Anyone who criticises our justice system when it doesn’t do its job must praise it when it does. Hence I doff my hat to the judges who sent several Just Stop Oilers down.
Last Friday, two of those zealots were sentenced to terms of up to two years for throwing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in 2022. The judges evidently couldn’t see the logic of holding the painter responsible for warm weather or indeed for the use of hydrocarbons.
However, I do see the logic of taking such fanatics off the streets before they start throwing bombs at people rather than soup at paintings. Personally, I’d lock them up for life, just to be on the safe side.
However, Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, disagrees. As far as he is concerned, the sentence is “a draconian and disproportionate punishment for a protest that caused minor damage to a picture frame.”
It’s only a hunch, but I suspect Mr McCallum would feel the same way even had the canvas itself been terminally damaged. However, if he weren’t a deranged fanatic, he’d know that in such legal matters it’s also the thought that counts.
Or, more precisely, the criminal intent. If someone shot at a crowd but only managed to cause a couple of flesh wounds, he’d still be charged with attempted murder and punished accordingly. He could have killed even if he didn’t do so. By the same token, the two Oilers clearly intended to damage Sunflowers, and it wasn’t a form of art criticism.
Five of their accomplices were also sentenced for blocking the M25, the ring road around London that carries 200,000 vehicles a day, 15 per cent of the UK’s motorway traffic. Progressive people the world over were up in arms, and French papers accused the UK of denying freedom of expression.
Right. I get it. Trying to disfigure a painting in the National Gallery and holding thousands of people hostage on a motorway are innocent exercises of free expression. All I can say is that yet again progress-junkies show a lamentable lapse in logic.
I’d like to help them out of that intellectual conundrum. Chaps, the term ‘freedom of expression’ omits a modifier that reasonable people assume can be taken for granted. That word is ‘legitimate’, as in ‘freedom of legitimate expression’.
Since climate fanatics don’t seem to take that implicit adjective for granted, the whole phrase is rendered meaningless. If disfiguring a museum exhibit or preventing law-abiding people from going about their business is free expression, then anything is.
Murder, for example, may be construed as free expression of pent-up anger. Theft, as free expression of the urge to redistribute wealth. Rape, as free expression of sexual desire. In other words, what we are observing here is a characteristic tendency of the Left to make words mean so much that they end up meaning nothing.
We are currently seeing another version of free expression all over the country. As the anniversary of the Hamas sadistic massacre of Israelis approaches, London and other major Western cities are overrun with pro-terrorist demonstrations. The marchers express themselves by screaming support for the terrorist organisations proscribed by law for being just that, terrorist.
The slogans exhibited on their placards range from anti-Israeli to frankly anti-Semitic, which too is against the law. It’s that omitted modifier ‘legitimate’ again.
Yet I for one feel warm gratitude for the marchers, as I always do for people who vindicate my innermost beliefs. The one relevant to the business at hand is that all anti-Western fanatics, whatever their ostensible gripe, are united in the same cause: hatred of the West.
One pro-Hezbollah placard held aloft yesterday made that point clear: “British Museum. Paint it red. Over 100,000 dead”. The reference to soup-throwers is unmistakable, as is the solidarity of all such evil anomians regardless of their pet whinge against our civilisation.
The marchers didn’t restrict themselves to merely rooting for Hamas and Hezbollah. They made sure they left no one in doubt that any enemy of the West was their friend. Thus their placards also expressed their support for Houthi bandits who fire rockets at passing ships.
They tried to express that sentiment not only freely but also poetically: “Yemen, Yemen make us proud. Turn another ship around”. ‘Proud’ and ‘around’ don’t really rhyme but, as I said, it’s the thought that counts. Never mind versification, feel the passion.
A similar fanatic outside the White House in Washington D.C. yesterday showed the right way forward by becoming the real trailblazer of pro-terrorist support. I use the phrase advisedly because he tried to self-immolate by setting his own arm ablaze.
This form of free expression has something going for it: if all such zealots set themselves on fire, they’d rid our cities of undesirables and, as a side benefit, provide a cheap source of alternative energy. All we’ll have to do is point them towards the areas where wind farms and solar panels fail to heat people’s homes adequately.
London police made 16 arrests yesterday, and I hope our justice system will continue to send those champions of free expression down. But Starmer finds himself in an invidious position. On the one hand, he has to ignore his own feelings and voice some opprobrium of the on-going flouting of the law.
On the other hand, 44 per cent of Labour voters support the marchers’ cause, as opposed to a mere 10 per cent of those who appreciate Israel’s right to defend itself (the corresponding numbers among Tory voters are eight and 36 per cent), with the rest uncommitted. As a professional politician, Starmer may disregard his own feelings up to a point, but not the feelings of his core constituency.
He is therefore unlikely to deny their freedom of expression, as they see it. As I see it, freedom of expression is either meaningless or pernicious unless it coexists with freedom from expression, some of its extreme and illegal forms.
Without this proviso, free expression may easily turn into a civilisational suicide pact, a sort of undignified Dignitas for the whole society. Having said that, I don’t quite see tweedy and Barboured crowds marching through London and chanting “Freedom from expression” – even though this may be a good idea.