NEWS from one hundred years ago: HATE SPEECH

Conservatives everywhere in the country are saying that workers who go on strike in such key industries as coalmining are not only disloyal but betraying soldiers who fought for ‘freedom’ in the First World War. One way of fighting working-class ‘sedition’ would be to outlaw people from speaking or writing freely about communism. ‘Steps should at once be taken to unearth and seize the stocks of Bolshevik literature,’ says Free Lance today, ‘and to prevent the distribution broadcast over the country of this poisonously seditious stuff. Not only should such literature be destroyed, but those who import it and may attempt its distribution, should be deported.’ The government should ‘purge the country, once and for all, of these enemies to free and liberal institutions, these would-be corrupters of the minds of our workers.’
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Free Lance, 13 October 1920