Home Secretary Theresa May appeared on BBC Radio 4 Today programme. View the video. (Photo: BBC)
The UK Home Secretary’s preview of a proposed new counter-extremism bill raises the stakes for freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. Index on Censorship is disturbed by the potential impact on free speech embedded in the proposals.
“While the exact wording of the law remains to be seen, it is unclear why new legislation is needed. Current laws on incitement to violence and hatred can already be applied to extremist individuals or groups. New laws risk simply stifling a far broader range of speech”, Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg said.
Under previous proposals put forward by Theresa May, extremists would have been banned from TV and stricter controls on what could be said on the internet would have been imposed.
May’s insistence that the proposed law would be applied to those seeking to undermine vaguely defined “British values” is a broad brush that could end up being applied to anyone who simply disagrees with the government. As Index said in October 2014, the proposals smack of the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s in the United States.
According to May, the UK already has the world’s toughest anti-terrorism legislation. Adding to this body of laws is unnecessary. Index remains convinced that driving debate underground is not the answer in tackling extremism or terrorism.
Queen’s University Belfast cancelled a Charlie Hebdo-related event (Photo: Flickr/Creative Commons).
In my column in the latest issue of Index magazine, re-published below, I explored the shrinking space for free expression on university campuses. It’s getting worse. Earlier this week, we learned Queen’s University in Belfast had cancelled a conference on the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo attack, citing security fears. That followed a decision by the University of Southampton to axe a conference on Israel after pressure from the Zionist Federation UK. Another group is now pressurising respected medical journal The Lancet over its coverage of Palestine.
Index condemns these attempts to stifle free and open debate. It is clear that academic freedom is under threat from special interest groups who believe that no one should be exposed to ideas that they find personally offensive. The result is that the universe of ideas and opinions is shrivelling. We need to push back, and universities, students, academics and academic publications must resist this pressure.
Something is going wrong at universities. Institutions that should be crucibles for new thinking, at the forefront of challenges to established thought and practice, are instead actively shutting down debate, and shying away from intellectual confrontation.
Driven by the notion that students should not be exposed to ideas they find – or might find – offensive or troubling, student groups and authorities are increasingly squeezing out free speech – by banning controversial speakers, denying individuals or groups platforms to speak, and eliminating the possibility of “accidental” exposure to new ideas through devices such as trigger warnings.
The trend was particularly noticeable last year when a number of invited speakers withdrew from university engagements – or had their invitations rescinded – following protests from students and faculty members. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew from a planned address at Rutgers University in New Jersey after opposition from those who cited her involvement in the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s torture of terrorism suspects; Brandeis University in Massachusetts cancelled plans to award an honorary degree to Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali; and Christine Lagarde backed out of a speech at Smith College following objections by students over the acts of the International Monetary Fund, which Lagarde runs. In the UK, the University of East London banned an Islamic preacher for his views on homosexuality. And a new law – a counter-terrorism bill – was proposed in Britain that could be used to force universities to ban speakers considered “extremist”.
Registering your objection to something or someone is one thing. Indeed, the ability to do that is fundamental to free expression. Actively seeking to prevent that person from speaking or being heard is quite another. It is a trend increasingly visible in social media – and its appearance within universities is deeply troubling.
It is seen not just in the way invited speakers are treated, but it stretches to the academic fraternity itself. Last year, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign withdrew a job offer to academic Steven Salaita following critical posts he made on Twitter about Israel.
In an open letter, Phyllis Wise, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor, in an open letter, wrote: “A pre-eminent university must always be a home for difficult discussions and for the teaching of diverse ideas… What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. We have a particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but that also respects their rights as individuals.”
These incidents matter because, as education lecturer Joanna Williams wrote in The Telegraph newspaper: “If academic freedom is to be in anyway meaningful it must be about far more than the liberty to be surrounded by an inoffensive and bland consensus. Suppressing rather than confronting controversial arguments prevents criticality and the advance of knowledge, surely the antithesis of what a university should be about?”
Yet, increasingly, universities seem to want to shut down controversy, sheltering behind the dangerous notion that protecting people from anything but the blandest and least contentious ideas is the means to keep them “safe”, rather than encouraging students to have a wide base of knowledge. In the US, some universities are considering advising students that they don’t have to read material they may find upsetting, and if they don’t their course mark would not suffer, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In the UK, increasing intolerance for free expression is manifest in the “no platform” movement – which no longer targets speakers or groups that incite violence against others, but a whole host of individuals and organisations that other groups simply find distasteful, or in some way disqualified from speaking on other grounds.
The decision to cancel an abortion debate at Oxford in late 2014, which would have been held between two men – and noted free speech advocates – came after a slew of objections, including a statement from the students’ union that decried the organisers for having the temerity to invite people without uteruses to discuss the issue.
