Strayside Sunday is our monthly political opinion column. It is written by Paul Baverstock, former Director of Communications for the Conservative Party. 

No political column this month can pass, comment-free, without reference to the awful killing of Conservative MP, Sir David Amess.  Leaving a widow and his five children, a son and four daughters, Southend’s booster in chief and, by every account, a dedicated and conscientious Member of Parliament, was stabbed to death at his constituency surgery in a local church in Leigh-On-Sea, Essex.   The killing is the latest in a series of violent attacks on MP’s going back to the millennium when Liberal Democrat MP Nigel Jones survived a samurai sword rampage that killed his parliamentary assistant.  Follow that with the stabbing of Stephen Timms MP and the murder of Jo Cox MP and one could be forgiven for asking “who would be an MP?”

Regular readers of this column will know I have often been deeply critical of our local elected representatives.  They often deserve it.  But what they don’t deserve is the torrent of the often-anonymous abuse they receive through the stinking cesspit of humanity that is social media, let alone the threat of personal violence.  Indeed, our own Andrew Jones MP has had to put up with a great deal of this and does not deserve it (no one does).  Social media is not a force for good, or at least not in the form into which it has now morphed.  Rather it gives voice and amplification to the ignorant, the disaffected, the bigoted and the downright unhinged.  It offers vocal minority interests the means to target and harass those holding either the majority or, heaven forbid, the unfashionable view.  The so-called cancel culture this creates is, almost by definition, fascist and dangerous.  We must find a way to stop it. Now.

Nonetheless, much has been written during the last week about the need to protect free speech.  Of course, we must.  But surely society can only operate cohesively if behavioural boundaries are set, observed, and respected.  In my view free speech ought to mean accountable speech.  And we can only be made accountable for what we say if we have the courage and decency to do so in our own name.  Hiding behind fake and/or temporary social media accounts is not free speech and should not be protected as such.  By the way, we don’t need to legislate for threatening language or violence on the internet.  Law is already on the statute book to deal with such behaviour.  In my view there is no distinction to be made between online and offline harms.

What we do need to do is ensure we can police such behaviour on the internet.  And social media companies must be made to share the burden; in an age when just a few minutes spent on the internet is enough to train proprietary algorithms to micro-target content and advertisements to each of us individually, the claim that Facebook, Twitter, and the others are doing all they can to monitor and intervene in threatening trolling and abuse beggars belief.  I just don’t buy that we can’t identify the wrong-uns.  If we can’t (or they won’t) then we should write a law that stipulates only personally identifiable and verifiable accounts can sign-up for and use social media.  And to be clear, data protection laws already exist to protect our personal information from misuse, so that is not a credible barrier to progress.

One of the hot topics on local social media of late is the £10.9 million Station Gateway proposal, under the auspices of North Yorkshire County Council and, specifically, the ‘consultation’ process undertaken in support of it.  The scheme is hugely contentious because it incites existing divisions between Harrogate’s business community (many wanting as much vehicular access as possible to the town centre) and local environmental campaigners (who want to reduce vehicular access, making way for more cyclists and pedestrians).  Real consultation presents substantiated evidence for the effects of the proposed change.  And while forecasts in this case suggest a likely boost to the local economy from the development, fronting up case studies from other towns with their own unique circumstances just doesn’t cut it.

Part of the problem here is that local people know that no amount of tarting up Station Parade can compensate for the run-down and tumbleweed strewn 1960’s concrete utilitarianism of Oxford and Cambridge Streets.  If North Yorkshire Council (and Harrogate Borough Council) really wanted to make a difference in the town that’s where they’d start.  Yet, perversely, because Station Parade is really about the opportunistic use of ring-fenced government money (the Leeds City Transforming Cities Fund exists to “make it easier to walk, cycle and use public transportation) we must get what we are given, rather than what is right.  This in the context of wider public discourse and government policy promoting (indeed regulating) renewable energy, electric cars, heat pumps and carbon neutral.  With COP26, the UN Global Climate Summit, to be held in Glasgow in November, the Conservative government is enthusiastically tacking towards interventionist measures on the environment, an impulse they share with the Labour-led West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Leeds City Region.  Environmental policy is fast becoming apolitical orthodoxy.

Would that the same were true about the boundaries of free speech and social media.

That’s my Strayside Sunday.

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