2 Jul 2015 | Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
It is probably a sign of the success of our society that people like me spend so much of our time defending the rights of jerks.
Racists, misogynists, Christian fundamentalists, jihadists, wannabe jihadists, counter-jihadists, homophobes, trolls, Top Gear presenters, True Torah Jews, Nazis; cretins of all colours and creeds. In modern, liberal Europe, these are the people who tend to get in trouble over free speech. In the past, they were the ones in charge.
That is not to say everyone else is entirely free from censorship; and of course, the reason we defend free expression as a good in itself is because we understand that the powers used to silence the craven can also be used to silence the virtuous, but by and large, it’s the oddballs who tend to get into trouble. Them and journalists.
And so we turn our attention, wearily but determinedly, to the case of the “anti-Jewification” protest which was due to take place in London’s Golders Green on 4 July. As others have pointed out, anyone hoping to prevent the “Jewification” of Golders Green is, frankly, a bit late. But then, we know full well that Judenfrei policies have experienced some success in the past.
The stationary protest will now not take place in Golders Green, but instead in central London – Whitehall to be precise, away from Golders Green’s Jewish community. Ironically, many Jews are now planning to make their way to Westminster to stage a counter-demonstration.
As Richard Ferrer, editor of Jewish News, noted: “Saturday’s rally is fast turning into the social event of the season for the capital’s Jewish community. When it was originally announced, synagogues braced themselves for their lowest Shabbat attendance figures in years. I had a family lunch booked, but had to make sure it didn’t clash with the scheduled Holocaust denial and book burning.”
It does all sound rather fun, but the moving of the Nazi demonstration does raise questions about the nature of protest and how it is policed.
A demonstration must be disruptive, by its very nature. So there’s a dilemma raised by the moving of a protest from the scene of its target, in this case the Jewish community, does it become effectively meaningless? What happens if a swastika waves in a side street in Whitehall, with no one there to fear it? Does it still resound?
The police decision to move the demonstration, in spite of earlier claims that they were powerless to do so, has effectively neutered it. It’s meaningless.
Now here’s the question: should the police have a right to neuter protest in that manner? Or does the fact that the neo-Nazis are allowed stand in the street and make their little speeches, even if it’s not the street they wanted to stand in, mean that their free speech has been fully protected? I’m not entirely sure we’ve thought about this fully. But I do recall past campaigns against “designated protest zones”, for example during the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
I don’t really know what the answer is here: I guess the simple point is that one should be free to protest outside institutions but not outside people’s homes. But then what about the UK Uncut protesters who staged a “street party” outside then-Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s home?
This case of the relocated anti-Semites is interesting exactly because it has not turned out to be Britain’s Skokie case. To briefly recap, Skokie was an Illinois town where many Holocaust survivors had settled.
In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America proposed a march there. They were opposed. The case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. The ACLU backed the Nazis’ right to march. Eventually, the court upheld the Nazis’ right to march. But they never actually did. [For more on this case, read Index on Censorship magazine, Vol 37, Number 3, 2008].
In 2015 in north London we have a similar but different case. There are some Nazis wanting to march in a Jewish neighbourhood, there are some people who object. But there is no great call to principle, no great desire to take up the cause seemingly on either side. It’s hard to even get anyone on the Nazi side to own up to who exactly is in charge. Joshua Bonehill, the Somerset Stormtrooper and all round troll, is widely believed to be responsible. He was arrested early this week on suspicion of incitement to racial hatred. No one seemed that bothered.
This is the British way of free expression; a matter of practicality rather than principle, a pliable concept, one that can almost always be tempered by appeals to taste: it is simply distasteful for Nazis to demonstrate in Golders Green; just not done to burn a poppy.
By and large, taste wins out in these compromises. Remember that the Chatterley ban only came to an end because it was deemed that the book was of high enough literary quality, not because adults have the right to read what they damned well please.
Tastefulness being the characteristic the British most pride themselves upon means it’s rare that anyone will argue against it. It’s a soft tyranny most people seem happy to live with.
