Cullingworth nestles in Yorkshire's wonderful South Pennines where I once was the local councillor. These are my views - on politics, food, beer and the stupidity of those who want to tell me what to think or do. And a little on mushrooms.
“You don’t protect free speech by allowing people to abuse it,”
So, in a long line of people who think free speech only applies when people agree with them, proclaims Stella Creasy MP. The context is a pretty in-your-face campaign from a pro-life group targeting her directly and politically. I have, as a former politician, a modicum of sympathy for Ms Creasy's discomfort at the campaign especially given the campaigners' preparedness to use her pregnancy as a rationale for their critique.
But that's it really. I'm prepared to lay into her opponents and tell them their campaign, for all its righteousness, is crass and verging on unpleasant. But there is nothing in that campaign, not a word or a picture, that represents an "abuse" of free speech. Bringing in the police, the media and her local Labour-run council to close down somebody else's argument is far more of an abuse of free speech than anything pro-life and anti-abortion groups have done.
It is Stella Creasy and all the others - left and right - who want to shut down robust debate, challenge and in-your-face argument (unless it agrees with them of course then it's fine). This is the real attack on free speech not that a pro-life group put up posters of unborn children on the streets of a pro-abortion MP. Yet the media response has been to go all gooey over Ms Creasy while failing to realise that she's telling other people that their speech is unacceptable.
Local council officials, on the other hand, were quick to respond to Creasy’s demands, using something called a ‘community protection notice’ to order the removal of the campaigners’ public education display. One can only assume that council officers concluded that the people of Walthamstow needed ‘protection’ against exposure to an alternative viewpoint.
Community Protection Orders come from the same suite of anti-liberty regulations as PSPOs (you can blame Tony Blair and Theresa May for these oppressive rules) - designed to allow public authorities to criminalise things that aren't criminal (such as a poster with a picture of an unborn child in full colour). It was a shocking abuse of power designed to protect the sensitivities of a politician and prevent people from speaking freely in public.
We've rather lost sight of this in the UK with our ever expanding surveillance state, PSPOs, ASBOs and hate speech laws:
"History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives
finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and
place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much
previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for
something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended
purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be
left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us
from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age.
The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is "one of the principal
characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation." Houston v. Hill, 482 U. S. 451, 463 (1987).
This is a dissenting opinion in the case - and here we're reminded of the chilling reality of these laws, a quote from Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria:
Sheltering from a sudden downpour in a parked car just off Brixton Road, London, are two of British music’s greatest new talents, and now biggest outlaws: Skengdo and AM. A fortnight ago, the Metropolitan police announced they had secured a sentence of nine months in prison for the two 21-year-old drill rappers, suspended for two years, for breaching a gang injunction issued in August last year.
I'm not going to pass comment on whether this pair of drill rappers are "two of British music's greatest new talents" but it is deeply concerning that they have been given a criminal record for singing a song. Let's be clear - if it is an attack on free expression to prosecute a bloke who taught his girlfriend's pug a Nazi salute then it is certainly an attack on that essential liberty to punish Skengdo and AM for a song, however edgy its lyrics might be.
There is an insidious tendency for the police, supported by politicians and the wider justice system, to use a variety of laws to target speech that they think presents some sort of risk. Tim Newman present a couple of examples - both attacks on speech by the police - on his blog recently:
Andy Mayfield, 53, was held in custody for 12 hours and strip searched under anti-terror laws after he started filming the cops, who were parked illegally outside their own police station in Ashton-on-Ribble, Lancashire in January. He was detained under the Terrorism Act and submitted to a rigorous questioning at the Newton Heath terrorism centre in Manchester before eventually being released.
And just today we hear that the police arrested and fined a man for covering his face while passing a trial of facial recognition technology:
She said they demanded to see the man’s identification, which he gave them, and became “accusatory and aggressive”.
“The guy told them to p*** off and then they gave him the £90 public order fine for swearing,” Ms Carlo added. “He was really angry.”
All this comes on top of Humberside Police checking the speech of a man who questioned the ideology of transgenderism (and retweeted a limerick).
It is a terrible idea that, because a group of musicians come from the same milieu as gangsters (and use their experiences in that environment as the narrative for their music) they should be classified as a "gang" thereby allowing the police to silence them via injunction:
The Met nevertheless decided to classify 410 as a gang, with the injunction declaring that 410’s activities, “including but not limited to the production of drill music videos … have amounted to gang-related violence”.
The use of gang definitions to target musicians (and their fans) has been shipped over from the USA (as Juggalos will tell you). One does wonder how they'd have dealt with the Rat Pack had they had these powers back in the 1940s?
The problem here is that, just as with Nazi pugs or Islamist "hate preachers", there are very few people prepared to defend people's right to speak when what they're saying is (in the eyes of many) distasteful, upsetting or incendiary. So I'll say it - Anjem Choudry shouldn't have been jailed for preaching, Count Dankula is a prat but that shouldn't be a crime, and Skengdo, AM and the 410 crew should be allowed to sing whatever they damn well want in their lyrics.
The reason for saying this isn't just because I want to be edgy but because giving the police and courts license to target these sorts of speakers allows them the same license to hound less notable members of the public - like the examples Tim Newman gave - for nothing more than giving a cop some lip or trying to hold them to account.
Plenty of you will have seen the ridiculous tale of Humberside Police investigating a "transphobic hate incident" that involved a bloke retweeting a limerick. There was no crime (Humberside cops are clear about this) but the police officer still felt that:
“We need to check your thinking”.
Take a second to absorb what this means. What exactly is the police officer doing here? The message seems to be 'you didn't break the law but you thinking is wrong and we have to correct you'. Here's officer's words:
“Although none of the tweets were criminal, I said to Mr Miller that the limerick is the kind of thing that upsets the transgender community. I warned him that if it escalates we will have to take further action. If someone comes forward and says: ‘I’m the victim of a hate incident and it’s really upsetting me’, then we have to investigate”
We have reached something of a tipping point over the transgender issue. It's not that one or other side in the debate is right or wrong but rather that one side - the side saying that a bloke in a dress doesn't become a woman just because he says he's a woman - is being threatened by the police and excluded by public authorities simply for expressing that opinion.
The hardest part about defending free speech has always been supporting people's right to say things that you find unpleasant or offensive. But this is necessary if we are to have a free society - without liberty in speech all other liberties become compromised. Here's Richard Sambrook, director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University:
...it’s a basic liberty. Intellectual restriction is as serious as physical incarceration. Freedom to think and to speak is a basic human right. Anyone seeking to restrict it only does so in the name of seeking further power over individuals against their will
Yet hardly a day passes without another example of our rights to speak being curtailed - from the new blasphemy laws of "hate incidents" through advertising bans to the use of obscure laws to curtail comedy. The police, local councils and self-appointed 'hate crime' organisations conspire to promote the myth that our society is peculiarly hateful and getting more hateful by the day. Politicians pour their souls out about trolls to their pals in the media, calling for bans on anonymity, regulation of social media and a host of other limits on the public's right to challenge those who hold power.
