Ryan Giggs and free speech

After all the furore of the Ryan Giggs affair it makes me wonder about the state of this country when it comes to freedom of speech, and how a few individuals are increasingly becoming an enemy to all of the values the west is supposed to hold dear. I mean, Ryan Giggs had his legal team trying to get the names, IP addresses and email addresses of the people naming him on twitter! If he had succeeded, then surely twitter could not refuse a similar request from the house of Said, the Libyan regime and so on… Either freedom of speech is protected or it is not, and I was shocked and saddened by the amount of people who came out to say “there should be restrictions on free speech”.

It might seem petty to make a point to protect the right and freedom of a few sleazy tabloids and gossipers, but if we ever get to the point where people have been imprisoned for simply gossiping then people we might as well hang up the Fascist signs and let democracy die the death some people want to deal to it.

And I don’t think Ryan Giggs is smart enough to understand this! I mean, listen to the man speak and you know his intellectual capacity is not a high point – but then, with his footballing skills, he never needed to be! So, I think in this case he is a victim, a victim of some pretty bad advice by his money grabbing lawyers who allowed him to commit the PR disaster of 2011 and becoming a cause celebre to liberals who see a worrying loss of liberty and basic freedoms here in the UK. This might not be akin to the Arab spring, but the fight for free speech is just as much about the right to gossip as it is to discuss political ambitions free of persecution.

I always recall Keith Vaz on Newsnight who boasted how we don’t have full freedom of speech in this country and was proud of it! And this is why we need to be more vigilant when it comes to our rights, as people who get voted in by ignorant voters are more than happy to reduce our rights to suit whatever the need of the day may be, whether that is for terrorism offences, racism, idle gossip or whatever. Through, thankfully there are enough people in the UK who will take to twitter and other sites in protest about this, people who might not go out to the streets to protest but will be more than happy to retweet the details of whatever it might be.

And thankfully twitter is based in the USA and at least has decided to protect it’s users details when threatened with denials of free speech!

I do agree with you on all counts.

Twitter tho... according to what the European boss said yesterday... He will pass details of people that break privacy laws, if requested...

Shocking news if the people behind twitter release details of users who breach these draconian privacy laws

Don't count on it! With the exception of David Davis and a few others, free speech advocates tend to be few and far between in this Government..