16 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
Derek Clark MEP (Image: Euro Realist Newsletter/Wikimedia Commons)
The UK Independence Party has promised it will ban the teaching of climate change in schools, if elected in May next year.
The party’s 2010 manifesto included a pledge to ban Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth from schools.
But this week UKIP Education spokesman MEP Derek Clark has said the party will go even further. Clark told Index on Censorship:
We will still ban Al Gore’s video for use in schools if I’ve got anything to do with it. I will not have much opposition within the party. It is, of course, not just this video which needs banning; all teaching of global warming being caused in any way by carbon dioxide emissions must also be banned. It just is not happening.”
Dr Nick Eyre, Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Energy at the ECI and Oriel College Oxford and Co-Director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said of the proposal: “It is anti-scientific nonsense – as well as a worryingly repressive approach to education. The very strong link between climate change and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is overwhelmingly accepted by the global scientific community, and has been for at least 25 years.”
A recent IPCC report shows that scientists believe with 95% certainty that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming. A 2013 study by UK Energy Research Centre, however, showed that 46% believe that climate change is ‘partly caused by human activity’, 22% believe that climate change is ‘mainly caused by human activity’ and another 6% believe that climate change is ‘entirely caused by human activity’. In total 74% of those surveyed believed that human activity is responsible for climate change.
This article was posted on 15 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
An earlier version of this article stated: “95% of scientists believe that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.” It has been edited to: “scientists’ believe with 95% certainty that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.
This article was amended to include the total number of people in the UK Energy Research Centre study who believe that human activity is responsible for climate change.
9 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
The British government’s plans to jail people the courts judge to be persistently ‘annoying’ has been defeated in the Lords – but remains a serious threat to freedom of speech in the UK.
Ministers’ baffling proposals would dramatically broaden the scope of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). They want to replace these with the so-called Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance (IPNAs), which could still become law if ministers hold their guns when the legislation returns to the Commons later this year.
But right now the broad coalition of campaigners who have fought Clause 1 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill are celebrating after the Lords last night decisively backed an amendment reversing the change.
The debate revealed just how extraordinarily blasé the government’s attitude to the reforms is. Rapidly lowering the threshold needed for an injunction will, ministers hope, make it harder for groups of miscreant youths to dodge having an ASBO slapped on them. What has left so many people really shocked is their inability to realise doing so would have terrible consequences for free speech.
Instead of only being applicable where a person or group causes or threatens to cause “harassment, alarm or distress”, the new injunction ministers were proposing to introduce was supposed to apply to all behaviour deemed “capable of causing nuisance or annoyance”.
It sounds laughable – and it is. Yesterday’s debate saw peers point out all kinds of behaviour which could be included in this definition, from smoking at a bus stop to handing out flyers to winding up the fan of a struggling football club. Carol-singers, bell-ringers, buskers, canvassers, trick-or-treaters, clay pigeon shooters, nudists: All would be affected because they would all be guilty of behaviour which could “reasonably be expected to cause” annoyance.
Those who repeatedly defy an injunction handed down by the courts, who many believe would have little option but to interpret the law more broadly than the government would like, would end up in jail.
Worst of all for our democracy, political protests would become much more vulnerable to being broken up by police under the changes.
“I suppose there are some in this House who might not have attended a demonstration or march,” Baroness Mallalieu told peers yesterday, “but I would wager they are in a minority.” She was talking about the kind of protest which irritates others because of delayed traffic, or the loud chanting, or the time taken off work. These would obviously fall under the scope of the changes. The baroness was not the only peer to quote Lord Justice Sedley’s ruling in a 1997 high court case, when he declared: “Freedom to only speak inoffensively is not worth having.”
There are further fears about the changes, too. Applications for IPNAs can only be made via agencies of the state, like the police or local authorities or government departments. Some believe vexatious obsessives would bombard them with demands for an injunction until they got their way.
Others think the change would result in people being moved on by police officers before the cases ever got to the courts. Ian Blair, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, recalled being on duty in Soho when a local resident demanded steps be taken against a man leafleting. “My Auntie Mabel is annoying,” Blair remembered his colleague saying, “but I’m not going to arrest her just for it.” His fear is that changing the word would lead to countless examples of police officers taking a different attitude in the future. They would go for the path of least resistance by breaking up all kinds of activity which has nothing to do with harassment and everything to do with freedom of speech. “This,” Blair summed up, “is a piece of absolutely awful legislation”.
The defeat which followed was a big one, by 306 votes to 178. But the government’s hold over the Lords is not that strong and since 2010 there have been over 80 such defeats. Ministers could simply reinsert the clause back into the bill when it returns to the Commons – meaning campaigners may have won this battle, but could still lose the war.