I raised this issue - slightly clumsily - at a Bradford Council scrutiny committee, pointing out that the police seemed far more concerned about hate "incidents" than actual crimes like burglary. Bradford Council employs a 'lead' on hate crime but not on burglary or robbery or indeed any other crime. We run adverts encouraging people to report hate incidents providing special hotlines, hundreds of places and spaces where reporting can be done. People are encouraged to see hate in clumsy language, to mark particular political opinions - not being a fan of mass immigration or thinking blokes in dresses shouldn't be allowed in ladies loos, for example - as uniquely hateful and requiring investigation and for the police to 'check your thinking'.
“There is a complete disconnect in respect to these priorities and the priorities of the communities I represent, and I think police lose credibility when they they focus on things that aren’t the concerns of the public.
“According to this report there has been 6,000 burglaries in the past 12 months. There is one reference to that in the report. I know from speaking to people that burglary is the single biggest concern of the people I represent.
“However, there is more focus in the report on hate crime, which I call ‘the new blasphemy.’ It seems you are putting effort and money trying to get more people to report someone writing something mean on Twitter rather than choosing to prioritise burglary.
“The only reason there is a rise in hate crime is because you are fishing for more people to report it.”
Free speech matters. It is time we started to challenge how public authorities - those who hold power over us - are curtailing free speech and using these controls to prevent people raising genuine and legitimate concerns about the policy choices of government and the actions of public servants.
Baffo’s Ganesh IPA carries an image of the multi-armed Hindu deity Ganesha holding a beer mug, a beer bottle, barley and what appears to be a hop cone.
In a statement, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, Rajan Zed, said that the “inappropriate usage of Hindu deities, concepts or symbols for commercial or other agendas” was unacceptable as it would “hurt the devotees”.
Zed added that linking an alcoholic beverage with a Hindu deity was “very disrespectful”.
Ganesha, traditionally depicted as having multiple arms and a human body with the head of an elephant, is the Hindu god of wisdom and is known as the ‘remover of obstacles’.
Baffo describes its 5.8% IPA as a double malt amber-coloured craft beer brewed in the English IPA style.
It seems that, despite the offence taken at this blasphemy from the Universal Society of Hinduism, the brewer in question isn't budging and plans to carry on selling the beer. The organisation making the complaint is based in Nevada (and seems to have a thing about searching for beers using iconography from the Hindu pantheon as this micro brewery in Keighley discovered) and say:
“Usage of Hindu deities, concepts or symbols for commercial or other agendas is not okay as it hurts the devotees."
The central argument here isn't the fact of the blasphemy - “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” as the second commandment puts it - but rather that followers of the religion might be upset at others' blasphemy. It's a second order modern blasphemy that, at least in Europe, seems to be supported by the human rights courts:
"An Austrian woman's conviction for calling the Prophet Muhammad a pedophile did not violate her freedom of speech, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday.
The Strasbourg-based ECHR ruled that Austrian courts carefully balanced the applicant's "right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria."
I don't consider that calling Mohammed a paedophile is done for any reason other than, as the court observed, "...having been aimed at demonstrating that Muhammad was not worthy of worship." The problem is the bit about "preserving religious peace in Austria" where a collective concern (followers of Mohammed might be unpeaceful if people are gratuitously rude about their prophet's matrimonial arrangements) is imposed on an individual right to speech. We should be concerned, moreover, that protecting religious 'feelings' is given as a reason to suppress speech.
This second order blasphemy where the crime is the upset caused to worshippers rather than the blasphemy itself sit oddly at a time when the West in general and Europe particularly is becoming less and less religious. And, as the Irish will vote today, specific blasphemy laws are seen as anachronistic (it's pointed out that, until Stephen Fry said something rude about God, the Irish had rather forgotten they had a blasphemy clause in their constitution).
For us Brits it took 30 years from the 1976 prosecution of Denis Lemon and Gay News for publishing a James Kirkup poem about Jesus being gay before we finally rid ourselves of any laws specifically criminalising blasphemy but now it is allowed for us to use religious symbolism satirically, attack the tenets of religions and call their founders rude names. Except, it seems, if doing this offends "religious feelings" or undermines "religious peace". I am reminded how I wrote, only a few days ago, how identity politics was creating a new form of blasphemy law:
We will have a scripture written down in legalese by government, police, CPS and courts with hate speech being to offend against these commandments - in effect what we'll have is a 21st century blasphemy law. And it will be a blasphemy law enforced by the unholy alliance of fanatical partisans, the Calvinists of Social Justice, and public authorities keen to be seen upholding the scriptures of political correctness. Free speech will have died.
I hadn't expected, when writing this about the widening reach of so-called 'hate crimes', that these would be used to reintroduce the crime of blasphemy - at least as regards Islam (Ganesh beer and gay Jesus have yet to find themselves in the European human rights courts although the UK Supreme Court has rules on gay cakes). The outcome of the ECHR's decision won't be a rash of court cases but rather the gradual adjustment of public diversity policies all wrapped round a wider definition of Islamophobia to encompass upsetting Muslims rather than just being prejudiced against Muslims.
I think we are watching as the right to speak as we see things, even if that upsets people, is being ended. People will still tell us they think free speech is important but then ruin this truth by saying that some forms of speech aren't free speech - "hate speech isn't free speech" they'll assert expecting us to nod and say "of course we can't let people say that sort of stuff". This isn't free speech it's exactly the same as that stiff old world of blasphemy laws where politicians, courts and public authorities decide what you are or are not allowed to say. Welcome to 21st century blasphemy where the possibility of offence - even faux offence from an obsessive little organisation in Nevada - is sufficient for your speech to be banned. As Ireland votes to remove its blasphemy law, the ECHR puts it back in!
The words of Henry II are remembered because some of his knights took his exclamation of anger and frustration as a call to arms and proceeded to murder the priest in question, Thomas Becket. These words came to my mind as I pondered where we are going with laws to control 'hate speech' and, in passing, the high profile release of Anjem Choudary from jail on completion of his sentence for terrorism. A reminder of what the judge said at the time:
“The jury were sure that you knowingly crossed the line between the legitimate expression of your own views and the criminal act of inviting support for an organisation which was at the time engaged in appalling acts of terrorism.”
The important thing here is, however, that Choudary wasn't jailed for any acts of terrorism but for saying that the cause of ISIS was a good cause - he was jailed for his words not his deeds. We consider, in the manner of these things today, that his speech was hateful and sought to promote ideas that endanger the values of our civilised nation. Surely, if you believe in free speech (and think, for example, that Jeremy Corbyn promoting the cause of Hamas is OK) then you need to ask why our civilised, free nation felt it right to lock up Choudary for what he said but lets Jeremy lead the Labour Party.
The problem with wanting to deal with the case of Islamism and its promotion of violence is that it opens up the argument for reciprocity - if supporters of Tommy Robinson attack Islam in hateful terms they become 'far right' and must receive the same mistreatment as Anjem Choudary. It's only fair. So, to execute this fairness, we must believe that the threat from the 'far right' to the values of our civilised nation is as great the treat to those values from Islamism.
So far, so good. The targets are extremists of one sort or another so (at least as the 'stop hate' theorum goes) fair game. But where's the boundary? How far into conservative Islam do we go before hate becomes the expression of religious faith? And how far leftwards from the scarier parts of the 'far right' do we go before hate changes to allowable political rhetoric? It is impossible to answer these questions satisfactorily - Boris Johnson talking about letter boxes was crass and unpleasant but hardly hate speech. Or was it? Look at the debate in the Labour Party over what constitutes antisemitism - for some that party is now an institution wedded to the idea of antisemitism whereas others say instead that all Labour leaders are doing is highlighting the cause of the Palestinians. Who is right?
