No Laughing Matter: the Scottish Government’s Latest Assault on Free Speech

Of all kinds of humour, political satire is the one that authoritarians tolerate least, for it has the habit of releasing suppressed feelings of defiance among the governed that might coalesce into rebellion. Two Serbian journalists, Srdja Popovic and Mladen Joksic, demonstrated this way back in 1998 with a prank. They and colleagues from the pro-democracy movement Otpor took a barrel and glued Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s picture to it. Then they put it in one of Belgrade’s busiest streets. Next to the barrel they placed a baseball bat. From a nearby café, they watched people’s reactions. Soon, people were queueing to take their turn at bashing the dictator’s face. Eventually, the police arrived but not before the queue and the jokers had hastily dispersed. Thus, the police had no clue as to who had been beating Milosevic’s picture and who had set up the joke. They had to do something, so they arrested the barrel. A photograph was surreptitiously taken of the arrest and Milosevic became the nation’s laughing stock.

Satire is the corrosive that eats away at vicious authority. Once the great leader becomes laughable, he is less or no longer frightening. He ceases to be a demi-god and becomes mortal. When this happens, the tyrant knows that his days perhaps are numbered, hence his concern that satirists are silenced.

It follows that satire is a mark of freedom of speech and a certain level of political sophistication. Satire is one of the proverbial canaries in democracy’s coalmine: when a nation is sliding into authoritarianism, satirists are the first humourists to go to the wall.

We therefore ought to be deeply concerned with BBC Scotland’s craven cancellation of satirical cartoons of Scottish politicians from its social media platforms after complaints were made by Humza Yousaf’s government. The complaints centred on the depiction of one-time Canadian Lorna Slater, the Green Party co-leader and ally of the SNP. She was mocked as the ‘minister’ for environmentally unfriendly short-haul flights and maple syrup. She was also caricatured as ‘Limo Lorna’ because of her alleged penchant for travelling in polluting limousines courtesy of the tax-payer. These are not particularly funny jokes, but they are satire, for they cut politicians down to size and wittily invite debate of their policies. Moreover, this satire, when compared to the Juvenalian savagery of Spitting Image in the eighties, is very tame.

Nevertheless, for the SNP/Green apparatchiks, the jokes were insupportable. Culture Minister Christine McKelvie called them ‘dreadful’ and Equalities Minister Emma Roddick described them as ‘unnecessarily nasty’.

It might be possible to dismiss this as snowflake hypocrisy, for the SNP and the Scottish Greens do not hold back in their acidic criticisms of the Union. But it is more than that: it is an attack on freedom of speech which in the satirical form helps to sustain political stability. Being able to mock authority defuses the tensions that can spill over into violence. Satire’s soft revenge is preferable to revolution’s chaos.   

Furthermore, the SNP/Green complaints are of a piece with the SNP’s most recent attempt at undermining freedom of speech. Scotland’s Hate Crime Law would have meant, if it had been left unmodified by cross-party intervention, that a person could have been charged with a hate crime against protected groups, not on the basis of whether his speech had been intended to be hateful, but on whether it would have likely stirred up hatred. A person could therefore have been indicted not on what he intended or did, but on how others perceived him. Thus, if person B merely thought person A’s speech could have stirred hatred, that would have been enough for police action. 

On this occasion, the Scottish government went no further than complaining. But it is not inconceivable that in the long-term drift towards increased censorship, the Scottish government might end up trying to outlaw the satirising of politicians in protected groups. Slater is a member of such a group because she is a woman. So too is Yousaf who is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage. Of course, do not expect Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative Party leader, to get the same protection because after all, he is white, male and heterosexual.           

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).

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