“Doing the Right Thing helps us put our values in practice.” This standard piece of corporate-speak is what informs daily life at Severn Trent Water, according to its website, where, in a message to staff and investors, its chief executive, Liv Garfield, lists its business values as Taking Pride, Having Courage, Embracing Curiosity and Showing Care.
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).
I wonder whether the company is pondering this week how these expressions of corporate intent sit with the latest controversy to hit the privatised water company – the sacking of an employee who, on an internal message exchange, submitted a post on the anniversary of the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists.
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.”
was taken down by the company, Mr Joshua was suspended, and later sacked for gross misconduct after a disciplinary hearing. He has since appealed against his dismissal, but we now know, thanks to the Sunday Telegraph, that he was unsuccessful. In the manner of such tales of our time, we are invited to take sides: crudely, to believe that Mr Joshua is a warrior for free speech and Severn Trent provides the most egregious example of cancel culture.
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.
First of all, context is everything. We know that the situation in the Middle East inflames feelings like very little else. So Mr Joshua must have known that his post was not an entirely innocent expression of opinion: it was bound to stir a reaction, and his use of the words “Zionist” and “Islamist” took it away from the merely personal into the political.
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.”
Sources at the company made it clear Mr Joshua had in the past made political comments, including opposition to the company’s LGBT inclusion days and South Asian heritage events.
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.
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Parents, there's no excuse for not protecting your children online
Read MoreSo what, you may say? How could anyone defend what happened on 7 October? Hamas is, by law, a proscribed terrorist organisation.
And were this posted by Mr Joshua in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, I doubt whether many would have taken issue with him. Again, context is all: we are aware of what has taken place in Gaza since the attacks, which also gives his post a political dimension.
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.
At his disciplinary meeting, Mr Joshua was told that “the language used in the post caused offence to employees with different perspectives, particularly those with Muslim or Palestinian backgrounds”.
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.
It was easier for Severn Trent to sack Mr Joshua than it was to confront those who found his opinion offensive and reason with them. It is, of course, a very unfashionable opinion, but my view is that there is no obvious right or wrong in this case, and we must strive to preserve the nuance.
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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