July 22, 2009
Have Anti-incitement Laws Helped the BNP?
Could it be possible that anti-incitement laws have actually helped the BNP? In considering this I want to focus on two laws in particular: the Incitement to Racial Hatred provisions of the 1986 Public Order Act, and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006). The former of these was plausibly targeted at combating racism in wider society, but the latter was most definitely aimed in large measure at the British National party specifically.
This is because the BNP were getting around Incitement to Racial Hatred law by talking about “Islam” and “Judaism”, which they pointed out are religions not races. Indeed, just before the 2006 law came into effect BNP leader Nick Griffin and Mark Collett (then head of the Youth BNP) beat charges of inciting racial hatred by pleading that they had been criticising religions not races. Following this the Government moved on long-standing plans to close the apparent loophole and legislated against incitement to religious as well as racial hatred.
Now, I happen to have multiple-ranging problems with incitement to hatred laws. In particular there are two issues that make me feel very uncomfortable.
Firstly it is not – and should not be – illegal to hate. Hate may be an unpleasant and nasty emotion, but in a free democratic society individual citizens should be free to hate because they should be free to hold whatever emotions they may have.
Of course, what they should not be free to do is act upon that hate by way of violence, destruction or intimidation. If there are incitement laws, they should target not emotions like hate, but actions like violent attacks upon others (which may well flow from emotions like hatred). Legislating against an emotion itself is deeply illiberal, for it is the state saying that some kinds of emotion are simply not allowed. And that is surely wrong, and worrying.
Secondly, there is a lurking problem with anti-incitement laws. Under anti-incitement laws against (for example) violent acts, if Agent X incites Agent Y to commit a violent act against Agent Z, then Agent X is to be punished for something that Agent Y did. But that seems to go directly against the principle – enshrined in the rule of law – that a person is only tried and punished for crimes they themselves have committed.
The way out of this is to declare it a crime to tell other people what to do. Yet that puts us in very tricky territory about responsibility. For imagine that I tell you to go and jump off a building…and you do it. Have I murdered you, and should I be put on trial accordingly? It would seem absurd to say that I have. But this hints at the lurking problems associated with prosecuting somebody because they incited another person to commit a crime.
But putting those concerns to one side, I want to focus on something else: the possibility that UK anti-incitement laws may actually have helped the BNP.
For a long time my belief was simply that anti-incitement laws don’t work, assuming their aim is to reduce racial and religious hatred and the criminal acts that may flow from such hatreds. People who are susceptible to messages of hate, and who are likely to act on that hate by being violent, destructive or aggressive, don’t just appear out of nowhere. Most people who are receptive to messages of hate are this way because they are angry. Their anger causes them to look for targets of blame; messages of hate towards other groups provide such targets.
The sorts of people predominantly susceptible to hate and who likely to be persuaded by incitement to violence will be – surprise surprise – less well-off people, who feel their life is a struggle, and believe that it is a struggle because others are being unfairly favoured at their expense. Thus, the way to stop these people being incited by others to emotions of hatred or acts of violence is to address the reasons why they are angry and susceptible to hate. This means – surprise surprise – targeting poverty, addressing feelings of disenfranchisement, and eliminating perceptions of unfair disadvantage by markedly improving people’s lives.
What is less likely to work are attempts to gag those who spread hatred. This is because the hate-spreaders will always find ways to either get around the law, or not be noticed by it. For as long as there is a receptive audience to messages of hate, the preachers of hatred will emerge.
Incitement laws target symptoms not causes: a more effective strategy is to neutralise the reasons why people are drawn to messages of hate in the first place. Of course, the upshot of this more effective strategy (namely, poverty reduction, civic engagement, clear communication about issues like housing allocation and immigration) is that it is considerably more expensive – and considerably less headline-grabbing – than threatening to lock people up.
For a long time that’s all I thought there was to it. Now I’m not so sure.
Part of the BNP’s recent electoral success has been it’s shedding of the thug image. Skinheads and jackboots are out, suits and ties are in. Alongside this more cosmetic alteration, the BNP’s rhetoric has also changed. No longer is the BNP preparing for the (allegedly) inevitable race war; now it simply wants to “stand up for the rights of the white indigenous population”, as Nick Griffin repeatedly states.
It has become common place to assert that the BNP’s rhetorical shift came because it realised it would do better in elections if it toned down its message of hate. But does this explanation give too much credit to the strategic aptitude of the BNP leadership?
As noted above, Griffin and Collett beat racial hatred charges in 2006 by pleading they were discussing religion not race. Post 2006, this defence would no longer wash as the Government moved to make incitement to religious hatred illegal too. Now, we can safely assume that BNP members do not want to go to jail. The result? Their rhetoric had to shift and become more subtle, less likely to land them in the dock for inciting religious or racial hatred.
In becoming more subtle the BNP’s message of hate became more opaque. Rather than ranting about race or religion directly, the BNP focused on issues like housing shortages and immigration. These served as proxies for racism and Islamophobia, without falling foul of anti-incitement laws. Accordingly, BNP messages became less obviously odious to the average angry voter. Simultaneously, the BNP’s focus on issues like housing and immigration appears to have resonated with voters who felt these concerns were unaddressed by the other parties. These factors appear to have combined – along with a collapse in the Labour vote – to deliver two BNP successes in the Euro elections.
Could it be that by forcing the BNP to be more subtle, the very anti-incitement laws designed to restrain Britain’s fascists actually helped them gain the electoral traction they’d previously failed to achieve?
