The hours they must have spent carefully selecting these words, which they felt would be both a rallying call for stakeholders and a bulwark against public criticism (the company was fined £2m last year for allowing 260 million litres of raw sewage to illegally flow into the River Trent, and Ms Garfield herself has come under attack for her £3.2m pay packet).
A sewage worker called Damon Joshua wrote the following on Severn Trent’s intranet, used by its 8,500 or so employees: “One year ago our valued partners and friends, Israel, were horrifically attacked by a group of violent and disgusting terrorists. I can say with confidence today that the vast majority of STW’s employees stand in solidarity with our Jewish, Israeli and Zionist colleagues against the evil of Islamist terror.”
Of course, neither is wholly true. But this singular and relatively minor set of circumstances does provide some important insight into one of the defining issues of our age: the limits of free speech.
A Severn Trent Water spokesman said: “This is a complex employee relations case and it’s important to be clear that this is not the whole story nor an isolated incident.”
And perhaps we will never get to the bottom of the precise details of why Mr Joshua was fired – but his case nonetheless provides a useful jumping off point for a broader discussion about free speech and offence.
square SIMON KELNER
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So what, you may say? How could anyone defend what happened on 7 October? Hamas is, by law, a proscribed terrorist organisation.
It is important here to recognise that this platform in question was owned by Severn Trent, and, while available for the exchange of opinions among its workers, the company has a responsibility not to publish content that may be offensive.
Which brings us to another touchpoint facet of this case. While there is a limit to free speech, there is no limit, it seems, to taking offence. It doesn’t matter how honest or reasonable the sentiment might be, if anyone finds it offensive, or it is perceived to be offensive in the judgement of others, that takes primacy over a person’s right to express said opinion.
We don’t have the freedom, on someone else’s platform, to make political statements, overt or covert, with which they may disagree. That’s not a feature of free speech.
But in meeting the challenge presented by today’s cacophony of ill intent on social media, we must also, to borrow from Severn Trent’s lexicon, have courage to “do the right thing”. That means standing up to those who use the act of taking offence to silence those with a point to make.
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