23 Aug 11 | Uncategorized
The English Defence League’s march into Tower Hamlets, scheduled for 3 September, has been met with a broad alliance of politicians and organisations — including council leaders from across the country, prominent trade unionists, religious leaders, the Canary Wharf Group, London Citizens and local LGBT organisations — calling for it to be banned. This week, a delegation from the Hope Not Hate coalition, led by London Assembly’s John Biggs and Rushanara Ali MP, presented a 25,000-name petition to Scotland Yard calling on Theresa May to ban the march, no doubt gaining inspiration from her recent decision on the Telford march earlier this month.
Of course, Tower Hamlets has been here before: Stepney in the 1930s, Brick Lane in the 1970s (and again in April 1999) and Millwall in the 1990s. The cosmetics are different but the fascist face beneath remains the same. The impact and attendant dangers of this march — into what the EDL claims is the “heart of militant Islam” and “the lions [sic] den”— are significant. The EDL is not planning a “peaceful” demonstration. The pattern is predictable: massive disruption to local communities and businesses, mobilisation of far-right activists from around the country ending in attacks on Muslims and other counter-demonstrators. So banning the march should be common sense: ban the march, stop the danger.
Unfortunately this logic is skin deep. When the Home Secretary banned the Telford march, it did nothing to prevent the EDL from staging a static protest. Nor did it prevent violent confrontations between the organisers and counter-demonstrators — there were 40 arrests. When the EDL’s Bradford march was banned last year, its members were still allowed to stage a static protest and, from their fenced-off park, they threw rocks and gas canisters at the police and counter-demonstrators. Some broke out of the pen and ran through the streets causing mayhem. During the Manchester demonstration in 2009, the police erected a steel fence around parts of Piccadilly Gardens in the centre of the city. The EDL circumnavigated the lockdown by marching from various assembly points (usually pubs) to the city centre. In the end, the bans achieved nothing.
I was born and raised on the Mile End Road, but I don’t believe the march should be banned for three reasons.
First, it will do nothing to prevent disorder and racist violence. If anything, it will still allow the EDL to hold a static demonstration as well as numerous parades into this area. And when they break out of it, they will turn Tower Hamlets, a densely populated inner-city borough with its warren-like streets, into a riot zone impossible to police.
Second, state intervention in protests is not something to be celebrated. Banning this march is a surely a harbinger of interventions in future protests not just those organised by the far right.
Third, the movement against the rise of fascism must not become dependent on the state. For inspiration, we have only to look at the Battle of Cable Street: the fascists came but they did not pass. Instead, local residents of diverse backgrounds united and fought back and dealt Oswald Mosley and his BUF the death blow.
If the EDL are to be defeated, it must be in the streets of Britain, in its front rooms, in its pubs. We are the ones that must do this — not the state.
Akkas Al-Ali is a playwright, director and dramaturg living in London.
23 Aug 11 | Uncategorized
The English Defence League’s march into Tower Hamlets, scheduled for 3 September, has been met with a broad alliance of politicians and organisations — including council leaders from across the country, prominent trade unionists, religious leaders, the Canary Wharf Group, London Citizens and local LGBT organisations — calling for it to be banned. This week, a delegation from the Hope Not Hate coalition, led by London Assembly’s John Biggs and Rushanara Ali MP, presented a 25,000-name petition to Scotland Yard calling on Theresa May to ban the march, no doubt gaining inspiration from her recent decision on the Telford march earlier this month.
Of course, Tower Hamlets has been here before: Stepney in the 1930s, Brick Lane in the 1970s (and again in April 1999) and Millwall in the 1990s. The cosmetics are different but the fascist face beneath remains the same. The impact and attendant dangers of this march — into what the EDL claims is the “heart of militant Islam” and “the lions [sic] den”— are significant. The EDL is not planning a “peaceful” demonstration. The pattern is predictable: massive disruption to local communities and businesses, mobilisation of far-right activists from around the country ending in attacks on Muslims and other counter-demonstrators. So banning the march should be common sense: ban the march, stop the danger.
Unfortunately this logic is skin deep. When the Home Secretary banned the Telford march, it did nothing to prevent the EDL from staging a static protest. Nor did it prevent violent confrontations between the organisers and counter-demonstrators — there were 40 arrests. When the EDL’s Bradford march was banned last year, its members were still allowed to stage a static protest and, from their fenced-off park, they threw rocks and gas canisters at the police and counter-demonstrators. Some broke out of the pen and ran through the streets causing mayhem. During the Manchester demonstration in 2009, the police erected a steel fence around parts of Piccadilly Gardens in the centre of the city. The EDL circumnavigated the lockdown by marching from various assembly points (usually pubs) to the city centre. In the end, the bans achieved nothing.
I was born and raised on the Mile End Road, but I don’t believe the march should be banned for three reasons.
First, it will do nothing to prevent disorder and racist violence. If anything, it will still allow the EDL to hold a static demonstration as well as numerous parades into this area. And when they break out of it, they will turn Tower Hamlets, a densely populated inner-city borough with its warren-like streets, into a riot zone impossible to police.
Second, state intervention in protests is not something to be celebrated. Banning this march is a surely a harbinger of interventions in future protests not just those organised by the far right.
Third, the movement against the rise of fascism must not become dependent on the state. For inspiration, we have only to look at the Battle of Cable Street: the fascists came but they did not pass. Instead, local residents of diverse backgrounds united and fought back and dealt Oswald Mosley and his BUF the death blow.
If the EDL are to be defeated, it must be in the streets of Britain, in its front rooms, in its pubs. We are the ones that must do this — not the state.
Akkas Al-Ali is a playwright, director and dramaturg living in London.
