​It is remarkable if Kneecap can shout ‘kill MPs’

​It is extraordinary that Kneecap can call for MPs to be killed and then escape criminal sanction.

​We do not write that because we think that the courts should prosecute people for what they say.

Quite the contrary – we think that should almost never happen. This newspaper is almost 300 years old and when you look at the first editions of it, from the early 1730s, you see the emergence of journalism and free speech alongside the appearance of the sort of democracy we all recognise today in the UK.

Over centuries a fine balance has been achieved between the right to free comment and expression and certain limitations to it, for example when you cause someone great harm by defaming someone’s character, or when revealing a secret might endanger life.

Only very rarely should the right to free speech be curbed. Insulting someone is nowhere near enough, nor gravely insulting them. But Northern Ireland has seen the boundaries of this debate, such as in 1984 when the loyalist politician George Seawright called for Irish nationalists and their priests who opposed the singing of the national anthem to be burned in an incinerator.

That despicable remark was made at a time when incitement to hatred laws were emerging to police the extremes of discourse.

But if Kneecap are allowed to call for the MPs to be killed, as one of them once did at a concert (they say they never seriously intended such violence), then there are two key observations:

The first is that the deep taboo around the murder of politicians, which exists for crucial (and obvious) reasons of civilised society, is put in serious peril.

The second is that as a society we cannot possibly justify jailing people for equal or perhaps even lesser hate speech, just because they do so from a perspective that is considered forbidden such as opposition to immigration.