Encountering views that make us feel uncomfortable, that challenge our worldview are fundamental to a free society. Universities are places where that encounter should be encouraged and celebrated. They should not be places where ideas are wrapped in cotton wool, where academic freedom comes to mean having a single kind of approved thinking, or where only certain “approved” individuals are allowed to speak on a given topic.
Index on Censorship knows well the importance of the scholar in freedom of expression. Though we have come to be known as Index, the charity itself is officially called Writers and Scholars International, an effort to capture as simply as possible the individuals whom we intended to support from the outset. The title was never intended to be exclusive, but the inclusion of “scholar” signals the importance our founders attached to the role of the academic as a defender and promoter of free speech. In 2015, as we watch the spaces for free expression narrow, we will work doubly hard to ensure that university remains an arena for the clash of ideas, not the closure of minds.
This article is part of Across the wires, the spring 2015 issue of Index on Censorship magazine and was first published in early March. Follow the magazine on @Index_magazine. To read other articles from the issue, subscribe to Index magazine online here, also available on your iPhone, iPad or Android devices. For more subscription options, visit our subscribe page.
In the mid-80s, advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi made a short film for Index on Censorship. Starring Anthony Hopkins in the title role, The Censor, written by Ivan Kraus, depicted a dancer being ordered about by a commissar who repeatedly tells her what movements she is forbidden from making. When she finally comes to a standstill the censor demands of her: “Why aren’t you dancing? You call that a dance?”
In a pleasing irony, the film, intended as a cinema advert, never made it to screens as it was deemed “too political”.
I was reminded of this earlier in the week when I read about activist Maryam Namazie’s clash with Trinity College Dublin’s Society For International Affairs (SoFIA). Namazie claims that conditions were placed on her speaking at an event, in particular the imposition of a “moderator” in the form of Dr Andrew Pierce, an assistant professor in Ecumenics at TCD.
I don’t know Dr Pierce, or his work, so have no reason to doubt that he would be a perfectly fine moderator.
I do know Maryam Namazie, having moved in roughly the same atheist/secular/free speechy circles, and I’m not sure that she is very much into the idea of Ecumenics or being moderated.
Maryam Namazie is a refugee from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her political education came in the Worker-communist Party of Iran, a group that does not spend a lot of time on “interfaith dialogue”. She retains a deep-seated anti-clericalism which has not so much gone missing from the British hard left, as never really existed (with the exception of libertarian communist/anarchist circles). She’s not into “interfaith”.
You can see why, as SoFIA speakers are normally not moderated, Namazie would not tolerate this exception. Like the dancer in the film, she felt so constrained by conditions that she could not continue. You can also see why SoFIA would imagine this as unreasonable, and cast it as so.
So has Maryam been prevented from speaking at TCD or not? Is this, as people like to ask “a free speech issue”?
The answers are: yes and no, and yes.
To the first question: yes and no. Yes, as she has been prevented from speaking under the terms she originally agreed to. Namazie clearly feels that the imposition of “moderation” will by its nature stifle her. And no, because, technically, the only person to actually prevent her from speaking was herself. It was she who pulled the plug.
Is this a “free speech issue”? Well yes. There are few more irritating arguments than “it’s not a free speech issue”.
This statement is usually backed up by the following arguments:
“X is against the law.” And? Resorting to the fact that something is illegal is to run away from an argument, not to win it. There are all sorts of bad laws, as anyone who has ever so much as signed a petition to change one has acknowledged. If you cannot form an argument as to whether someone should or should not do something without recourse to existing laws, you probably need to work a bit harder on it.
“Not compatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights/Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” See above. Legalistic arguments are for lawyers.
“This is an abuse of free speech”. Because you can only use your rights for the purposes I wish them to be used for. That’s how rights work.
“No one has a right to a platform.” This is absolutely true. However, the flip side of that is that clubs, societies etc have a right to invite the speakers and guests they choose. Every so often, the Oxford Union, or a university debating or philosophy society, will invite a fascist or a Holocaust revisionist to discuss “free speech” and its limits. It’s a dull trick, made even duller by the reaction of United Against Fascism/Socialist Workers Party student activists who will attempt to shut the talk down. (And, yes, before there are letters, you have every right to try to get something shut down. Yes, that is exercising your free speech, until you storm the hall. Then you’re using force).
“We’re not saying she can’t speak: just that she can’t speak here.” See above.
“You wouldn’t get away with that in X country (usually Saudi Arabia, Russia or China).” No, you wouldn’t. Why you want to compare the free world with regimes like that, I’ve no idea, but we should be glad that people “get away with” saying more in democracies than they do in autocracies.
“Free speech does not mean the ability to say X.” Nah, sorry. It definitely does.
