Hello and School with Brendan O'Neill, Nadine Strossen and Paul Coleman.

The event is free and open to the public and you can get tickets by going to Spiked-Online

dot com and clicking events in the top right corner.

For this spike podcast special, we spoke to panelists Paul Coleman.

Paul is the executive director of the Alliance defending freedom

and is author of censored how European hate speech laws threaten free speech.

Here we get a taster of the discussion to come and find out what Europe can teach the rest of the world

about the dangers of criminalising hate.

This is from a junior minister of the UK government.

She said the counter-extremism strategy has been a future proof for

future types of extremism that we cannot possibly imagine. So essentially

the government's saying that they want to create a concept of extremism that is so fluid that is so moveable and changeable that it will capture speech in the future they can't even possibly imagine and they're proud of this they they see this is a great thing the idea that you can future proof restrictions on speech is just a terrifying concept and a window into

the mentality of many governments across Europe.

It's become something of a cliche to say that hate speech is not free speech.

Every European country has some kind of criminal law against hateful, insulting and offensive

speech, but at the same time, freedom of speech

is widely understood to be a fundamental human right

and a cornerstone of democracy.

I started by asking Paul how easy it is

to distinguish between free speech and hate speech.

It's hard to define what a hate speech law is because there is no universally agreed definition of hate speech and so lots of different people say hate speech is

different things and normally when you look at definitions it's just a lot of

...