The problem with using laws to try and prevent hate speech is that it requires a set of what are, in effect, commandments setting out those things which are not permissible in speech. The principal of these commandments isn't enshrined in statute but is a definition agreed by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service:
"Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person's disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity."
The caveat here, of course, is that this hate crime definition requires a criminal offence before it can be invoked. And, conveniently, various laws exist that criminalise speech (Public Order Act 1986, Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 are a few examples - remember Choudary was done under anti-terrorism laws) thereby allowing for the criminalising of pretty much any speech touching on matters referred to in that hate crime definition. It's this definition that has resulted in women's groups getting investigated for 'transphobia' while conducting a campaign to keep the law unchanged.
Not only is all this - the privileging of certain groups and opinions - an assault on free speech (anyone who thought it wrong to local up Count Dankula for teaching his girlfriend's pug a Nazi salute should also be worried about to jailing of Anjem Chaudary for his unpleasant, if less humorous, speech) but it also becomes a tool for bullies and mobs. Because the police (and the agencies, often private agencies for all their charitable status, they work with) encourage reporting of 'hate crime' the opportunity arises to use this as a means of closing down debate. This is what we've seen with the campaign around the current consultation on the Gender Recognition Act - loud opposing voices result in official intervention to prevent debate:
We recently received a request for a meeting to be held at Leeds Civic Hall by Women’s Place UK. Since accepting the booking, we have been made aware of further details regarding some of the views which have been raised by this group previously, which are not in line with Leeds City Council’s values on gender and equality. We have therefore decided that Leeds Civic Hall is not an appropriate venue for this event and have informed the organisers.
"...made aware of..." views - this is what we can expect as the hate speech agenda gets embedded. Because the voice of "transgender identity or perceived transgender identity" looms large in that definition (unlike being a woman), public authorities respond immediately to accusations of 'transphobia' even when such allegations are, at best, contested and, at worst, complete fiction.
All this seems a bit like a minority sport - trans versus TERFs isn't exactly mainstream in most folks' lives - but the direction of travel here is towards the further extension of hate speech interventions. The Law Commission says that hate speech definitions should encompass misogyny, ageism and perhaps even misandry. With each extension the degree to which our speech is policed becomes more and more intolerable while the mobs and bullies extend their domination of politics to the exclusion of modest, moderate and considerate voices. We will have a scripture written down in legalese by government, police, CPS and courts with hate speech being to offend against these commandments - in effect what we'll have is a 21st century blasphemy law. And it will be a blasphemy law enforced by the unholy alliance of fanatical partisans, the Calvinists of Social Justice, and public authorities keen to be seen upholding the scriptures of political correctness. Free speech will have died.
Over the sunny Bank Holiday weekend a lot of people who had nothing better to do with their lives (such as drink lager, have barbecues, watch cricket, sit in the garden) assembled in London on a rally for free speech:
Protesters flying national flags and holding placards decrying limits to free expression rallied at Whitehall after marching through central London from Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, a location seen as emblematic of free speech that has been the scene of several recent far-right rallies.
Now, while there's an irony at a march protesting free speech proceeding more-or-less without the authorities doing anything other than watching, there's a point to all this that matters. It's not about whether or not the mobb allows Tommy Robinson to get permanently chucked off Twitter but rather about the manner in which the idea that we should be free to speak our minds is now considered to be a mad, bad and dangerous thing. Not just by authoritarians but by people who probably lay claim to the title 'liberal'. It seems that expressing support for free speech can now be categorised as supporting the "far right":
Claiming freedom of speech as a value is something the American far right has been doing for years (aided and abetted by liberal dupes, naturally)
Well I don't know about you but, for me, free speech is one of those inalienable right things and I thought that the left were committed to the idea that human rights merited vigorous defence? It would appear that today, in our crazed looking glass way, the centre-left - once the bastion of support for rights - has given up on the idea of free speech. In its place is a movable feast of allowed and disallowed ideas, concepts, theories and words - anything, presented by the wrong person in the wrong place can be described as 'hate speech', thereby providing the left its justification for restricting speech.
The problem is that one person's 'hate' is another person's considered criticism of an ideology, attempt at argument or humour - preventing Jordan Peterson from speaking on US campuses, banning of Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel, and the trial of comedians for making bad jokes about blowing up airports or Nazi dogs. We are reminded, yet again, that free speech has to be fought and won with each generation. For much of the last 100 years, most of the left has been on the side of the good guys, the folk who think free speech - the chance to say things that might hold those in power to account - is worth a bit of offence and upset. Today this isn't the case, now most of the left - not just the fascist style left of Momentum but the whole spectrum from centrist social democracts to old unreconstructed communists - are opposing free speech. For sure, in this they're joined by other cowardly centrists in all political parties, but the thrust of the campaign against free speech is coming from the left, from its obsession with identity, with 'shutting down' voices that touch on these issues in what the arbiter of good speech determines as the wrong way - whether it's gender, race or religion.
We are still, in the main, a society where people can speak freely but the decision of mainstream - and left wing - politicians to stress identity and the prevention of 'hate speech' above the idea of liberty has meant the cause of liberty, the case for free speech, now sits with people who can be caricatured as 'far right' (in truth, for every actual fascist, there are thousands of libertarians of left and right). The left has given up on free speech:
Freedom of speech is no longer a value. It has become a loophole exploited with impunity by trolls, racists and ethnic cleansing advocates. They are aided by the group I call useful liberals – the “defend to the death your right to say it” folk.
Like Thurber's very proper gander, today's left believes that anyone expressing any view they dislike must be hateful and, therefore, driven from civilised society. To justify this position, its advocates will seek out the most shocking examples of crass and offensive speech -"look!", they'll shout, "you're supporting this vile stuff". And us defenders of free speech are left spluttering - we're not fans of Tommy Robinson's views and think Milo is a dickhead, so our response is mostly to shuffle off to the side and say nothing.
The reason that the left used to defend free speech is because without it things like trade unions, women's suffrage, gay liberation and civil rights wouldn't have happened. All of these things required brave men and women to stand up, seize their right to speak, and tell the powerful that things had to change. This is why we have free speech - not to allow racists to be racist or sexists to be sexist but to give the powerless the right to their voice. I believe this is worth a few tears, a little offence, and I don't understand why the left has given up on free speech.
Every now and then I get asked about why I'm in politics and, once I've done the self-deprecating bit about how no other business would have me, I get to the crunch. I am involved because free speech, free markets, free trade and free enterprise need defending. The systems of government, the lobby groups, the business organisations, the voluntary sector and 'thinking people everywhere' all conspire to limit and restrict your and my freedom to act. Challenging this sad truth is essential.
