Keith Porteous Wood and Simon Calvert: The Lords will vote on Wednesday* on a vital issue of free speech

Keith Porteous Wood is Executive Director of the National Secular Society. Simon Calvert is Deputy Director for Public Affairs at The Christian Institute. Reform Section 5 is a joint campaign initiative of The National Secular Society and The Christian Institute.

Free speech is a fundamental value in a liberal democracy. Lord Dear’s proposed amendment to Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 - due to be voted on in the House of Lords on Wednesday - seeks to uphold, and defend, free speech in the United Kingdom.

Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 makes it illegal to use “threatening, abusive or insulting” words or behaviour if they are likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress”.

The use of ‘threatening’ and ‘abusive’ language is wrong and their criminalisation justified. Both terms clearly denote a satisfactory degree of seriousness to be legislated against. The term ‘insulting’, however, is subjective, open to misinterpretation & abuse and undermines free speech.

An amendment to remove the term ‘insulting’ from Section 5 has been tabled by Crossbench Peer Lord Dear and co-sponsored by Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws (Labour), Lord MacDonald of River Glaven (LibDem) and Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Conservative). Indications are that backbench support for the amendment is overwhelming.

Arguments put forward against the proposed amendment are misguided. In 2009, the Home Office claimed, “if ‘insulting’ is removed from the offence, it is possible that people who mock and verbally torment disabled and other vulnerable people would, in the eyes of the law,  be committing no offence. This is simply wrong.

Simon Calvert: The Government should reform the public order act to restore free speech and stop wasting time on spurious offences

Simon Calvert is the Campaign Director of Reform of Section 5. Follow the campaign on Twitter.

In Britain, we enjoy more rights and freedoms than almost anywhere in the world. It is easy to forget, but there is a reason why those who flee persecution are so often prepared to cross oceans to get here. We often take for granted the freedoms which most of the world aspire to. And when freedoms are taken for granted they are at risk of being watered down or manipulated. One such cornerstone of our society is the right to free speech, which is increasingly being challenged by someone else’s right to not be offended. You don’t have to be a student of law to know that we no more enjoy a right not to be offended than we enjoy a right to watch England win a penalty shootout.

One piece of well-intentioned legislation that is having, in the words of David Davis MP, “a truly chilling effect on freedom of speech” is Section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act. Granted, this obscure provision was never going to attract the same outrage as proposals to detain terror suspects for 90 days without charge, and it probably won’t turn hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets in protest, but it does matter and it must be reformed.

Section 5 currently outlaws “insulting words or behaviour” but what exactly constitutes an insult is unclear and has resulted in some highly controversial arrests. One boy was arrested under Section 5 for holding a sign which read “Scientology is a cult” and another student found himself in breach of Section 5 when he told a mounted police officer that his horse was gay. On each occasion an arrest was made on the grounds that someone, somewhere, could have been insulted if they heard or saw the offending point of view. There are more troublesome cases, too. The veteran campaigner, Peter Tatchell, was arrested under Section 5 when campaigning against members of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir - who called for the killing of gay people, Jews and unchaste women. He was arrested for displaying a placard that cited the murderous actions of Islamist fanatics. Is this what it has come to? Have we reached the point where we need the State to sanitise and vet every discussion?