Recently I’ve noticed a dramatic and sudden upsurge in people willing to reject their lies and the deceit; people with no special language axe to grind (unlike me) who have spotted the way activists, politicians and their media missionaries abuse the English language for the same, entirely childish reason; merely to get their own way. More and more often I’m seeing people latch onto the wickedly deceitful use of a specific word like “tragedy” to describe the barbaric stabbing of three little girls at a Southport dance class, when a more honest writer would have used “atrocity” or even just good old fashioned “murder.” More and more people confronted yet again with innocent looking pairings like “asylum seeker” and “climate change” are stopping to think – hard. The word liar is enjoying a long overdue renaissance on social media. 

Numerous writers and commentators have drawn attention to the democratic deficit that started in Britain with Blair and New Labour, widened under Cameron, only to be turned into a far from Grand Canyon by Boris Johnson, courtesy of his government’s catastrophic response to Covid. The staggeringly low turnout at the UK’s recent election and a honeymoon period for the Labour Party shorter than Romeo and Juliet’s; even before that had burgeoned into a rash of street violence, point to a wider electorate whose patience has worn so thin, you could slide it between their clenched teeth.

People no longer just suspect they are being flatly ignored and denigrated by politicians of all creeds. They know they are. Seeing a referendum and elections change nothing, many have reached a point where real, gut-wrenching anger has taken over. It seems a ubiquitously dismal prospect, and that is indeed the tenor of so much current commentary. Buckle up while politicians double down, is the general, submissive advice on offer, for a few years at least.

But I want to offer an alternative, more optimistic, indeed far more proactive defence of genuinely free speech. One that might just curtail the adolescent antics of a widely loathed and mistrusted political class, hell bent on torching more of all our nations’ sense of decency.

Postmodernists have made damn sure that it always starts with language. Every single controversial cultural change; every single policy that activists, and others who dedicate their careers to telling people how to live their lives impose, on an otherwise disinterested populace, starts with wordplay.

It doesn’t start with rainbows painted on tarmac, orange paint hurled over great masters, or pink lighting that makes the façade of the House of Commons look like a nail bar, or a branch of Claire’s. Those ludicrously visible signals are the children: not the parents.

So my suggestion for anyone like me who believes free speech means what it says on the tin, is to start fighting them on the frontline, where they’ve been frolicking unopposed for decades. If free speech doesn’t mean the freedom to voice spontaneous, as well as considered thought; to express an emotion as potent and quintessentially human as hate, as well as love, it isn’t free at all. And those that love to tell you with free speech comes responsibility, and therefore limits they are always unsurprisingly the ones best qualified to impose, need to pipe down and understand that the only responsibility free speech is wedded to, as far as the bulk of decent humanity is concerned – is a responsibility to tell the truth.

We need to restore integrity to the language, to generate an expectation that our words proceed from honest and sincere intentions. That this is not the case for our leaders and the elite generally, we can see for ourselves day after day, hour after hour even, as they exploit the speed and ubiquity of social media in their desperation to assert their authority. Their determination to pillory social media as a source of misinformation is only matched by their eagerness to exploit it for precisely that purpose. Which is why it is proving to be the most delicious disinfectant. Misinformation itself is a dreadful piece of deceit, the Woke’s weasel word for lying.

When you see the phrase “facial recognition” as you will again and again, shut it down and remind the user that what they are really describing is “police monitoring” or “police surveillance.” When someone opts for “assisted suicide” remind them what a euphemism is, then use the words, “State sponsored killing” or “State sanctioned killing.” When people try to enforce the idea that “Islamophobia” or the “far right” are both real world and widespread phenomena, point out that a suffix is a linguistic, not a societal or cultural change; that in a democracy citizens are free to both mock and reject poorly thought through slurs or labels.

Remember it really is all about intention, that very deliberate choice behind the words those who believe free speech is nothing more noble than a freedom to lie, make. The only reason to opt for “assisted” as an adjective in the phrase “assisted suicide” is to imply that the victim (I mean, feel free to provide a different word if you can) is being helped, even looked after in some way; as though they will always be naturally and infallibly in control. Of course we know from ample evidence, this is not what happens. And don’t forget of course, how those very same “assisted suicide” voices are highly likely to express horror when confronted with real suicide statistics, especially amongst young men. 

If you feel you can’t speak freely at work, or to your family and friends, then take a good hard look above your head to see who is jerking your strings. Finally, when some eager puppeteer calls for the introduction of a “digital ID,” take out your scissors and remind them that in a democracy we “licence” dogs, not humans.

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Joe Nutt is the author of five books, mostly about poetry and as an essayist he writes regularly for a number of magazines.