Readers of the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown will know that she has been pretty consistent in arguing that free speech should have limits. "Words do violence to humans, sometimes more than sticks and stones," she wrote last year, citing the "gratuitous invective" aimed at Muslims such as herself by "toffs like Martin Amis and [Geert] Wilders and racists like the BNP". If a toff like Martin Amis should know when to keep his trap shut, it was only to be expected that she would retaliate after a rather less prominent irritant, a Tory councillor by the name of Gareth Compton, tweeted something as horrible as this: "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really." He broadcast this comment while listening to the Wednesday breakfast show on 5Live, where Alibhai-Brown contributed to a debate which is still available on BBC iplayer, headlined: "Should Britain butt out of another country's politics?"
Ms Alibhai-Brown told the Guardian that she considered the tweet to be incitement. "I'm going to the police – I want them to know that a law's been broken." Mr Compton tweeted, lamely, that he had been joking: "I did not 'call' for the stoning of anybody. I made an ill-conceived attempt at humour." Soon after, a spokeswoman for West Midlands Police said: "We can confirm a 38-year-old man from Harborne has been arrested for an offence under section 127 (1a) of the Communications Act of 2003 on suspicion of sending an offensive or indecent message." Meanwhile, the Conservative party suspended him indefinitely. In the House of Commons, Steve McCabe, the Labour MP for Selly Oak, asked for an official response and a "debate about the House's attitude to the barbaric policy of ritual stoning to death in Iran". He was assured that there are no plans to introduce it here.
Showing that she has not, as some think, overreacted to offensive phrasing by this instantly anointed pariah, Alibhai-Brown explained why Compton deserves everything he gets. "He knows I'm a Muslim," she wrote. "He didn't say 'shot', he said 'stoned to death'." So Compton's choice of words would have been peculiarly upsetting for the columnist and her family. Why, if it was not straightforward racism at the expense of a Muslim woman, did he select stoning out of all the different forms of execution that he might playfully have invoked? Presumably because, when Nicky Campbell introduced Alibhai-Brown into the BBC debate on Wednesday morning, his first question to her was: "Are we in any position to criticise countries for stoning people to death?" Instead of critiquing his choice of words along "you know I'm a Muslim" lines, she had replied no: "I don't think they have any moral authority in the world any more to lecture anyone on human rights abuses. That's one of the prices I think that's paid by countries that think there's one law for us and one for them."
In fact, what seems to have provoked Compton, as it evidently provoked her fellow guest, Brad Adams from Human Rights Watch, was Alibhai-Brown's insistence that Britain's tarnished history, in Empire as in Iraq, now precludes our political intervention on behalf of individuals struggling in countries where there is systemic human rights abuse. Adams called this "making the perfect the enemy of the good". Following her logic, which some find quite offensive, the current prime minister should not protest against, say, the imprisonment of the Nobel prize winner even when his fellow victims of persecution, such as Ai Weiwei, implore Britain to do so.
As for Compton – arrested and bailed in this country for failing to satirise a perceived insult to human rights in judicially approved language – he should probably abandon hope: section 127 of the Communications Act of 2003 is the very means by which Paul Chambers, author of another poorly judged tweet, was recently convicted of "sending by public communications network a message that is grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". That Compton's tweet is unmistakably a tasteless joke as opposed to a serious attempt to get like-minded Conservatives to impose the cruellest sharia punishment on the closest thing the Independent has to a national treasure will be no excuse. Last week, just as Ms Alibhai-Brown was refusing to accept Compton's apology, Paul Chambers was again repenting of his humour back in January, when he told his Twitter followers: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" Dismissing his appeal in Doncaster, the judge, Jacqueline Davies, said Chambers was an "unimpressive witness" and the tweet was "obviously menacing'.
Except it equally obviously wasn't. Or, at any rate, nowhere near as menacing as Harriet Harman on people with ginger hair. Or as Comment Is Free when it goes off on one. Or as the enemies of Mrs Thatcher in songs such as "Margaret on the Guillotine" or "Tramp the Dirt Down" – until her admission to hospital two weeks ago inspired a more reflective assessment, summarised in a website called Is Thatcher Dead Yet?
"Crap!" Is that what devout homicidal jihadists write when they want to be super-scary? Wouldn't they lose the exclamation mark? Have we missed something? Or is it possible that, far from being utterly humourless and out of touch, as is widely believed by twitterers, Davies is actually the one with a quirky, if widely misunderstood, comic talent and is even now weeping with laughter over what she privately believes to be positively the funniest verdict of her career? Like, how often do you get the chance to ruin the life of a harmless trainee accountant because of a proven non-threat when, on the streets, extremists do their best to look sinister and, on the internet, jihadists successfully incite murder, lol!
It may be a further cause for judicial hilarity that, as Chambers's solicitor, David Allen Green, has pointed out, anyone who electronically forwards the original Chambers tweet could be charged with the same offence, since the CPS has made intention irrelevant to prosecutions under section 127.
Unhappily for Gareth Compton, a blimpish-looking Tory who has strayed into a community dominated by more fashionable and liberal-minded twitterers, there may not be much sympathy if he meets the same fate as Paul Chambers. In fact, to the Twitter-averse, any setback experienced within this often fatuous little world might not look like much to bother about.
But if Paul Chambers is worth crushing, rather than cautioning, who's next? It is the very disproportion between aimless, personal tweeting and this truly menacing over-reaction that should worry the twitterers' fellow citizens. Or those, at least, who think this country can still teach China's politburo a thing or two about free speech – only joking, Yasmin :)