And the problem isn't capitalism, it's government. This isn't to say that big business is innocent - the amounts spent by business on lobbying government for law changes, subsidy, new trade barriers and more regulation remind us that many large organisations really don't like the idea of freedom. So when Corbyn-loving students tell me capitalism is corrupting, I get their point - hardly a day passes without one or other example of a big business getting some sort of protectionist fix or some new regulation aimed at preventing market entry. We've known this for a long while - it's the central theme of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - mercantilism, market fixing, cartels and protectionism, all those things the technocrats try to justify, prevent the growth of wealth, the opportunity for equality and the raising of people out of poverty.
I also understand how those young people are disgruntled at being 'Generation Rent', at having great fat student debt they probably won't pay off and at seeing my generation sitting snuggly on a pile of assets (but still moaning at having to use those assets to look after ourselves in our old age). But when Corbyn or other socialists try to say that these problems are some how a consequence of free markets, free trade or free enterprise, they are lying - even when they use the catch-all term of capitalism.
Housing in London is expensive because for sixty years we've run urban containment policies around the capital and for forty of those sixty years, London has generated more new jobs than it has new houses. And if you provide just six new homes for every ten new households, housing is going to get more expensive. This isn't the fault of the market, it's the fault of government for rationing the land we've got to build houses on. They call this planning and it's the basic building block of socialism - instead of having a free market, some folk in an office with a computer model decide what the price should be, how much should be made and how it should be distributed. It limits your freedom and it doesn't work.
Defending freedom is not, therefore, simply about the moral imperative of liberty but is justified for straightforward and practical reasons. Those freedoms - speech, trade, markets, enterprise - should be defended because they work, because they are the things that made us rich and, right now, are making poor people everywhere richer. The only places - North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe - where people are getting poorer are places where these freedoms are comprehensively rejected. Places where socialism - the planned economy - is the chosen model.
Everywhere I look freedom is under attack. Technocrats and business lobbyists saying import tariffs protect domestic business. Local councils saying limiting procurement options supports local economies. Planners saying the problem is the wrong plan not the planning itself. Farmers saying they couldn't operate without subsidy. Public health groups wanting to ban smoking in parks or to fix booze prices. Police forces calling for new powers to seemingly arrest anybody for almost anything. Housing lobbyists saying the solution is to fix rents not to build houses. Schools snatching sausage rolls from innocent children's lunchboxes. Mayors enforcing public morals by banning pretty women from advertising or drinking from the train.
And then we're told the problem is capitalism? It's not, the problem is that government - in cahoots with a bewildering lobby of charities, businesses and 'campaigners' - takes away freedoms. And we can't subdivide these freedoms - be cross about the loss of one freedom that's important to us while cheering on a ban on something we don't like. For sure some of these losses of freedom are less damaging than others but each loss - from daft rules on advertising vaping to 'Public Space Protection Orders' that make anything an official doesn't like a crime - represents a further restriction and another barrier to pleasure, enterprise or exchange.
I'm happy to defend capitalism - the idea that the rewards from business success goes to the people who put up the cash - but it's not as important as defending free markets, free trade, free enterprise and free speech. Those freedoms constrain the worst urges of business, protect us from the busybody and limit the oppressive instincts of government. We have become too glib about each new loss of freedom - even sometimes to the point of welcoming it because of the NHS or crime or community safety or, the favourite all-purpose reason, because of the children.
So let's get less hung up about whether something's owned by the people who invested, by the workforce or by the community and worry instead about those who want to take away your freedom to organise business how you want. Let's be bothered about government and business wanting to fix gas prices or food supply or where you can buy gin and lemonade. The good life we enjoy and that we'd like everyone to enjoy, was made possible by that free enterprise, by those free markets, and by that free trade. And underpinning all this is free speech - our right to speak what we see as truth, to promote our business and to challenge the assumptions and presumptions of those who govern us. Freedom matters - let's defend it.
Intolerant, judgemental, excluding, bigoted, closed-minded, sneering, insulting, rude, divisive, ignorant, aggressive and downright offensive. Shallow, unpleasantly personal, condemnatory, bullying and, sad to report, violent.
These are the sorts of words that spring into my mind when I consider our politics right now. I guess that, what with Donald Trump in the White House, Brexit and the rise of populism across Europe this is how many of you - especially the left wing ones - feel too. What you don't realise is that it's you I'm talking about. I'm fed up with the narrow, bitter little world that you inhabit and the manner in which you think anyone prepared to consider other opinions, ideas from the right, is essentially a bad person.
I've known I was a bad person for a long while. It's not just that I think capitalism is brilliant, empowering and liberating. No it's a wider conservative agenda - the bits about rejecting the world of equalities top trumps created by left-wing group think. It's about thinking that we should take people as individuals - in the round.
I know a bloke. Have a drink with him now and then. We'll call him Steve. He's a racist. And I've told him this loads of times. But I know he also fusses over elderly neighbours and will go out of his way to help someone hurt or stranded. I've seen him do this. So tell me, am I to reject him because he's a racist? Or should I mention his sin to him and continue to see the good that he does? Truth is it's better I hear his argument, engage with his concerns, than simply walk away.
But then I'm a bad person. I don't agree with your left-wing agenda. Take abortion - for sure I'm not opposed to it. But I do think it's a damned sight more complicated than the simple slogan 'women's right to choose' tells us. Yet people who don't agree with you about abortion - terrible people. Bad people. You know something? I want to hear those people, to treat what they say with respect.
A couple of days ago this gay, journalist 'came out' as a conservative. Now I appreciate that this is the USA where there's an enormous liberal temper tantrum going on but this little quote sums up for me the problem the left has with the idea that people don't all accept their worldview.
Frostiness spread far beyond the bar, too. My best friend, with whom I typically hung out multiple times per week, was suddenly perpetually unavailable. Finally, on Christmas Eve, he sent me a long text, calling me a monster, asking where my heart and soul went, and saying that all our other friends are laughing at me.
I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was outside of the liberal bubble and looking in. What I saw was ugly, lock step, incurious and mean-spirited.
The left wing commenters I read seem to speak a lot about values - how politics should be value-driven and how we should all fight to defend their values. Yet, these are values that think it's OK to ostracise someone from a community because he wrote an interview with someone right-wing? Think I'm exaggerating? Here's a chunk from a riposte to that gay journalist by another gay journalist:
Gay conservatives aren’t welcome in gay spaces because the people they support are an existential threat to our rights and our community. After all, queer spaces (such as bars, bathhouses, community centres, and even bookstores) were founded and instrumental in radical sexual politics and political engagement. You can’t divorce that from the social aspect, because doing so would deny the history of our community and the present reality of so many vulnerable LGBT people.
You're not allowed to be in the gay community if you're not left-wing.
For a while I worked for a voluntary organisation in Oldham. I never made a secret of my politics if anyone asked but I never brought those politics to work. I did my job, talked about all the other things in life but left political debate on the doorstep. This was hard because one or two colleagues with robust left-wing views were always ready to loudly proclaim their opinions (including in front of me, saying that conservatives are all ignorant, racist bigots).
You, my left wing friends, really must stop this (and I apologise at this point for the left wing friends who've already stopped). Not just because I'm telling you it's not very nice but because this attitude is destroying your parties and political prospects.
This chart, from Political Betting's Mike Smithson, shows that Labour is in third place among C2DE voters. Take a second to absorb this fact. This is, if you want a definition of it, is the 'working class'. Now ask yourself why? I know your response - the media, Brexit lies, racism, bigotry. Every single time this is the explanation from the left.
