If you find yourself saying ‘Of course I’m opposed to violence, but’ – maybe just stop there

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The worst of sins in modern politics – perhaps the only one remaining – is hypocrisy. Journalists love it, as it saves us from having to make value judgments. Relativists love it, because it suggests there are none to be made.

None, that is, but the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not be inauthentic. Let a politician cheat on his wife and he will be indulged and forgiven. But let him first pretend to be faithful, and the whole world will come down upon his head.

Rather than struggle with difficult moral questions – was this right or was it wrong? – politics instead leans to easy comparisons. You said this but you did that. A close cousin is the flip-flop: you said this before, but now you say that. Or the whatabout: how can you say this about that, when you never said that about this.

So obsessed are people in politics with spotting hypocrisy in others that they often fail to notice it in themselves. And yet as often as not the two go together: for every hypocrisy there is an equal and opposite hypocrisy.

If, after all, you accuse your opponents of having flip-flopped on an issue, and yet you still find yourselves on opposite sides, logically it implies that you must have flipped as well.

Take the steaming controversy over campus antisemitism. The indignation of the right at the bloodthirsty rhetoric of some pro-Palestinian protesters has caused much amusement on the left. What, so now you’re in favour of speech codes? What happened to all that tender right-wing concern for freedom of expression?

But of course an equal and opposite transformation has happened on the left. The same people who were telling us, not so long ago, that the slightest insensitivity or “microaggression” was a grievous assault on the well-being of its (usually unintended) victim, seem suddenly unperturbed in the presence of explicit demands for genocide.

That the two should have changed places is not coincidental. Most issues are complicated; speech issues are no different. Demands for speech to be regulated are rarely altogether lacking in some legitimate concern. In some cases they may even be justified.

The issue typically turns, or ought to, on two questions. One, is the speech proposed to be regulated by the government, or by some private actor, within its own bounds? What is a violation of an important right in the first may be a vindication of it in the second.

And two, does the speech impose some verifiable harm on others, of a kind that has long been accepted as the subject of the law, criminal or civil: incitement to violence, say, or fraud, or libel? Or is it merely false, or offensive, or categories of material that, however objectionable, is nevertheless no business of the state to prohibit?

This gives rise to two types of errors: falsely attacking speech as harmful that is merely offensive, and falsely defending speech as offensive that is actually harmful. You hear a lot of both flying about at the moment, which greatly adds to the confusion. It would be easier if we were only having to sort out one kind of error at a time.

It is easy to see, then, how partisans could find themselves on one side or the other of this issue, or even both at the same time. If your political opponents, or some other group you don’t like, are demanding the regulation of this or that type of speech, you will naturally tend to see this as repressive and dictatorial, regardless of how harmful the speech may be.

If, on the other hand, your opponents are the ones demanding the right to speak, you will tend reflexively to insist that it be regulated, focusing on the vileness of the speech, rather than on the harm arising from its suppression.

This is no way to organize our thoughts. The issue in these debates should not be “do I like the people involved.” Neither is it “are you for or against the regulation of speech,” as if the answer were the same in all cases.

What we should insist on, rather, is that any regulation meet the proper tests – not only of necessity, but of proportion, limiting any intervention to the minimum that is required.

Now, let’s apply all this to the recent riots in Britain. As always, the first concern on all sides has been to call out the hypocrisy of their opponents. The right has been incredulous to see the left, in the form of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, posing as the champions of law and order in the wake of the riots, instigated as they were by the forces of the far right. Where were you, they demand, when it was Black Lives Matter causing mayhem in the streets?

But any hypocrisy on the left is more than matched by the hypocrisy of the right. The spectacle of conservative commentators, even as the rioters were attempting to burn down hotels filled with asylum seekers, pleading for greater understanding of the “root causes” of the carnage, is one that will not be easily forgotten or stomached.

This is exactly the sort of mush-minded nonsense that, when displayed by the left, deservedly attracts conservative scorn. The formula is in each case the same. “Of course violence is never the answer,” the speaker begins, “but” – there is always the fatal “but” – “but we have to understand this in context.” It is exactly the sort of thing one heard after Oct. 7, as it was after Sept. 11.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying to understand the causes of things. The error in “root causes” thinking is the automatic assumption that the root cause is whatever the speaker happens to feel most strongly about. Search for what motivates the terrorists (and let us have no compunction in calling the riot leaders what they are), and by a remarkable coincidence you will find it happens to offer triumphant confirmation of My Prior Convictions.

Thus, for example, if you were a left-wing critic of American foreign policy prior to 9/11, you were quite certain that the “root cause” of the attacks was to be found in the failings of American foreign policy, as seen by left-wingers. It is not surprising, then, to see right-wing critics of British immigration policy leaping to the conclusion that the riots, while deplorable, were the inevitable consequence of the failings of British immigration policy, as seen by right-wingers.

How convenient. In effect, both groups have hired the terrorists as their spokesmen. Even as they disavow their methods – “there is never any justification for violence” – they are exploiting the terrorists’ willingness to use those methods.

At best, this blames policy makers for crimes that are exclusively the fault of the criminals who commit them. At worst, it amounts to issuing a ransom note: do as I say, change the policy to my liking, or the terrorists will strike again.

But in fact there’s no particular reason to think the one has anything to do with the other. It may well be that a majority of the British population aligns with the conservative critique of British immigration policy. That does not mean that terrorist violence was the inevitable consequence.

The thesis would appear to be that the population could be arranged along a sort of continuum of opposition to a given policy, depending on the extremity of the means with which they choose to express it. According to this thinking, violence is simply the logical extension of more peaceful methods. From logical it is a short hop to inevitable, which sounds a lot like justifiable, or at least excusable, however much you might want to disavow it.

But surely the more interesting question is what distinguishes the terrorist from the general population, not what they have in common. If a large number of people are of the same view on some point – immigration or any other – but only a small number are willing to engage in violence, the explanation must lie in what makes the latter group different – the particulars of their life experiences, or social conditions, or whatever else formed in them the willingness to harm or kill others.

All societies contain people within them who are willing to engage in violence, politically motivated or otherwise. Some have more than others. That Britain, which has low rates of violent crime generally, suffers from a particular proclivity for mob violence, from football hooliganism to street riots, is an observation that long predates the current round of madness. It’s worth trying to understand why, but a serious attempt would range a lot further afield than “aha, immigration.”

As for the other easy answers – it was all the fault of social media, or misinformation, or Elon Musk – we should be equally skeptical. No doubt social media accelerated the spread of the false and incendiary accusations – that a Muslim immigrant was responsible for the murders of three girls at a dance class in Southport, rather than a British-born Christian – that far-right instigators used to whip up mob fury. But if there had been no social media it would have spread in other ways.

That does not mean social media bears no responsibility. There has been much alarm expressed in certain quarters at people being charged after the riots “merely” for posting on social media. But the particular form in which speech is expressed is not the issue. The issue is the harm that arises, or could be reasonably foreseen to arise.

Most, if not all of the charges were for posts that were not simply offensive or even inflammatory, but clearly constituted incitement to violence (example: “blow up a mosque with adults inside”), particularly at a time when violence was very much in the air. The charges, that is, were laid under Britain’s existing speech laws.

That suggests further, more draconian restraints – such as a law, apparently under consideration, against spreading misinformation – are as unnecessary as they are inadvisable. That, ultimately, should be the standard by which we judge a policy: not whether it is hypocritical or not, but whether it makes sense.