They should ban that sort of thing!

Bans save lives - but they also ruin lives. To get them right we need an ethical and moral framework that helps us to understand the difference.

What is my relationship with banning things? It's complicated.

I'm one of life's natural liberals. I can't get exercised about what other people do with their lives. Dinner at Tony Macaroni, an Adam Sandler movie and home to make out listening to Adele and your old Phil Collins albums? Knock yourself out. Champagne and oysters, a sex party and then a 12-hour acid trip? Be my guest.

If no-one who has not given consent is affected and there is no coercion, why on earth would I care what people do? But, on the other hand, I broadly support the ongoing ban on the high street sale of enriched uranium. Any uranium libertarian in me comes second to the awareness that there is too great a threat to the wider good from personal possession.

So there's your parameters – everything in between is a negotiation, and not a negotiation I think we are handling very well just now. At one moment we seem to be banning things willy-nilly, at another there are things that seem incredibly harmful we do nothing about. We seem to love a symbolic ban, seem to think we don't want a regulatory ban but then appear to really like regulatory bans. I shall explain this in a minute.

This is all live this week because of two big and important issues, one important, one important precisely because it isn't important. As with so much it the modern world we go running up to these issues and react impulsively. I am going to share my own criteria for coming to decisions by looking at some examples.

Let's start with Kneecap, the excellent, exciting and exhilarating Irish punk rap group. These kids have an almost supernatural ability to get under the skin of the British establishment. They are unafraid to dive in to issues people are afraid to talk about, and they're not overly concerned about having your or anyone else's permission to do so.

But it's not really their blistering take-down of British imperialism and its appalling track record in Ireland and elsewhere that is getting to the powerful just now, and let's be honest, it's not their throwaway comments about the merits of disposing of your MP. It's Israel. It's always Israel. They have taken an unapologetic, forthright position and are using the kind of language the rest of us are afraid to use to describe what they see.

This is the function of art, or one of them. It can be cosy and functional, but is is also there to challenge. Bans and speech are always contextual. If we do not give our artists leeway, we do incredibly harm. I can remember watching the awful Rodney King incident and the police brutality that followed. I of course own NWA's Fuck Da Police, the blistering, politically-incendiary response. And I saw all the calls for 'something to be done'. Naturally, it wasn't about the police.

The powerful love silence and consent and polite language they can ignore. They don't like being called out as fervent supporters of genocide. That is why it is really important that as many people as possible call then fervent supporters of genocide in the most eye-catching way they can. You have guns, we have record players. You're not afraid to use your guns, we're not afraid to use our record players.

From DH Lawrence to Kneecap, we must, must, must grant generous space for art to upset us. Alongside our record players we have placards and our feet. When they stop us using placards and our feet, we're in trouble – and they're trying. Many of you will have followed the fact that Britain is now one of the most repressive western democracies when it comes to the right to protest.

The pretexts for protest bans proliferate as fast as rich people can think them up. When they do 'catch' someone in their ban now they are explicitly using disproportionate sentencing to scare off others. The worse the powerful get at running our lives for us, the more they need to prevent us expressing our displeasure about it. Protest is inconvenient like water is wet. That is its point, its purpose.

For someone on the left, those are pretty straightforward positions. Let me give you a more difficult one; Orange Order marches. I am from Lanarkshire and have had the usual hair-raising experiences with sectarian violence from both sides. If I'm honest I'd like it if both sides would magically disappear. But they won't, so what rights do they have?

There is little about an Orange march that isn't unattractive to me – but the same is the case with the Adam Sandler movie night I opened with. I also recognise that, like it or not, the Scots Ulster community are a real community with a real culture and history. I don't like some of the practices in strict Islam either but I'm very uncomfortable with talk of banning them.

We can't have full-on hate speech and no-one should be allowed dangerous provocations (like marching past churches that you are hostile to), but the Orange Order is my Kneecap. They make me uncomfortable with things I don't agree with. I can't be hypocritical about this. I am afraid the 'ban it!' bar has to be set pretty high when we're talking about real communities with real cultures and histories. The alternative is a dark place...