Perhaps you want to take a step back and consider whether it's actually your outlook and values that are doing the damage. That friend of mine, Steve. He's a Labour voter (except he's not any more). And there are loads more like him. Inadvertently, Paul Mason, left-wing former BBC journalist captured the dominant left wing view of people like Steve:
“They’re not working class Tories… most of the UKIP people are either people who haven’t voted or have flipped in a radical way from Labour. They are toe-rags, basically. They are the bloke who nicks your bike.”
The search for understanding of these voters stops once you've satisfied yourself that they hold views you consider unsavoury such as wanting fewer immigrants, worrying about Islamist terrorism, supporting the armed forces, liking grammar schools, backing tough penalties for criminals, thinking the international aid budget is too big, believing that lots of people on benefits are essentially scroungers. I could go on but you get my gist.
All of these unsavoury views have a sensible, considered policy response that, when people hear it, gets them to to nod - even if thy don't always leap enthusiastically to support that policy response. Right now these people are voting for right-wing' parties because those parties do at least seem to have half an ear for the things that are bothering folk. What's the left's response? Mostly it's to call them racist, homophobic, misogynist bigots. Or, for the more considered, to mutter about 'dark forces' and genies being out of bottles followed by arch references to the 1930s. That and calls for violence.
But then, I'm a bad person. A conservative. I probably don't share some of your values. I certainly reject the idea that we are defined by the groups you've placed us in - it really is possible to be a gay conservative or a black libertarian. Such people are not weirdos, strangely deluded folk who probably need a re-education camp (and who we should surely ostracise before their unsavoury views contaminate our caring liberal places). You, my left wing friends, have a long way to go - you've allowed this to happen:
Ranking institutions as either red, amber, or green in terms of how restrictive they are, the survey of 115 universities found that 108 – when taking university administration and students’ unions as a whole – censor or chill free speech to some degree. Some 73 were assessed as red, 35 were amber, and only seven were green, meaning that as far as Spiked was aware, they placed no restrictions on free speech and expression – other than where it was unlawful.
Red means that the university - often under pressure from left-wing student activists - has "banned and actively censored ideas on campus". And trust me on this one - no left wing ideas have been banned not even the most extreme of communist apologists for historic genocide and current oppression. Indeed some of these lovely folk are the very activists campaigning for restrictions on free speech.
The bitter, snarky, judging and excluding way in which much of the left behave - not just the extremes but people who'd consider themselves moderate - suggests that it is having something of a crisis. Now I know there remain open, engaging and thoughtful left-wing folk out there and I feel for them. But what I don't see is that openness to a diversity of ideas that once was the hallmark of modern liberalism. Those hippy values - peace, love and understanding - have vanished, replaced with a unwavering and judging creed founded in groupthink and the rejection of free speech.
daoku began watching star wars at different playback rates in order to do this but again it only lasted a while. He then purchased the exact cinema seats that were there in 1977 and placed them in his living room.He purchased 40 shop floor dummies, dressed them in 1970's clothes, placed them on the seats and watched star wars until the small hours.
That is just the tiniest of flavours...
It is good to know that, when you need one, you can find someone who has fine details of flag history and etiquette at his fingertip. James Higham is one such:
The ship is right, the three masts are right and the artist may well have been right in 1776 on the flags, though it seems not.
Some years ago, skateboarders old enough to buy cheap airfares would gather informally in small groups, take postbuses to the high places and board down the mostly empty mountain roads. Much fun. In the UK, the official reaction would be one of horror; the bansturbationists would emerge in force, the Chief Constable would appear on TV, MPs would demand new laws to ban boarders and local councils would deploy wardens to patrol all the steep roads with powers to seize boards. After all, the UK is a nation where it is now forbidden to roll a round cheese down a grass hill because of 'elf-n-safety.
Among all this frivolity there is seriousness. And nothing is more serious that protecting free speech. The Churchmouse reminds us that there appears to be something of an inconsistency in attacks on speech:
The group was created on May 14 with a post reading “Donald Trumps Hair Looks Like A Bleached Mop – Gordon Ramsey 2016.” The most recent post is, “What Is Your Weapon Of Choice?” Asking what weapon people would use to kill Trump if given the chance.
Me, I liked Facebook and Twitter better when they defended free speech rather than allowing government and the progressive mob to beat them into submission.
As a smoker, I’m feeling neglected. All the things we used to cause have moved on. We were the Grim Reapers who brought death and decay everywhere we went. Every disease, every illness was our doing. I was having fun with that.
As our intrepid freethinker observes - the fussbuckets are now obsessed with food.
It was only yesterday I commented on James Higham's post about die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter - the 'volunteers' who acted as eyes and ear for East German state. As James reports:
Almost every apartment building in the DDR maintained a kind of superintendent (known as a “Hausbuchbeauftragter”) who kept notes on who visited whom and when. In total, this group included around 2.1 million people, and many of them were willing to share their information. The Volkspolizei also had around 173,000 “voluntary helpers.” In addition, school directors, heads of youth organizations belonging to the “Free German Youth” (FDJ), election helpers and factory heads were also part of the army of potential informants.
My observation was that we should guard against any moves to empowering people to act as voluntary behaviour police.
This morning I awake to the news that the Metropolitan Police and Home Office have launched what the papers are calling a "trollhunter squad" with the intention of responding to 'hate speech' in social media - all part of an 'Online Hate Crime Hub'. Now this is, in one respect, just more of government wanting to control speech but this time there's another chilling aspect - die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter has arrived in England:
A team of volunteers will search out material they deem inappropriate on social networks and report it to the unit. The allegations will then be investigated and the culprits prosecuted, if caught.
That's right folks. A collection of self-appointed guardians of the web will act as informers, snitches, grasses. And any person with any sort of profile - political, business, artistic - will face constant scrutiny from these collaborators with those who want to suppress free speech. Here's a bit more:
...Twitter and Facebook will be asked to help fund a "community" element to the unit, in which volunteers "skilled in the use of social media" will "identify, report and challenge online hate material", it reports. The detectives' role will be "identifying the location of the crime" when online abuse is reported, and refer it to "the appropriate force area and social media providers".
The slow death of free speech in England continues. Just listen and you'll hear: "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" and "hate speech isn't free speech". We will see a step change in online fussbucketry as, with each passing day a new form of 'offensive speech' is discovered, reported to the authorities and punished. It's not just that £1.7m is a lot of money just to protect the sensibilities of some Twitter users but that we're licensing the worst sort of judgemental puritan as agents to enforce an attack on free speech. As I said in a Tweet - welcome to the Twitter Stasi.
Somewhere - I don't know precisely as I've not been paying it all that much attention - there's a gathering calling it self "Reclaim the Internet". My Twitter timeline is filled with a steady dribble of reports from this gathering - many from Labour MPs but also photographs showing earnest folk talking about trolls, abuse and how the Internet is a horrible place stuffed with nasty people who live under bridges.
Now I've no doubt - indeed I've witnessed it - that there are plenty of thoroughly unpleasant people hiding in corners of the Internet churning out pretty vile and personal stuff. Anyone who has encountered the less intellectual parts of the 'alt-right', especially the American 'alt-right', will have enjoyed a collection of choice insults, gun-toting threats and plenty of racism. And the sort of stuff that's levelled at Jewish public figures like Luciana Berger is straight up revolting.