This article was posted on 2 July 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
22 Jun 2015 | Academic Freedom, Counter Terrorism, Magazine, United Kingdom, Volume 44.02 Summer 2015
Students at a protest in Manchester. Photo: Alamy/ M Itani
The realisation of academic freedom typically depends on controversy: it voices dissent. Linked to free speech, it is marked primarily by critique, speaking against – even offending against – prevailing or accepted norms. If it is to be heard, to make a substantial difference, such speech cannot be entirely divorced from rules or law. Yet legitimate rule – law – is itself established through talk, discussion and debate. Academic freedom seeks a new linguistic bond by engaging with or even producing a free assembly of mutually linked speakers. To curb such freedom, you delegitimise certain speakers or forms of speech; and the easiest way to do this is to isolate a speaker from an audience and to isolate members of an audience from each other. Silence the speaker; divide and rule the audience. When that seems extreme, work surreptitiously: attack not what is said but its potentially upsetting or offensive “tone”. Such inhibitions on speech increasingly chill conditions on campus.
Academic freedom is typically enshrined in university statutes, a typical formulation being that “academic staff have freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges” – as the statutes of the University of Warwick, where I work, have it. Yet academic freedom is now being fundamentally weakened and qualified by legislation, with which universities must comply.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking in Munich on 5 February 2011, said: “We must stop these groups [terrorists] from reaching people in publicly funded institutions like universities.” This was followed by a UK government report on tackling extremism, released ahead of the recent election, which said: “Universities must take seriously their responsibility to deny extremist speakers a platform.” It was suggested that “Prevent co-ordinators” could “give universities access to the information they need to make informed decisions” about who they allowed to speak on campuses. Ahead of May’s UK election university events had already been changed or cancelled. And immediately after the election, the government signalled its intention to focus further on the extremism agenda. In endorsing this approach, university vice-chancellors have acquiesced in a too-intimate identification of the interests of the search for better argument with whatever is stated as government policy. The expectation is that academics will in turn give up the autonomy required to criticise that policy or those who now manage it on government’s behalf in our institutions.
Governments worldwide increasingly assert the legal power to curtail the free speech and freedom of assembly that is axiomatic to the existence of academic freedom. This endangers democracy itself, what John Stuart Mill called “governance by discussion”. The economist Amartya Sen, for example, has recently resigned from his position as chancellor of Nalanda University in India because of what he saw as “political interference in academic matters” whereby “academic governance in India remains … deeply vulnerable to the opinions of the ruling government”. (See our report from India in our academic freedom special issue.) This is notable because it is one extremely rare instance of a university leader taking a stand against government interference in the autonomous governance of universities, autonomy that is crucial to the exercise of speaking freely without jeopardy.
Academic freedom, and the possibilities it offers for democratic assembly in society at large, now operates under the sign of terror. This has empowered governments to proscribe not just terrorist acts but also talk about terror; and governments have identified universities as a primary location for such talk. Clearly closing down a university would be a step too far; but just as effective is to inhibit its operation as the free assembly of dissenting voices. We have recently wit- nessed a tendency to quarantine individuals whose voices don’t comply with governance/ government norms. Psychology professor Ian Parker was suspended by Manchester Metropolitan University and isolated from his students in 2012, charged with “serious misconduct” for sending an email that questioned management. In 2014, I myself was suspended by the University of Warwick, barred from having any contact with colleagues and students, barred from campus, prevented from attending and speaking at a conference on E P Thompson, and more. Why? I was accused of undermining a colleague and asking critical questions of my superiors, the answers to which threatened their supposedly unquestionable authority. None of these charges were later upheld at a university tribunal.
More insidious is the recourse to “courtesy” as a means of preventing some speech from enjoying legitimacy and an audience. Several UK institutions have recently issued “tone of voice” guidelines governing publications. The University of Manchester, for example, says that “tone of voice is the way we express our brand personality in writing”; Plymouth University argues that “by putting the message in the hands of the communicator, it establishes a democracy of words, and opens up new creative possibilities”. These statements should be read in conjunction with the advice given by employment lawyer David Browne, of SGH Martineau (a UK law firm with many university clients). In a blogpost written in July 2014, he argued that high-performing academics with “outspoken opinions”, might damage their university’s brand and in it made comparisons between having strong opinions and the behaviour of footballer Luis Suárez in biting another player during the 2014 World Cup. The blog was later updated to add that its critique only applied to opinions that “fall outside the lawful exercise of academic freedom or freedom of speech more widely”, according to the THES (formerly the Times Higher Education Supplement). Conformity to the brand is now also conformity to a specific tone of voice; and the tone in question is one of supine compliance with ideological norms.
