tional if you remove from Voltaire’s imagined coat of arms the two-fingered salute, or from his imagined signature-tune the verbal raspberry.

The last Labour government’s legislation on hate-speech might well have criminalised both. Published into the climate of religious sensibility that prevailed in Voltaire’s day, some of his work would probably have been illegal under modern Britain’s laws against religious hatred. Some existing Biblical,Talmudic and Koranic characterisation of homosexuals, too, would probably be criminal under our new laws against anti-gay hate-speech if the legislation had not been amended to exempt religious teaching (and these faiths’ respective characterisations of non-believers would probably be criminal under our religious hatred laws). The Bible and Koran routinely descend to the level of gratuitous insult in their references to many groups.

Less discussed is the reason why.Why does religious teaching share with secularist teaching (and gay activist literature share with anti-gay literature, and feminist literature share with anti-feminist literature) such a ripe and fruity anthology of common abuse? Why, throughout history, have protagonists in so many of the great arguments about human faith, behaviour and ideas, ‘stooped’ (as the Respect agenda’s apologists would say) to gratuitous attacks of a personal nature, calculated to offend real people? Were we to forbid all that, insisting on polite and unpersonalised general argument, what would be lost? ‘At least half of it’ is the answer. In compiling my own published anthology of verbal battle, I quickly settled on Scorn as its title because scorn — and, yes, gratuitous offence — has always been so sharp and prominent a weapon in the battle of ideas.This I believe, for a range of reasons, three of which follow.

First, without intensity and passion, few great political or philosophical causes ever prevail.When human beings do believe, with intensity and passion, that other human beings are slaves to a wicked or groundless set of beliefs or habits, they cannot in practice make an issue of it without carrying the fight to the flesh-and-blood individuals concerned. To say that what people are doing is wicked, without calling them wicked, to say that what people believe is a delusion, without calling them delusional, to say their ideas are foolish, without calling them fools, is so at odds with the structure of our language that the stopping-short will always sound like a failure of total conviction.

Second, many faiths, cultures and hierarchies depend for their ascendancy on a measure of moral or social intimidation. They scare people. I’m afraid I think the Catholic Church used to and in some benighted places still does; and that Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and the Indian caste system still do; that the oppressors of women do and that homophobia did until quite recently. The way to dispel awe, fear or unmerited deference is to show open disdain: to defy by mockery, contempt or scorn. To deflate a balloon, prick it. Ask Jane Anger, whose 1589 Protection for Women included sustained passages of hate-speech — ‘[Men’s] slanderous tongues are so short, and the time wherein they have lavished out their words freely hath been so long, that they know we cannot catch hold of them to pull them out, and they think we will not write to reprove their lying lips’ — which heartened her supporters and invigorated her cause as no reasoned argument could have done. Against bullies, rank disrespect can succeed where argument fails.

Finally, the propensity of words (or indeed cartoons) to give offence is not unrelated to the propensity of their targets to take offence. If offence is the touchstone then this allows some groups to attract to themselves an unusual degree of protection from criticism simply by making a bigger fuss whenever criticised. This penalises modest or level-headed groups at the expense of hotheaded, aggressive or self-righteous ones. I would include gay ‘community’ spokesmen, some commentators on Jewish issues, and many Muslim groups in that category.

Despite the Respect agenda and our recent (largely unprosecuted) laws on hatespeech, England’s ruling legislation on speech and publication remains the law of defamation. Procedurally flawed and unequal as in practice it is, it has at its heart a simple and compelling idea: that citizens are not free to publish untrue factual claims about each other, where those claims are likely to be believed; but if their words amount only to common abuse then their targets are not defamed and have no remedy.

With the piecemeal and disgraceful extension of law-by-injunction, the development of dangerous Continental ideas of privacy, and the huge expense of bringing actions in defamation,government will sooner or later turn its attention to all-encompassing reform. Whatever shape that reform takes, let it keep to heart an idea more ancient thanTony Blair’s Respect agenda: that the open expression of contempt, anger and dislike is more often a part of our liberty than a threat to our liberty.

‘Good luck —Glasgow is always a tough crowd.’

the spectator | 18 September 2010 | www.spectator.co.uk mind your language dot wordsworth

‘Quick, darling,

you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen. He is a collector of last taboos. Once, it was death. Since there’s been geriatric sex (when he loudly complained of the misuse of geriatric), sex-change surgery live, The Vagina Monologues,Tourettism and Joan Bakewell.

Yet linguistic taboos about race, sex (‘gender’) and disability have multiplied, despite the popularity of ever more ingeniously obscene slang. On the same principle as Wikipedia, these swell the online Urban Dictionary weekly. It claims to have published 5,198,891 definitions since 1999, not all obscene.Thus, someone proposed gay buffer to mean ‘an extra seat left between you and a person of the same sex in a cinema so as not to appear gay’. In response, readers gave 10,409 thumbs up and 2,333 thumbs down.

In print, Viz magazine’s latest 624page edition of Roger’s Profanisaurus (named after Roger Mellie, the man on the telly) is called Das Krapital. It is hard to quote because it truly is obscene. But fans of gay buffer may like the terms good with colours, puddlejumper, spud fumbler, or German ambassador (after the German word Botschafter).

I’ve found, from hearing men shouting in pubs which my husband took me to, that the explosive element in a taboo torpedo is not the noun but the adjective attached.You may call this Wordsworth’s Law. Even the terrible c-word is thus modified. It is ‘You dirty c *** ’; ‘You stupid c *** .’ George Cornell was shot in the Blind Beggar not because he called Ronnie Kray a poof, but because he called him a fat poof.

Fat remains an adjective that still evades the attentions of the law, presumably because it relates to unhealthiness, and health is the new morality. Otherwise, even calling someone a Welsh idiot is risky.

But the biggest new taboo is against identifying failure. It is not just the 97.6 A-level pass rate. Management gurus even ban the use of feedback, preferring feedforward, which is deemed to focus on future success. So my recommendation for something to shout next time a motor-car nudges your bicycle is: ‘You fat failure!’

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