So I get the idea of 'reclaiming the Internet' presumably drawing on the experience of 'reclaim the night' marches that have been a feature of feminist campaigns down the years. Indeed the use of moral suasion and solidarity to sway public opinion is pretty valuable - the fact of saying 'you're not going to stop us, this is our space too' is powerful.
What worries me is that we get - especially when there are politicians involved - a sense of 'something must be done' where that something is almost certainly some form of further constraint on free speech. It's fine for organisations - in the real world or online - to have rules and to enforce those rules (my local Conservative Club is pretty tough on bad language, for example) but when this becomes a means by which the difficult, the challenging and, yes, the unpleasant can be shut down warning bells should go off.
It's even worse if the result of these campaigns is that governments take 'something must be done' as permission for creating a policing system allowing argument to be closed down by reporting the 'abuser' to the authorities. Don't get me wrong here, there are times when this is absolutely right, but too often the opportunity is taken to close down real debate and, worse, to conduct a political attack using reporting.
The, now thankfully neutralised, 'standards' process in local government tells me that having a quasi-legal process driven by reports of supposed wrongdoing presents less scrupulous politicians with the opportunity to undermine opponents, to destroy careers simply through reporting someone to the beak. And it doesn't matter much whether the person reported actually did much wrong, the fact of the reporting is sufficient.
So when you see someone Tweeting "I've blocked and reported @pigeonpost for being a vile troll", what you are seeing is something that is an attack on @pigeonpost - by all means block and report but waving this fact around the Internet is pretty poor behaviour when it might be that the worst @pigeonpost has done is lost his or her rag (and it's not your call whether the medium's terms and conditions were breached). It's also indulging in the same trolling behaviour you're accusing @pigeonpost of using.
In the end the price of free speech is that people can be - and often are - pretty vile. This isn't just true online (as any visit to a city centre pub late on a Saturday night will tell you) but clearly causes some consternation online. So complain and protect, encourage good manners, insist that terms and conditions of social media are adhered to, but please don't use abuse as a reason for restricting speech, for giving to politicians, public officials and campaigners the tools to shut up those whose only offence is to be rude or inarticulate in their opposition to such folks' agendas.
Free speech matters. It is one of the protections - too few of them - we have from the worst of government. Governments don't like free speech and will find ways to limit it. Ways to stop you from saying what you want to say. Too often I pick up little whispers - "I know I'm not supposed to say this but..." And yes, sometimes this is racist, sexist, anti-gay but I can challenge that, explain why it's wrong - if they can't say it and take that challenge will they not remain racist, sexist or anti-gay? And won't that speech become hidden and in doing so become more extreme by developing only with affirmation and never challenge?
So, in reclaiming the Internet do remember that you're reclaiming a place of free speech, filled with the jokes, opinions, stupidity and rudeness humanity churns out. It's mostly ephemeral, often thin in thought, but for many people it's the way they get to sound off, to explode with fury, to celebrate, to share joy. Don't kill this because there's a few who think it grand to swear and cuss, to issue threats and to parade their nastiness for all to experience. Don't do in free speech for the sake of sensibility.
PS There probably is a Twitter user called @pigeonpost and I'm sure they're not remotely offensive - it was just slung down as an anonymous name, hopefully no-one's upset!
....
Asked whether a Labour government would break up media monopolies, he said: "Yes. We are developing a media policy which would be about breaking up the single ownership of too many sources of information, so that we have a multiplicity of sources. And actually promoting co-operative ownership and access, including local TV and radio stations and newspapers like The Morning Star."
There are many things he says that I find chilling but this statement from Jermey Corbyn is a terrifying attack on the free press and free speech. I know you're all going to talk about how Rupert Murdoch is incredibly evil because he owns lots of media and doesn't vote Labour. I know so many want to pretend - against all the evidence to the contrary - that Murdoch's businesses have some sort of monopoly over the media and the the man himself is Henry H. Potter spinning his scrurvy webs like some sort of sinister spider.
You are wrong. If there is a media monopoly in the UK (and I don't think this is remotely the case) then it is the BBC not News International. This isn't an attack on Aunty but simply an observable truth - in terms of what people out there are watching, the BBC remains the dominant media organisation and this applies especially to news.
What Jeremy Corbyn, in his pretty typical hard left way, is saying is that the private ownership of media with the aim of turning a profit results in distorted news. The argument will run on to suggest that monopolies in media are therefore a problem and need to be broken up. Yet the UK does not have a media environment that features any sort of monopoly (unless you look at the BBC, of course). If you focus just on national newspapers this still isn't true even though Rupert Murdoch 'controls' a goodly chunk of them. And more to the point those newspapers no longer represent people's preferred source of news - we've the TV, the radio, our lap-tops and increasingly assorted apps on our smartphones. Twitter and Facebook are probably more important as news sources than The Times or The Guardian these days.
No, the real reason Jeremy Corbyn wants to control the press is because - as he noted just before that comment above in the Morning Star - it is critical of what his 'caring, sharing new politics' is about. So just like his pals on Bradford council wanting to ban folk they disagree with, Corbyn wants to cripple a diverse media environment through threats of 'break-up', seizure and control. We are reminded again that Labour really does hate the idea of a free press.
I like Mohammed Ajeeb, he's like the progenitor of Bradford's Pakistani Labour politics and most of the time speaks with wisdom. I did once point out that he knew absolutely nothing about marketing (which was true) and now I will point out that we don't, as he suggests, need a new definition for free speech:
At a human level priding ourselves with ignominy is a camouflage for moral sanctimony. In these extraordinary times when different definitions of freedom of speech are banded about, there is pressing need for a more agreeable new definition. Perhaps this difficult task could best be undertaken by the world organisation like United Nations.
All this is suggested because Ajeeb wants people to stop being rude about the founder of Islam, Mohammed. Now, leaving aside the self-evident fact that Mohammed is pretty dead and clearly not upset by cartoons, there isn't any way in which you can 'redefine' free speech without making it 'not free speech'. This is because the definition is really straightforward - you're allowed to say stuff. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is a good guide:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There you have it, Ajeeb - you can gather, worship, speak and go about your life freely. That is called civilisation and should be our aim - that we place restrictions on speech is because some choose to kick out at peace and freedom, to cry out the you shouldn't be allowed to say that. If we must change it is to banish such people so we can live in a world where speech, worship, assembly and trade are free.
One of the first targets of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi organization were
books. This began in 1933, shortly after Hitler seized power in Germany.
He ordered leaders of the regime to confiscate and destroy any
literature deemed subversive to the National Socialist agenda. The
elimination of these documents was carried out in a ceremonial fashion.
Public book burnings were held for all the citizens to view. These
demonstrations were held in both Germany and Austria. All works authored
by Jewish, communist, pacifist, socialist, anarchist and classic
liberals were fair game.
It does seem that we have learnt nothing. Here - in the latest example of Labour's selective memory about free speech - is a proposal to ban Hitler's turgid racist tome, Mein Kampf:
“Of course Amazon – and indeed any other bookseller – is doing nothing
wrong in selling the book. However, I think that there is a compelling
case for a national debate on whether there should be limits on the
freedom of expression,” writes Docherty to Javid.
