Dear LPG readers,  


I am a pensioner, but I am also the child of one of the many pensioners who listened and followed the call of post war Britain to leave the West Indies for the opportunities that England offered back in the 1950s, and one of the things my parents told me that they looked forward to the most was becoming a part of a nation renowned for its freedom of speech.  I don’t really know why their fascination left such an impression on me because I was never particularly vocal, but just the thought of being able to have my say seemed like something really liberating at the time.   

My parents also told me that, having lived here for a year or two, they concluded that the realities of living here back then were quite different.  I have always thought the British stiff upper lip to show them as a reserved nation, but people did say some radical stuff which resulted in a variety of different consequences, some quite hurtful.  

Perhaps it was the Bill of Rights 1689 which set the standard but that was geared more towards limiting what the king or queen of the day had absolute political supremacy over and what was said in Parliament, from what I can see.  Free speech has often resulted in hurtful things being said both in and out of that House and we immigrants weren’t the only ones to be affected. 

We all do it, say things that we don’t think will hurt others and the ‘he said, she said’ reports are not just hearsay anymore.  With the establishment of the internet and particularly social media, people do their talking so much more publicly these days.   

I suppose no one ever said that what was written down was as free as what is said, but our younger people are so used to texting and jotting down things that we would have only had the opportunity to say to the few people we knew back in the day, that things are different now.  Now those statements that used to only be spoken to a few people who would most probably have been upset by them at the time, but who would have forgotten them a few minutes later, can now so easily get recorded for posterity.  The consequences of letting your mouth run away with you extend to your texting fingers as well as those little videos that are made on smartphones, and they have a habit of ending up on the internet somewhere. 

On the other hand, if people did not blurt out what they think from time to time, the nucleus of many ideas and innovations that we have today would never have been realised.    

We older people often think that we were so much wiser when we were young, although we are forgetting that perhaps we were more aware of the consequences of saying something hurtful or inaccurate back then.  But when I really think about it, I have to admit to being pretty loose with my words back in the day.  The other point that has to be made is that, back in the 1960s, when I was a young person, what we had to say at any given time would have been heard by far fewer people.  

Back in the middle of the last century I remember the politicians and celebrities being the people getting into lots of trouble for what they said, but in these days of telephone hacking, you even have to be careful of what you say on the phone.  With all the CCTV cameras and their microphones, we have, the only real place where anyone can have a truly private conversation is in their own home.   

We all put our feet in our mouths from time to time.  So, perhaps freedom of speech sounds good, but I have learned that it is just about as liberating as everything else really.  Apart from the official and legal consequences, we need to be mindful of the social ones.   

With the freedom that it gives us comes the need to consult your conscience before you let any words pop out of your mouth, and an obligation to be able to say sorry from time to time is another consequence we need to keep in mind …  

LL, Charlton  

 

 

LPG found a little information on the Bill of Rights 1688…  

 

 

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