You could call it the crows coming home to roost if you were inclined do to so, I suppose. Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh of Kneecap being charged with a terror offence is a sneaky move by the British police because its a summary offence, and therefore less serious, but won’t be heard before a jury and could likely ensure that the group can’t get into the States and to those huge festivals mostly made possible by American capitalism.
There are plenty of people who dislike Kneecap who are openly cheering this on, just as they were delighted to see Gary Lineker being forced out of the BBC, but the peculiar thing is that this schadenfreude is, on social media at least, sometimes coming from those who have been complaining loudly about cancel culture.
There’s a fundamental principle at play here: do we actually believe in free speech, or do we excuse its suppression when it suits us? That’s the kind of hypocrisy, to be honest, that I’d expect from the crybully left. And we can’t suddenly decide free speech doesn’t matter because we may be taking a particular side on the bombardment of Gaza.
In fact, one of the main characteristic of the modern left (I don’t think James Connolly ever expressed this kind of pettiness) is that they use cancellation as punishment, because its never enough to disagree with dangerous ideas such as, say, that biological sex is real or that mass immigration is harmful, and its not even sufficient to censor said ideas or thoughts: rather, the person who had the effrontery to hold a contrary view to the latest only permissible opinion must be pilloried and punished and destroyed.
It’s how the crybully term applies, because often the demands that another human being be cast into the darkness because they are ‘hateful’ is accompanied by the most nauseating gloating and shrieks of delight that the establishment has come down hard and heavy on offending liberal/left sensitivities. The lack of self awareness is astonishing.
That has, in fact, almost become the defining characteristic of the modern left, since they care very little about old-fashioned stuff like worker’s rights or even women’s agency any more. But their vindictiveness is partly what has led to a backlash against hate speech laws – that and the realisation that a policemen’s cosh could now be used to stop people posting mean tweets. Ordinary people, mostly indifferent to political squabbles, woke to what was happening and increasingly didn’t like it.
For clarity, the left’s full-throated promotion of the idea of framing all speech they didn’t like as ‘hate-speech’ wasn’t to ensure social harmony, it aimed to criminalise speech, to get people locked up – and very often it was aimed at working-class people who disagreed with them on issues like immigration.
Kneecap is managed by Daniel Lambert who is also Chief Operating Officer of Bohemians Football Club who recently got €25 million off the Irish government (tough being anti-establishment, isn’t it?) and both the band and their manager talk a lot of nonsense about “smashing fascists” which, according to Mo Chara who featured in the band’s star billing on RTÉ’s ‘Unchartered’ (again, must be hard to keep fighting the man while being on the national TV station morning and night) includes people who say ‘Ireland is full’.
It’s always deeply ironic to see middle-class socialists like Paul Murphy and Richard Boyd Barrett punching down on working-class people who are sick of the chaos caused by the government’s immigration policy – and to see the supposed rebels of Kneecap nodding along with the denigration of ordinary people who have those concerns. So much for being punk: if they were real rebels they’d be standing with the people of East Wall or Carna instead of regurgitating some lefty, internationalist nonsense
But we can’t take embrace the vilest aspects of our political opponents when it suits us. And in that regard, the right of Kneecap and others to speak freely, even when some may consider it offensive, should be protected, because without free speech we have lost the right to challenge not just the establishment but each other.
Up to the plate in regard to Gary Lineker – who is in hot water for inadvertently but stupidly retweeting a video about Palestine which contained an anti-Semitic emoji – stepped an unlikely ally, the most old-fashioned toff of all, dubbed the Honorable Member of Parliament from the 18th century, Jacob Rees Mogg.
His point is that Lineker’s view on Palestine isn’t the issue: its the principle that matters. Mogg, unlike the left who hate him, is a conviction politician. If he supports free speech, he’ll support it for everyone, and that’s really the only logical stance to take.
And he’s right re being offensive. Kneecap’s raison d’être is to be offensive, they’re rappers. As I said before: they mostly talk up taking drugs with a lot of swagger and throw in a sprinkling of social commentary. That’s their USP really, not their politics, which in the Irish context is far more red than green. When your audience are young people who get a buzz out of the supposed rebelliousness of saying ‘is cuma liom sa f**k faoi aon Garda”, you’re on a well-worn path, not forging a new one.
They also like the Irish language, as I do, and that’s something to be admired, even though their music is rubbish (hey, I’m a middle-aged Gaeilgeoir, but as a seannós singer I did really like their rendition of Amhrán na Scadán), but I realise that they and their lefty manager would likely rather choke on their own vomit rather than say a word in defence of free speech for this writer or this platform.
And they’re far more likely to be preaching nonsense about ‘the far right’ when it comes to immigration than they are to have a coherent nationalist viewpoint – because if our history has taught us anything its that giving a ceád míle fáilte and then leaving the door open has been very, very bad for Gaelic Ireland, as has been 800 years of invasion, colonisation, plantation and general brutality almost all of which came from our nearest neighbour, sadly.
I suppose a point about being controversial is that you need to be able to be punk enough to deal with the backlash that inevitable ensues. Kneecap were in trouble after a clip from a November 2023 gig appeared to show one person from the band saying: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP”. They subsequently apologised when people were understandably horrified, especially given that two British MPs had been recently murdered.
Everyone really knows, however, that the catalyst for all this fuss, to be honest, isn’t balaclavas or Hezbollah flags or stupid remarks made by druggy eejits on stage. It’s about the previously-uninterested authorities coming after those who oppose Tel Aviv’s actions in a war that was spurred by the massacre of October 7th but has long since passed justification.
There is little point really in adding my condemnation, once again, to the horror being perpetrated on the people of Gaza, just as I condemn the vile murder of two young Israeli embassy workers in Washington yesterday, gunned down by a man who shouted ‘Free Palestine’. Everyone is so entrenched on both sides, even as the bodies pile up and the destruction of a whole people continues.
The truth is that the military and economic and globalist might of the United States has swung in even harder behind Israel, and that is being reflected in trickle-down effects such as Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh being charged with a terrorist offence for holding a flag.
Again, yes I know that the left would rather live forever deprived of soya lattes than defend my right to free speech on issues such as immigration or abortion. I remember well the frenzied hatred on social media in 2018 (one charming person said I should be nailed to a cross on O’Connell Street, while the supposed liberal and tolerant crowd wanted to get ordinary people fired for expressing the mildest pro-life opinions) – but, again, we should aim to be the opposite of these malicious, spite-filled, people, not emulate them.
Just last year, pro-Palestinian pseudo outrage caused Eoin Hayes of the Soc Dems (another crowd that supports hate-speech legislation) to stand back because he had owned shares in an Israeli company. But they – and yes Kneecap, this includes you – were silent when an ordinary mother, Lucy Connolly, upset by the frenzied and brutal murder of little girls in Southport, put up an ill-advised tweet.
Connolly is in jail now, serving a viciously-long sentence in what is obviously an act of political sentencing. Kneecap say the terrorism charge laid against them is also political policing. It’s easy to say that what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the lippy, annoying, ill-informed gander. But that would make hypocrites of advocates of free speech. We should be better than that.