22 Aug 11 | Uncategorized
In many parts of the world, the BBC is a voice of reason, providing real information to even out the state propaganda elsewhere on the radio dial. Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi recently said the BBC World Service gave her a lifeline while she was under house arrest.
Read Index’s Jo Glanville’s brilliant essay about the service’s future in London Review of Books “Auntie Mabel doesn’t give a toss about Serbia”
If it is considered an important part of the World Service’s mission to impart information to audiences in countries where the media are restricted, then shortwave surely wins out as the more reliable means of communication. It can be jammed, but it cannot be wholly disabled – as the internet and mobile phone networks were in Egypt earlier this year. Shortwave’s adherents are concerned that the World Service is turning away from the people who need it in favour of an audience of ‘opinion-formers’. Its managers claim the contrary, pointing to the maintenance of shortwave in Burma as an example, but a poorer, rural audience is being left behind, and when a country’s dictator takes control of radio broadcasts, the World Service will no longer be available there in any form.
If the BBC decides that it can no longer afford to maintain the infrastructure for shortwave, and begins to close down its transmitter sites around the world as other international broadcasters have done, there will be consequences for its participation in a new form of digital radio called Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM). It is the digital version of shortwave and medium wave, providing high-quality radio with the advantage that it can be transmitted, free from political interference, over great distances. DRM is still in its early stages and receivers are not yet widely available, but India and Russia have both committed to it, and Brazil is thinking about it. The World Service is involved – one of its executives chairs the DRM consortium – but its role might be jeopardised if it pulls out of shortwave since DRM uses the same facilities and frequencies.
22 Aug 11 | Uncategorized
This article was first published by the Independent
Free speech is a grisly vocation. A number of my assumptions about British society have been tested to the full since I became an advocate for this rarefied freedom nearly three years ago. An early lesson was that one should not confuse liberalism with open-mindedness. Another is that we’re happy to listen to anyone, as long as they don’t upset us.
The manufactured brouhaha over David Starkey’s comments last week follows a well-trodden and wearisome path. Curmudgeonly man (or woman) says something crass. Remember Jan Moir? I’ll come back to her later. Somebody gets cross. They reach for their computers and go on to Twitter. Within minutes others follow suit, expressing their fury and “solidarity”, often without bothering to find out what the
Starkey’s “the whites have turned black” ranting was not out of character. The man has form. I remember, a few years ago, him looking askance at me when I expressed delight at the Olympics coming to the EastEnd of London. His (approximate) reply – but why would anyone want to go to places such as those?
The BBC loves contrarians. They have a category of their own in the contacts books of producers of discussion programmes, possibly entitled “a bit of right-wing rough”. Yet the corporation is scared rigid of the public reaction. It employs an army of bureaucrats whose job it is to worry about viewers and listeners getting upset. I’m sure this department has doubled in number since the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross imbroglio.
And once these officials get involved with a “complaint”, boy do they get involved. They began to wonder out loud: should Newsnight have invited such a dangerous man into the studio; should Emily Maitlis have pounced on him? I would not be surprised if editors did not receive in coming weeks a set of edicts on how to respond to emergencies such as this. Option one: take the programme off air. Option two: ensure that programmes have a few seconds delay so that controversialists can be silenced out, à la Gerry Adams in the 1980s. Option three: apologise immediately to viewers for any offence caused. I only half jest.
The BBC is merely following a national trend. Many public bodies make sure they never say anything controversial. I remember chairing a discussion for the Arts Council on self-censorship. One manager of a theatre in the Midlands said that before his staff confirm their next run, they convene a meeting of local “stakeholders” to check whether anything planned might remotely cause offence. I was astonished, but several others round the table suggested this was quite normal.
During the last general election campaign, Index on Censorship held a hustings debate on the record of the three main parties in supporting freedom of expression. The then Justice minister, Michael Wills, praised the Labour government’s role in extending legislation that protected citizens’ sensibilities, particularly of ethnic minorities. One commentator in the audience, a Sikh, told the well-meaning minister that he and everyone he knew didn’t want or need his warm paternalistic embrace, thank you very much.
Legislation there already is aplenty. Not only does the UK have some of the most punitive libel laws in the Western world, but we have ample religious and racial hatred laws. The only absolute in this area is incitement to violence. Beyond that, the issue of offence and free speech is as much a judgement as a rule. It is, I admit, harder to upset a middle-aged, middle-class white man than it is a section of society that feels itself particularly vulnerable. But most of the time these judgement calls are being made by white middle-class liberals with an extenuated sense of guilt.
Just over a year ago, I was asked to give the keynote speech at Amnesty’s UK annual general meeting. I challenged those assembled to agree that free speech was as important a right as any of the others they were fighting for. I am not sure I convinced them. Many people, particularly on the left, find it hard to disentangle a liberal society from an open society.
For sure, I would prefer a world in which spiteful or glib comments were not made about other races or religions. I would rather that committed Christians did not denounce homosexuality as a sin. I would prefer it if Moir had not suggested that Stephen Gately’s death was connected with a “deviant” gay lifestyle. She was perfectly within her rights, however, to say what she said. And those who read her piece were perfectly within their rights to disagree with her.
One can cite many such examples of bloggers, authors, film-makers, artists or tweeters saying or doing something that upsets. It would be hard to imagine any work of any merit that doesn’t upset someone. The European Convention codifies our rights. It is by no means perfect, but the best we have on offer. Sometimes these rights stumble against each other, such as the competing right to privacy and the right to free speech. One right is not enshrined, but is now, wrongly, assumed to be sacrosanct: the right to take offence. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I suggest we dust off a phrase that probably hasn’t seen the light of day since the 1950s. “I beg to differ.” That should suffice the next time someone sees Starkey talk about blacks on TV or reads Moir on gays in the Mail.
John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship and author of “Freedom For Sale”