Of course Docherty is very careful to tiptoe around making a specific proposal to ban Mein Kampf but the very fact that he can countenance such a ban (or a limited ban where only a few specially licensed academics can view Adolf's incoherent racist ramblings) reveals just how much of a problem the left has with the idea of free speech.
The question for Docherty is where the line is drawn. Do we draw it, as he suggests around the idea of 'hatred' and if so what do we mean by hatred? Do we consider the consequences of a given writing - in which case Das Kapital is just as much a candidate for Docherty's Ban with its fomenting hatred of enterprise, initiative and free choice. And what are we do do about religious books like the Koran or Bible with their incitement to kill infidels, execute gays, stone adulterers and slice chunks off burglars? Do we ban them too?
What should worry us most isn't merely the fact of a Labour MP calling for books to be banned but the concluding rational that Docherty puts up:
Docherty said that the reality today is that if “someone puts the
contents of Mein Kampf on to a blog, the police would knock on their
door …
This is maybe true. And if it is, it is a damning observation of our supposedly free society. It scares me just how close we are to banning books simply because they promote ideas we find discomforting, disturbing or contrary to the current 'truth' and 'wisdom'. We need books - all of them, good and bad:
“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority
afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of
the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves”
So wrote Ray Bradbury in his passionate defence of the book, Fahrenheit 451. Docherty and the other banners or burners are scared, fearful the good men will be corrupted by words on the page. That we won't see through to the evil or some ideas - whether from Trotsky or Hitler, Guevara or Goebbels. Docherty and all the anti-free speech left are wrong. We are stronger, better and more decent than that - and we deserve the right to know evil for what it is.
I asked on Friday who would join George Galloway in attacking the idea of free speech (I know George dubbed it a 'free speech rally' in the same way that communist dictatorships call themselves 'democratic').
And we now have our answer - 'hundreds' turned out in last night's cold and snow for what is now being called a 'multi-faith' rally (I wonder how many non-muslims - Galloway excepted, of course - actually attended) and they heard George say:
"I am here to defend the honour of Muslims, Islams and Muhammad.
"These are not cartoons, these are obscene insults to the prophet Muhammad.
"The backlash against Muslims is under way in France and the UK.
"It seems there are limits to freedom of speech in France. That's hypocrisy, not democracy.
"For the sake of unity in our society, we have to demand from our Government the protection of our prophets."
So pretty clear from George there - he wants blasphemy laws that extend the (already excessive) privileges granted to religion and to Islam in particular.
And he was joined in this call by Imran Hussein, deputy leader of Bradford Council and parliamentary candidate for Bradford East:
"There is a big debate around freedom of speech. It is a fundamental right.
"Let's have freedom of speech, not freedom to openly insult.
"I was deeply insulted, deeply offended by the publication of Charlie Hebdo, in particular its depiction of the Holy Prophet Muhammad.
"There has been double standards and hypocrisy here."
So Cllr Hussein thinks that somehow he has the right not to be offended and that special protections - essentially a blasphemy law - should be granted to the faith he professes because him or others might be upset by that blasphemy. This is not free speech.
It really doesn't come as a surprise that George Galloway has come down on the side of being offended and opposing free speech. He will (quite rarely) grace Bradford with his presence tomorrow evening to join a protest rally under the banner of 'Our Prophet Our Honour'. This event - organised by David Humphreys, George's vicar on Earth - is explicitly against free speech and George is right there:
“While he totally condemns the killings, there is a feeling in the
community that there are problems facing Muslims about the issues of
free speech. These cartoons have provoked a great anger.”
I'm sure some people are angry about 'these cartoons'. After all, you've every right to be offended and upset by things that are written. But what George and his friends want is a privileged protection for one particular religion - they want the right not to be offended. And in doing this they want to remove the right to free expression from other people.
On Tuesday next week, Bradford Council will debate a motion that says:
This Council notes the deplorable recent terror attacks in and around Paris.
The Council reaffirms its commitment to the freedom of self expression, as contained within Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998.
The Council requests that the Interim Chief Executive write to Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, expressing Bradford District Citizens’ condolences for and esprit de corps with, the people of Paris and wider France.
It will be interesting to see what is said - and whether other councillors try to water down the commitment to support free speech. I am reminded that, on a previous occasion, Bradford's Labour Group voted down a similar motion (proposed in less shocking circumstances).
Update: In a slightly delicious reaction, Jason Smith - Bradford UKIP head honcho - has called for the event to be banned. Seems UKIP don't think much of free speech either! It also resulted in Galloway - having organised an anti-free speech rally - to make out he's defending free speech. Proof yet again how monumentally stupid UKIP folk too often are!
Baron Evans of Weardale used to be the head of MI5 which means that, when he expresses a view on security matters, journalists and broadcasters go into sombre, stern nodding-dog mode. So Evans gets away with saying this stuff unchallenged:
“Inadequate security will breed vulnerability and fear and that in turn will
tend to limit people’s ability to contribute to civil society, will tend to
provoke vigilantism and will tend to diminish people’s ability to exercise
the very civil liberties and human rights that we wish to sustain.”
My problem with this is that there is precisely zero evidence of 'vigilantism' in the UK. Nor is there any indication that - other than oddly in a little Pennine village - people are organising themselves in gangs to provide security or exact vengance.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not suggesting that we don't need the security services or security for that matter. Merely that the sort of language used by Evans is designed merely to frighten, to operationalise the H L Mencken definition of politics:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
I will however give Evans the benefit of some doubt - having spent a lifetime looking almost exclusively at the relatively small number of bad guys in the world, it's understandable that his mind is set to see those bad guys as the central problem facing democratic societies. Thus we get this observation from our retired spook:
...the world faced a build-up of trained terrorists not seen since al-Qaeda ran training camps in Afghanistan before 9/11.
We are, of course, expected to take this at face value. But it really is rather meaningless. So al-Qaeda ran training camps in Afghanistan but Evans gives no indication of numbers or the operational capability of those terrorists being trained. The reality is, I suspect, that we're talking about at most a few thousand (most of whom are safely losing a war in Syria against other Muslims) and Evans' former colleagues know who nearly all of them are. But by referring to 9/11, Evans takes us to a dark moment in our history - the worst terrorist atrocity in recent times.
The events in Paris remind us that there are people who would tear down our freedom and destroy the peace in which we (most of the time) live our lives. But we should not allow such doomsayers as Evans with their jaundiced view of humanity to set the security agenda. The truth is that, if we get vigilantism, it will be because people like Evans scared the pants off us not because of anything al-Qaeda, ISIS or Anjem Choudhary do or say.
...while there's still plenty of war, hunger, sickness, and poverty in the world, things are much better
than what they were only a few decades ago—not to talk about centuries
ago. We are still far from utopia, but the data is stubborn: We are
getting there. Fast.
However you assess the evidence and wherever you look people are safer, healthier, wealthier and happier (at least on average). The cynic would suggest that the likes of Lord Evans are conjuring up those hobgoblins so as to keep the security business going whereas others point to more powers for such folk as part of the reason. They are wrong, the main reason for the world being better is that more people have more freedom. It shouldn't be a surprise that the least safe, healthy, wealthy and happy places are places where security is absolute and government dominates everything.
