Change the language, change the reality: that’s the theory, because it’s cheaper. Thanet District Council, which administers a somewhat unlovely part of Kent, has imposed a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) which means you can be fined £100 for swearing in the street. So, if, for instance, you want to express the idea that Thanet is “&h75!” you won’t be able to say that within the hearing of a council officer without being fined the equivalent of half your monthly council tax.
I wonder if you can accumulate multiple fines in one interaction. I wonder if you are fined for each individual profanity, or each sentence containing multiple profanities. I wonder if there is a cap, and if there are parts of Thanet — pub gardens, council offices? — which are potentially as lucrative as the infamous Hammersmith bus lane that accounted for 80 per cent of all bus lane fines in the borough.
I’m not much interested in the internal landscape of people who feel threatened when their fellow countrymen use obscene language and so try to brush it under the rug as far as Sandwich, or Canterbury. The guidelines for PSPOs, which I sort of read, ask custodians of public morality to consider “to whether prohibitions in one area will displace the problem behaviour elsewhere”.
Are Thanet swearers that organised? Will they think: “I feel a profanity coming on, I must get on a bus to Deal, where they are more civilised?” Prod such people, in my experience, and you find nothing: they are an abyss, which makes them sound more interesting than they really are.
Of course, it was a David Cameron initiative, when he had recovered from wanting to “hug a hoodie”: that is, someone who went to a cheaper school than he did. Cameron, who gets more credit for being a competent prime minister than he deserves because he doesn’t have a mad face, was about to strip the state, and what better accompaniment to austerity than to remove people’s ability to express their feelings about it?
Bad governance and illiberality are twins, not poles. Austerity’s intellectual foundations (I’m being polite for a column about swearing) predisposed that a fair proportion of the (non-Tory) population was scum, and the rest must be protected from them. I suspect that was the beginning of the sequence of public incivility that exploded into violence last week: you can have cruelty without profanity, and the first is worse.
Last year a man swore heartily at me in my own garden and, though I did not enjoy it, it never occurred to me to mind his language
I’m fairly convinced that, if you were to poll the British people on whether you could swear in public — there already being sanctions for threatening behaviour and assault — they would say yes. In olden times taverns would have a public bar, where you could swear, and a lounge bar, where you could not. If you did swear in the lounge bar, a man who had just sworn jovially at you in the public bar might punch you for using profanity in front of his wife.
Last year a man swore heartily at me in my own garden (it being in Cornwall, a minor parking infraction was the cause) and, though I did not enjoy it, it never occurred to me to mind his language, because I never mind mine. I just didn’t want him to hit me in the face and, because he gave free rein to his language, he didn’t. In defending the PSPO, a spokesman, who could plausibly be AI, said that banning swearing would make Thanet safer. He doesn’t understand human nature.
Of course, it’s an assault on the usual villains: street drunks, who have enough to worry about without being forced to curse their lives in polite language; working-class men, again; the ever-terrifying youth; and on wider truths too, such as Thanet being unlovely, an idea that now lacks a language, and that is dangerous. What I now call the Thanet Protocol is a mirror of the “Be Kind” ethos, which, far from improving people, seems to coerce them towards ever more savage self-deception and unspeakable cruelty.
People don’t hate less when the (in this case, anodyne) instruments of their hatred are removed. They hate more, and creatively. If the Thanet Protocol remains — it is being challenged — I expect to see an increase in minor property damage, dog fouling, and, for the pseudo-intellectuals, an interest in the themes of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
It’s fashionable, in these fretted times, to wonder what exactly constitutes our national identity. With Chaucer an early national poet, and he was filthy (read The Miller’s Tale): perhaps it’s this?
