Without free speech, this island seethes with resentment

20 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized

This article was published on Comment is Free

Police warnings that anyone attempting to burn a union flag during the royal wedding next week will be arrested are part of a worrying drift towards a legally sanctioned fetishisation of symbols both religious and secular in Britain. The warning came following an application by the far-right Islamist group Muslims Against Crusades (an offshoot of the outlawed al-Muhajiroun) to protest near Westminster Abbey on 29 April.

Earlier this week, Andrew Ryan, an English Defence league member with a history of public order offences, including racial chanting, was sentenced to 70 days in prison for burning a Qu’ran (he also received a 30-day sentence, to be served concurrently, for stealing the book from a local library).

The symbolic burning of books is wrong. The imprisonment of English Defence League member Andrew Ryan for burning a copy of the Qur’an is wrong. These two sentences are not contradictory.

In January, Ryan stole a Qur’an from a Carlisle library (that is definitely wrong, by the way), took it to Carlisle town hall and set fire to it with a cigarette lighter, while shouting derogatory slogans about Islam. It was, district judge Gerald Chalk commented when sentencing Ryan, “an act of theatrical bigotry”.

This is true: but does it amount to racially aggravated harassment, for which Ryan was convicted?

One could claim so if Ryan had taken his one-man protest to a local mosque, or Islamic cultural centre, or actively sought Muslims in the area. But he went to the town hall. So it’s difficult to see who exactly he was harassing. “Harassment” suggests targeted action.

He could, perhaps, have been convicted instead under section 5 of the Public Order Act, which is the law that did for al-Muhajiroun member Emdadur Choudhury, fined £50 for burning poppies on Armistice Day. That law itself is deeply insidious in its vagueness, and has been used several times in the arrest of street preachers putting forward conservative Christian views on homosexuality.

It’s worth mentioning Choudhury’s paltry fine, because that is certainly what Ryan’s supporters in the English Defence League will do. Why is it that one act of theatrical bigotry merits a fine, and another a 70-day jail sentence? Why does the desecration of a symbol of national mourning merit less punishment than the desecration of a religious text? While judges’ decisions are independent, this will only add to the EDL and its supporters notion that there really is “one law for them … “.

The English Defence League will be keen to portray Andrew Ryan as a martyr. They now have their very own shahid, persecuted for his beliefs by the deadly combination of Islamists and an establishment all too keen to capitulate.

So here, then, we have a practical argument against both these convictions: when we privilege certain types of speech, we create grievance. When we privilege in law certain ideas, we create resentment against people who hold those ideas. We see this in every impotent rage against “political correctness”; every indignant howl on the protection of religion and believers. The social cohesion argument that underpins so many government and police curbs on free expression does not really seem to be working.

Choudhury and Ryan were both convicted for actions that some might find upsetting. Their convictions legitimise and deepen the culture of taking offence that will not be resolved unless we begin to accept that free speech is not always easy to defend, but vital if this not to become an island of seething, hidden resentments masquerading as a coherent nation. More jaw-jaw, less law-law?

What's offensive, for God's sake?

8 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized

There will be two billboards in London this month – at Angel and in Hammersmith – displaying the slogan of the British Humanist Association Census Campaign: “If you’re not religious, for god’s sake say so”. Other than online, those two billboards are the only place you are likely to see that slogan, which this week should have been visible on railway stations and on the sides of buses in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff, Exeter and other towns and cities across England and Wales.
For God's Sake Humanist poster
The hundreds of other posters supposed to be appearing across the country this week have been prevented from appearing in case they cause offence.

Bus posters with the phrase “for God’s Sake” were turned down by the owners of the space on buses because of the advice of the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) that, under 4.1 of its code, the phrase “for God’s sake” had the potential to cause “widespread” and “serious” offence. We had to amend the slogan to get the bus posters out there.

Posters bearing the slogan intended for railway stations were rejected by the owners of the space for same reason, but the companies owning the space went further and said that, in any case, they didn’t want to take adverts relating to religion. So, we were allowed no posters at railway stations at all.

This sorry episode raises two serious questions about advertising in a free society.

Firstly, how is offence to be measured? We received emails at the office from Christians who weren’t offended by our slogan and at least two Christians I discussed the issue with on radio said the same thing. On what grounds did CAP believe that offence at our slogan would be “widespread”? And what would make that offence – taken in response to a common idiomatic phrase as thoroughly secularised as Christmas – so “serious”? And why did the owners of the railway station spaces shy away from our posters when posters from the Trinitarian Bible Society saying that anyone who doesn’t believe in god is a “fool” are a perennial part of my daily commute? Is offence only serious if people who believe in a god feel it?

The second question is, although we all know that the ASA is responsible for dealing with complaints about adverts once they are up, who is responsible for deciding whether an advert gets up in the first place?

Especially in an area as sensitive as censorship, simple principles of the rule of law would demand that any regulations should be clear, accessible and universally applied and that, in the event of a decision being made, it is clear who has made it, why they have, and how it can be appealed. In our situation, this was all impossible. Both parties – CAP and the owners of the advertising space – were able to place responsibility for the censorship of the adverts on the other.

CAP advised that our adverts could break the code. Owners of the advertising space said they would not take adverts that CAP had advised could break the code. We could not appeal against the advice of CAP because it is non-binding and CAP said it was entirely up to the owners of the space whether to take our adverts. The owners of the space said they would not go against advice from CAP. We could not appeal against them because they are commercial interests perfectly free to refuse any adverts they care to.

If public advertising space becomes increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, there is every reason to fear that what we see will be only what unaccountable and (naturally) offence-shy commercial interests will allow us to see. In this situation, a more suitable role for a regulator than sniffing out offensive potential would be to advance and guarantee free expression against such interests, for all our sakes.

Andrew Copson is chief executive of the British Humanist Association