And when we look at the Muslim world, we need to stop looking at it merely as the breeding ground for murderers like those in Paris but as a place where millions of people discovered they have a voice and are beginning to demand it's heard - by the military and traditionalist leaders as well as by the upholders of religious orthodoxy. The Arab spring may have turned into a pretty lousy summer but the new leaders of these places (as well as those in other places not touched by that spring) cannot put the voices back into a box.
So what to do? Integrate different kinds of people with each other by removing barriers and improving connectivity. By reintegrating street networks we can create valuable urban space. Arguably, allowing people to meet and interact in public urban spaces won’t threaten the security of the country and won’t corrupt morals as old players may fear it will. Rather, it might bring tolerance and promote reconciliation and reduce crime rates. Additionally, it will help in building trust between the regime and people.
My article is a call for a new strategy in which ‘anti-territorial’ programmes that are designed to break down boundaries between communities by encouraging social mix through increasing people’s freedom to construct bridges to other communities and overcome their isolation. In this respect, a new borderless Cairo might foster economic integration and urban competitiveness. I think that is the first step in security sector reform, otherwise this open plan jail will collapse and the prisoners of Cairo will be released.
The last open question that I will leave for the future to answer is: how long will the division between rulers and ruled remain?
This is the antithesis of the position that Evans and the security experts adopt. They want to manage - limit even - interaction, to ban certain activities, to control speech and to determine the sorts of fun that are permissable. Such people are brothers to both the fussbuckets and to the religious absolutists, to people who believe absolutely how people should behave in public and who use arguments about health, wealth, safety and happiness to promote their authoritarian agenda.
Forgetting of course that the thing making us healthier, wealthier, happier and safer isn't government but liberty. It's free trade, free enterprise, free assembly and above all free speech not armed policemen and snooping spies that makes for a healthier, wealthier, happier and, yes Lord Evans, safer world.
I was searching for words to describe this morning's attempt to machinegun free speech, to silence the joke. It is shocking yet, I fear, hardly surprising in a world that daily turns the offended into victims.
But what else can we do? Only, perhaps, this. We can hold the line. We can make our stand, a stand for liberalism and reason and liberty and we can hope – however flickeringly – that this will, in time, be enough to prevail.
Je suis Charlie? In truth, I don’t know about that. I hope so. But, really, I don’t know if enough of us are Charlie Hebdo just as I know too few of us were prepared, 25 years ago, to say I am Salman. But there is no longer either the time or room to hide. If you were not Charlie Hebdo yesterday it is time, today, that you were.
The Parable of the Mote and the Beam by Domenico Fetti
Don't get me wrong, I think the term 'social justice' is a misleadingly weasel phrase that most of the time is used in the manner of a toddler's foot-stamping scream of 'not fair'. But that's not the point here. The point is that we have created a world where people - in frightening numbers - think it OK to call for the arrest and incarceration of someone for the generic crime of being offensive.
Worse still, the response of the police and other public authorities is to indulge these screaming toddlers - and please let's make a distinction between specific threats of rape or violence and generic racist, sexist or otherwise unpleasant comments. So instead of simply doing nothing (the correct response) what the police do is issue statements saying they are 'monitoring' social media for offensive comments. I'm guessing this is done in the manner of the teacher who can't control his class - 'one more sound from any of you and you're all on detention'.
The problem is that today's society seems filled with people who say things like 'of course I believe in free speech, but..." Revealing by this statement that they think it entirely proper to pass laws, enact regulations and lead twitter mobs with the aim of preventing people from expressing something they find unpleasant, distasteful or offfensive. And some of these people even get offended on behalf of some other bunch of folk - "if I were (insert name of possibly offended group) I'd be deeply offended by that..."
I don't know where all this started. Nor do I think that there's anything wrong with challenging people who express unpleasant views. But at some point we started to believe a particular argument that somehow free speech wasn't really free speech because many people didn't feel safe or confident to challenge the misogyny, the racism or the general self-regarding offensiveness. This brings me to the conversation with my neighbour (who, shall we say, is not hesitant in expressing unpopular opinions) - his point to me was that, as a politician, I can't say what I really want to say because me saying it becomes 'top Tory in offensive tweet scandal' whereas his saying that something is just seen as the fat bloke at the bar sounding off.
My response is that I do self-censor (we all do this but I do to a greater extent). There is a long list of things I will discuss at home that I won't discuss at the pub. And a longer list that I'd avoid in public - whether at council or on social media. You could argue that my free speech is curtailed - it would be good to be in a position to speak more of some things on that list because they are very important - but it is me doing the curtailing not the public authorities. It is sensibility - as the Georgians would have seen it - that constrains my speech not the threat of arrest and imprisonment.
It seems to me that the debate about speech has got to the point where the idea of free speech is so curtailed that any argument can be closed down simply by using the term 'offensive' (or the terms that specify that offence - 'racist', 'misogynist', 'anti-disabled' and so forth). Worse still people who aren't really offended - those thousands signing that petition - grab their pitchfork and join the mob calling for the offenders head on a stake. Each one of those people should, as Christ pointed out at the Sermon on the Mount, examine his or her own conscience - consider their own offensiveness before laying into someone else for the same crime.
Free speech is one of the three pillars on which our liberty is founded. All three are under attack but there's no doubt that the desire - from governments and from those who would create an Orwellian newspeak - to restrain what we are allowed to say is becoming one of the biggest challenges to freedom. That some ideas cannot be debated at universities because some students night not feel 'safe'. How we've extended the term race to encompass any self-identification as a minority. And the fearful closing down of debate about religion and the multiplication of perceived language offences. This creeping authoritarianism threatens free debate, the creation of ideas and acts merely to cow people into an approved manner of speech and behaviour.
But the real battle line lies with the law, with the use of that law to shut down debate and to destroy your opponents. Worse still with the application of that law to destroy someone because the mob demands it. This is the real offence, the real attack on our freedom. This - not someone you don't have to take any notice of posting insults on twitter - is the thing we must challenge. Free speech is too important for us to allow people to carry on adding the word "...but..." to it and using that word to justify calls for arrests, for bans and for stopping debate.
There shouldn't be a choice between social justice and free speech. Indeed no sort of justice is advanced by preventing someone else - through the mob or through the force of authority - from expressing an opinion, even where that opinion may offend someone. And no sort of justice is served by arresting and charging people for saying something. I recall the campaigns against Britain's blasphemy laws - I can remember arguing with fellow Tories that we should support the campaign regardless of the company we would have to keep to do so. This was the 'progressive left' successfully extending free speech. So why now do the same people now campaign for laws to limit free speech?
We need to make the case for free speech. To point out that it's this freedom that allowed the debate about women's rights, that provided the platform for gay liberation and that sat at the heart of the civil rights movement. The sort of mob rule we see on twitter is not morally distinct from the mobs who would have stopped Martin Luther King had the USA not had a constitutional protection for free speech. So if you're saying we can't debate some things because some folk choose to be offended - whether it's feminism, Islam, Liverpool football club or the character of Glaswegians - then you are helping create a society where control, oppression and submission destroys liberty. In the end you can't have a free speech only for those things you approve - that's not free speech that's censorship. That's not a free society.