This is increasingly how controversial opinion is managed. If one speaks in a tone that stands out from the brand – if one is independent of government at all – then, by definition, one is in danger of bringing the branded university into disrepute. Worse, such criticism is treated as if it were akin to terrorism-by-voice.
Nothing is more important now than the reassertion of academic freedom as a celebration of diversity of tone, and the attendant possibility of giving offence; otherwise, we become bland magnolia wallpaper blending in with whatever the vested interests in our institutions and our governments call truth.
This vested interest – especially that of the privileged or those in power – now parades as victim, hurt by criticism, which it calls of- fensive disloyalty. What is at issue, however, is not courtesy; rather what is required of us is courtship. As in feudal times, we are legitimised through the patronage of the obsequium that is owed to the overlords in traditional societies.
Academic freedom must reassert itself in the face of this. The real test is not whether we can all agree that some acts, like terrorism, are “barbaric” in their violence; rather, it is whether we can entertain and be hospitable to the voice of the foreigner, of she who thinks – and speaks – differently, and who, in that difference, offers the possibility of making a new audience, new knowledge and, indeed, a new and democratic society, governed by free discussion.
© Thomas Docherty
Thomas Docherty is professor of English and of comparative literature at the University of Warwick in the UK.
This article is part of a special issue of Index on Censorship magazine on academic freedom, featuring contributions from the US, Ukraine, Belarus, Mexico, India, Turkey and Ireland. Subscribe to read the full report, or buy a single issue. Every purchase helps fund Index on Censorship’s work around the world. For reproduction rights, please contact Index on Censorship directly, via [email protected]
28 May 2015 | News and features, United Kingdom
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Abu Haleema. The poor man can’t catch a break. All he wants to do is establish a global caliphate under the harshest possible interpretation of sharia — a caliphate in which, he hopes, he will play a significant role — and yet he is thwarted at every turn.
First the authorities stop him from travelling to Syria to join the Islamic State. And then, to add insult to injury, they take away his internet, like he’s a naughty teenager. It’s a hard knock life for Abu.
And it’s about to get even harder. In the Queen’s Speech, the government announced a new counter-extremism bill which, will essentially make the existences of Abu Haleema and people like him illegal, without actually making them illegal.
How does that work? To quote the BBC: “The legislation will also propose the introduction of banning orders for extremist organisations who use hate speech in public places, but whose activities fall short of proscription.”
This, in essence, is a thought ASBO, a convenient way of stamping out “extremism” without making any serious attempt to test that behaviour against any kind of proper harm principle.
Whether we like it or not, we do have laws on hate speech and incitement to violence in the United Kingdom. We also have the powers to proscribe terrorist organisations.
But these powers are apparently not enough: and so we must create semi-legal sub-strata of behaviour where people can be censored on the basis of us not liking what they say very much.
This is not some plea for accommodation of the views of Abu Haleema and his friends. Let us be very clear here: these are views which are entirely antithetical to the secular liberal democracy we aspire to be.
But that fact is exactly the test of a secular liberal democracy: if we are to imagine free speech as a defining value of democracy (as David Cameron has said he does) then we cannot just choose which free speech we will defend and which we will not (as David Cameron has said he wants to). As commentator Jamie Bartlett has pointed out, free speech is not something that one pledges allegiance to in the abstract while stifling in the practice.
Predictably, we now turn to the life and times of George Orwell for a lesson from history.
In early 1945, a small group of London anarchists found themselves facing prosecution for undermining the war effort — specifically the charge of “causing disaffection among the troops”. Their crime was to criticise basic training, and to suggest that Belgian resistance movements should not hand over weapons to their Allied liberators, but instead retain their arms and set about building workers’ militias which would form a revolutionary force in post-Nazi Europe.
For this, several of the group were jailed, the British authorities of the time not noticing the irony of fighting for freedom in Europe while jailing dissidents at home.
The failure of the state — and the civil liberties movement — to stand for the right to free speech led to the formation of the Freedom Defence Committee.
