SPEAKING IN TONGUES

In the ‘Eight­ies, when I was in my twen­ties, like many oth­ers I lis­tened to a lot of punk rock, start­ing with the Sex Pis­tols’ scream of ‘God save the Queen/And the Fas­cist regime’, through to Crass’s anti-Falk­lands War chant ad­dressed to Mrs Thatcher ‘How does it feel to be the mother of a thou­sand dead?’ (fol­lowed up by the lesser-known but equally un­for­get­table ‘Sheep Farm­ing In the Falk­lands’ which de­scribed the war as ‘An­other page of British his­tory to wipe the na­tional arse’). And let’s not for­get an­ar­chist Ian Bone’s song about the as­sas­si­na­tion at­tempt on Ronald Rea­gan, ‘Dum-dum Bul­lets For a Dum-Dum Dummy’, or the Poi­son Girls’ fa­mous at­tack on po­lice con­trol and prej­u­diced judges: ‘Per­sons Un­known’. Etcetera. Many or most of these songs con­tained ob­scene lan­guage, and at­tacked the pow­ers that used to be mer­ci­lessly. And got away with it. To ex­press anger and out­rage, to bru­tally lam­poon the Roy­als, to den­i­grate mil­i­tary ac­tion in a time of war, and gen­er­ally to stick the ver­bal equiv­a­lent of two fin­gers up at the Es­tab­lish­ment in all its many guises, was a pop­u­lar pas­time back then. On one oc­ca­sion, the po­lice did con­fis­cate some copies of Crass’s ‘How Does It Feel’ from sev­eral record shops, but it would never have oc­curred to the Old Bill - or any­one else for that mat­ter - to sen­tence the mu­si­cians in­volved to sev­eral years in the slam­mer. And yet this is ex­actly what has just hap­pened to the rap­pers Valtònyc from Ma­jorca (three and a half years) and Pablo Hasél from Cat­alo­nia (two years, with a pos­si­ble fur­ther three years if he can’t pay an ad­di­tional €40,200 fine - which he can’t). Both are ac­cused of ‘ex­al­ta­tion of ter­ror­ism’ and lèse-ma­jesté. The first mis­de­meanour car­ries a min­i­mum pun­ish­ment of three years for ‘di­rect provo­ca­tion or in­ci­ta­tion to com­mit ter­ror­ist acts’, ac­cord­ing to ar­ti­cle 578 of the Span­ish penal code. As Amnesty In­ter­na­tional Spain has pointed out in a re­port pub­lished last month en­ti­tled ‘Tweet If You Dare’, ar­ti­cle 578 en­ables the po­lice to ar­rest and charge an all but lim­it­less swathe of tweet­ers and mu­si­cal artists who - wit­tingly or not - have trans­gressed the bounds of what the state re­gards as po­lit­i­cally ap­pro­pri­ate. And if that sounds a lit­tle un­usual in a 21st cen­tury EU coun­try, then the lèse-ma­jesté law is sev­eral de­grees weirder. A mere in­sult to the King is re­garded as a hate crime for which you should be put away for at least 18 months. (Valtònyc’s own sen­tence con­sists of two years for ‘ex­alt­ing ter­ror­ism’ plus one and a half for cock­ing a snook at his Majesty). And to think that in Lon­don, 35 years ago we de­lighted in call­ing the Great and the Good every name under the sun, be­cause we knew that we were young and there­fore more pow­er­less than most but also that we could at least speak ir­rev­er­ently to power with­out fear of reprisal. Thank Christ we weren’t liv­ing in Spain today.