“From DH Lawrence to Kneecap, we must, must, must grant generous space for art to upset us”

But what connects all those cases? They are all an assumption of leeway for people against power. What about the other way round? What about when we ban things people do because power thinks its bad? Bet I hate that stuff, dontcha?

Nope. There is a simple question I always ask first – who is protecting who from what? It's the uranium point again. I favour using power to restrain personal action where personal action is measurably bad. I wouldn't ban smoking, but I absolutely supported the ban of smoking in trains, and then in all public places. You have a right to smoke; you don't have a right to make me smoke.

You'll laugh about this if you're not old enough, but when they first proposed banning smoking on trains, you got opinion articles in mainstream media suggesting that the inevitable outcome of this was civil unrest and bloodshed. Seriously, it was claimed people would fight and die for their right to smoke on a train. They didn't, they shrugged and were delighted to get home not stinking of smoke.

The hysteria got louder over smoking in public places. That was going to be civil war. People will not stand for being told what they can and can't do. Except if you were to hold a referendum on reintroducing smoking in public places now, my guess is you'd be absolutely trounced. This is what I mean about people liking protective bans – people like being protected.

This is the second big 'ban its story – social media and kids. Adults are blowing off about how we can't possible imagine that we can mess with the children's social media. The children, meanwhile, are overwhelmingly begging for protection. A shocking 80 per cent of children do not think they are being protected anything like enough.

Here we reach the real problem; the time lag between the conclusive knowledge that smoking was really bad for you and the various bans which prevented passive smoking being all-but compulsory was... 50 years. Half a century before science really changed policy. Why? Because the tobacco industry pioneered a set of strategies for preventing policies that protected the public.

They are simple strategies; ignore until you can't ignore, then sow doubt where there is certainty, then spend money on PR making it about something else altogether. The key phase is 'doubt'. They created doubt where there wasn't any by funding fake science. It only took one in 100 studies to question the other 99 and this was a 'split debate'. The tobacco industry is and was evil.

But it was the pattern set by them that handed the oil industry its playbook for ensuring ongoing climate change damage. Doubt, doubt, doubt we hear. Then it's 'oh, but there are so many different and competing options' – yeah, like carbon capture and storage which was invented by you to create competing options and more doubt, lies they could sell the politicians. It's still happening.

It's only just starting to happen with Ultra Processed Food. Depressingly, this is now heavily owned by the tobacco industry and you can hear it all over again – doubt, evidence isn't strong enough, freedom of choice, we're the future... So regulation is not even on the horizon. The politicians love to be presented with enough doubt to not do something they don't want to do.

Thus it is with social media. It is to 'simplistic' just to ban it during school hours, we hear. We can barely regulate it. Personal choice, it's down to the parents, give the kids a lesson on how not to get addicted – anything but do anything. And, just as the media was heavily financed by tobacco industry so propagated the 'doubts', now it is funded (or their funding is gate-kept) by social media. Expect lots of complications and doubts and whataboutery.

This of course doesn't appply to when you're only passing hate speech legislation, because that's about banning things 'poor white kids do' (they convince themselves). That was contested and full of very serious doubts, but not like the science around tobacco, eh? Just pass it anyway. Poor kids don't have lobbyists.

In fact, since we're finding excuses, was banning cigarettes for children really necessary? What about an education campaign about safe use? It will keep them entertained while on a break from cleaning chimneys. (A blanket ban on sending weans up lums? Surely it's more complicated than that – I'm sure the Tony Blair Institute is preparing a report as we speak...)

Banning things is complicated. When it comes to art and culture and communities and tradition and history, tread very, very lightly. When it is about controlling people, don't do it. When it is mainly about protecting the powerful from the plebs, fight back. But where it is protecting the plebs from the powerful, get it done and don't listen to the powerful.

Banning things is a very powerful way of saving lives – if they are being prayed on by corporations. Banning is also a very powerful way of destroying lives. And of course there is a lot of grey in the middle. If we don't have a moral compass to tell us which is which, the powerful will screw us over.