Most of the supporters of the Freedom Defence Committee, including Orwell, would have had some sympathy with the anarchist position (Orwell had hoped, in the early days of the war, that the training and arming of the Home Guard would lead to a socialist revolution after the Nazis had been defeated. Apart from that, at least one of the accused, Vernon Richards, was a friend of Orwell’s).
But Orwell and his comrades in the Freedom Defence Committee were alert to the fact that one cannot simply defend the freedom of one’s friends. One also had to stand for the rights of communists and even fascists to hold their views. (Before any reader attempts to refer me to Orwell’s supposedly infamous “list” of communists and fellow travellers, supplied to his friend Celia Kirwan at the government’s Information Research Department, let me point out that it was a list compiled as a favour for a friend, not a blacklist: no one on that list was ever arrested, and they pursued their careers and lives unhindered). This led to the FDC taking the position that those with unpopular views – even those who had been (and still were) on the other side in the war, should be given the same justice as everyone else – demanding, for example, proper rights in cases of dismissal from employment when such a concept barely existed for anyone.
Fascists, communists and Islamists aside, there is probably not a single political grouping in Britain today that does not lay some claim to Orwell’s legacy. But as with free speech arguments, all tend to support the side that supports their side: libertarians cling to the anti-surveillance overtones in his work, while ignoring the long-held demands for state intervention on some issues. Conservatives admire the anti-communism, while ignoring the horror at capitalism, tradition, and the class system. Socialists pretend that Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were anything else apart from scathing attacks on left utopianism.
Orwell was a far from perfect figure, but he did get a lot of things right — the fundamental one being the consistent application of principles on issues of liberty.
It is fashionable to invoke Big Brother whenever governments introduce new surveillance measures, or suggest censorship of extremist views. It is also, generally, silly and hyperbolic. But when faced with an enemy entirely at odds with democracy, as we are with Islamist extremism, it’s worth noting that, as did Orwell and his comrades, it is possible to attack the ideology while standing firm on freedom.
An earlier version of this article stated that a group of London anarchists faced prosecution for suggesting the Belgian resistance movements should not hand over weapons to their German liberators. This has been corrected.
This column was posted on 28 May 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
22 May 2015 | Campaigns, Europe and Central Asia, mobile, Statements, United Kingdom
Britain’s Home Secretary, Theresa May, would — apparently — like to pre-approve programmes before broadcast that may include “extremist” content. We know this thanks to a leaked letter to the prime minister from the former Culture Secretary Sajid Javid who expressed his objection to the plans of his fellow cabinet minister.
Javid pointed out, quite rightly, that such a move could (and would) have a damaging effect on free speech — a freedom that David Cameron himself identified earlier this month as being part of the “British values” he wants to protect (values and freedoms that are systematically being attacked by the current government though proposed measures such as the Snoopers Charter and planned abolition of the Human Rights Act).
The world’s most repressive regimes largely have no need to pre-vet content. This is simply because they control all media outlets, and thus the messaging of the broadcasts and press. Why bother pre-vetting content when you’ve decided everything that goes out in the first place. If you can’t do that, pre-vetting is the next best step for an authoritarian government. China, which has one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching censorship regimes in the world, pre-censors TV documentaries, as well as non-fiction films, and has strict guidelines for broadcasters — including online companies — that forces them to self-censor huge swathes of content. Burma, whose military dictatorship finally ended in 2011, had pre-publication censorship for more than four decades.
As Javid himself notes in his letter: “It should be noted that other countries with a pre-transmission regulatory regime are not known for their compliance with rights relating to freedom of expression and government may not wish to be associated with such regimes.”
Yet with every step Theresa May makes she seems — under the guise of protecting our national security — to be bringing us closer and closer to the practices of countries who restrict the rights of their citizens to speak openly, countries who spy on their people indiscriminately, and countries who issue vague and obscure directives about the kinds of people and opinions deemed “unacceptable”.
We already have plenty of laws in Britain dealing with incitement to violence and the promotion of terrorism. We also have strict broadcasting rules addressing these areas. But the idea that the government should have a role in assessing content before it is broadcast, or in developing lists of speakers banned, not for inciting violence or hatred, but because their ideas are extreme, should set alarm bells ringing.
This article was posted on 22 May 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