And on it goes. The problem is that these caveats always apply to things that are, obviously so, free speech issues. But — and this is probably a good thing — nobody wants to be seen as against free speech (though it was amusing to see the format of the various censorious motions brought at the National Union of Students’ Women’s Conference this week: “Motion to Condemn XXXXphobia on campus. Speech for: NUS XXXX Society. Speech Against: Free”).
One wishes sometimes we could be more honest. Don’t say “this isn’t a free speech issue”, rather “this is a free speech issue, and I’m OK with this amount of censorship, for this reason.” Then we can talk.
There is, I am told, a war going on in feminism. A war between “intersectionalists” (I think) and TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, as far as I can tell).
I am not about to stick my oar into this particular boating lake, for two reasons:
Reason 1. Self-awareness. I am a white middle class western European media professional, north-London dwelling male, born in a time when there is little chance of conscription. I am practically the most privileged thing that ever existed, and the last thing people struggling for equality need is me, turning up, cheerily shouting “Only me!!!” like Harry Enfield’s Mr-You-Don’t-want-to-do-it-like-that, and telling people how to do a real feminism. That is not to say I do not have a right to have an opinion, but…
Reason 2: lurking in that apparently placid boating lake are piranhas, reading to chew up and spit out any oarsman (or woman) who does not know every ebb and eddie of the lake.
It’s a horrible sight to see. Every so often some poor naive jumps in their little pleasure boat, having been assured by the man that it’s perfectly safe, and rows happily to the middle of the lake. You watch from the shore. They wave back. What’s that sound? They’re singing Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins, their rowing keeping a brisk beat with the jaunty marching tune. “Shoulder-to-shoulder” and-stroke-and-stroke.
Unbeknownst to them, the piranhas have smelled blood. They row on. Gleefully, they reach the crescendo: “Our daughters’ daughters’ will adore us…”. They raise their hands to punch the air. An unattended oar slips into the water. The piranhas stir. Daughters? That sounds like determinism. The water begins to froth. The poor unsuspecting oarsman (or woman) is still singing. Eventually they catch the commotion in the corner of one eye: they hear it grow louder, under the boat, which now seems irresponsibly flimsy.
They sing still, but now in trepidation: “No more the meek and mild subservients we!”.
The frenzy grows stronger, at what was certainly a slight on members of the BDSM community (well, the Ms anyway). Stronger and stronger. Our rower tries to resist, we can see, but the boat is now falling apart, as if rotten, under their feet. Our previously carefree rower feels first a nip, and then a rush. They are simultaneously drowning and being eaten alive.
A final defiant shriek from a the near-eviscerated pleasure seeker, and then there is nothing. The waters are calm once more.
We tut, from the shore. Such a shame, such a loss. Did you see the cowbell dog?
That’s one version, but then try to see it from the fishes’ point of view. Fish have got to live. Piranhas have been, for years, maligned as a generality by the mainstream. The very word “piranha” is thrown around as an insult. Piranhas are irrational, illogical, even abominations against nature. And of course, there is more than one type of piranha, and not every piranha has the same experience of what it’s like being a piranha. Piranha identity is complex, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean piranhas shouldn’t bond together and work together. What outsiders view as a “feeding frenzy” is actually the best – only – way piranhas can continue to exist safely.
Besides, the piranhas grew up in this lake. They know it like the back of their fins – how to navigate, how to communicate. If anyone’s in a wrong place in the boating lake, it’s not the piranhas.
This is not an unreasonable case. The question then (and here’s where the horrendous tortured boating lake analogy comes to an end, you’ll be pleased to know) is: Was George Bush right? Can the human beings and the fish coexist peacefully?
The issue emerged again recently with a terse exchange of letters in the Observer newspaper, which followed the cancellation of a show by comic Kate Smurthwaite at Goldsmith’s college. Smurthwaite said she’d been banned because some university feminists who are pro sex work were threatening to protests against her anti sex work views, and the college security didn’t want the hassle.
A letter was put together, as letters are, decrying campus censorship and the narrowing of debate (with specific mention of the National Union of Students’ policy of “no-platforming” feminist Julie Bindel for statements on trans people). There was a response, disputing the facts of the first letter and suggesting that there are bigger campus free speech issues – around student protest for example – than whether certain already powerful people can take part in a panel debate or a comedy show.
The problem here is the commodification of free speech: who is allowed it and who isn’t, and, in hierarchical societies (i.e. pretty much every society we’ve come up with so far) who grabs it as theirs and who should be granted more in order to even things out, and who can “use” free speech against whom.
This is to treat free speech as a weapon rather than a space. There is not a limited amount of free speech to go round: rather, there is a (hopefully) ever-expanding free speech arena in which we can argue. The signatories of both letters have actually identified the same problem, the narrowing of the space, particularly in education. Perhaps it would be beneficial for them to defend the space in which to argue rather than trying to push the other side overboard.