The Home Office’s official line, from crime prevention minister Norman Baker, is: “The bill was never intended to ban noisy children or carol singers and does not do so as currently drafted. I am disappointed the Lords fell for what appear to be scare stories.”
There might just be grounds for optimism, even though the timing is particularly painful. Next month, it becomes possible once again to insult others without the fear of being arrested for doing so under the Public Order Act 1986. That was a similar outrageous infringement of freedom of speech which is now being reversed after MPs defied the government last year.
Will they repeat that courageous stand to protect this most basic of civil liberties when the government’s attempt to outlaw being ‘annoying’ returns to the Commons? Let’s hope so.
This article was published on 9 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
3 Jan 2014 | Religion and Culture
This year’s Burning Man festival featured a temple, built by hundreds of artists in the space of a few days. There are not many photographs I can link into this article. The majority of them have been destroyed, along with the temple itself.
Some participants of the festival, which takes place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, have expressed that it seems a shame, or that they can’t help but have mixed feelings about destroying something to which they have dedicated a colossal amount of effort. Others enjoy the fact that they are burning their creations, the making of which they were able to focus on without the nagging distraction of feeling compelled to sell afterwards.
I have never been to Burning Man or anything overly comparable, however in November 2011, I went to the Artist’s Bonfire at the Islington Mill in Manchester. As with Burning Man, the premise is that primal expressions of self can still exist in a modern day context, a context which involves health and safety regulations, and in some cases arts council funding.
I was amused and surprised by the Telegraph’s backlash against the event, which subsequently added to it an even greater feeling of illicitness, that then became mixed with feelings of uncertainty. I had hoped that by going I would be making a small statement against drives towards profit, popularity and ego, which, in my mind should have little to do with artistic experience. But then I decided that, if any profits were made out of a bunch of artists burning their work, then whoever took that money is surely coming from the same mindset that I was naively seeking to undermine.
When it came to it, my contribution to the experience was a cop-out. There were students burning sculptures of cities that had required blueprints in order to build them (the blueprints were burned too). A professional artist immolated an extraordinary self portrait, which leads to other questions: Is it a form of self harm? Does it matter if it is? Is it a simple purging of the painfulness of being painstaking? Was I attempting to self-promote through annihilation?
I was nervous when it was my turn to throw to the fire. Even though all I burned was something that was made in a digital format, and which was backed up on several mediums of hard drive. In fact, due to laziness, what I threw onto the fire was a completely blank disc. I made a shaky speech about the wonders of modern technology, how its capacity for preservation means that the destruction of art is nothing to fear.
Age old connotations regarding censorship make these occasions worrying. There are Hitler’s book burnings and the equally insane pyres overseen by a chief of the NYC police department in connection with the Occupy movement. Luckily the worst case I’ve witnessed in the flesh was a ridiculously puerile feud between two local entertainment guides, which culminated in a brief burning in the car park of a small music venue.
A more historical instance is the destruction of the work of the poet Sappho. That much of her work appears now to be in fragments seems to overshadow it in the minds of many of her critics, shrouding her work and its context in a series of fascinating myths. These myths raise such questions as ‘has the work been destroyed by natural causes?’ and ‘was her work smashed by jealous invaders who not only begrudged her of her art but scorned her sexuality?’ Sappho, for whatever reasons, may also have felt it necessary to destroy the poems herself.
Earlier this year, experimental pop artist Grimes blogged about techno band The KLF, mentioning their decision to burn a million pounds.
Bill Drummond explained: “We wanted the money, but we wanted to burn it more.”
For Grimes and TheWoodQuarter, this stunt feels uncomfortable, compromising the artistic integrity of an otherwise respectable band: “it’s not something you would do if you had ever experienced poverty”.
Their concern echoes The Guardian’s review of Mark Knoop’s Piano Activities, a concert in which the pianist destroyed his piano. I might have been inclined to concur with the reviewer’s outrage were it not for his total denial of destructive relevance, which he deems “creatively redundant” post John Cage and punk. Although the reviewer is careful to state that “censoring [artists] would indeed have been wrong”, he makes the claim that “destructive performance misreads the temperature of a culture where a siege mentality reigns”. This is compounded with dogma: “Once music has been razed to the ground by Cage, Paik and others, it’s time to build”.
For me, such argument is a form of destruction in itself. It is more dangerous than a person trashing his own piano because it seeks to persuade that there is a specific and given “time” for a specific and given artistic ethos. A stance that requires art to be an advantageous strategic building block further entrenches it within the realm of commodity.
This article was posted on 3 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
23 Dec 2013 | Volume 42.04 Winter 2013
In conjunction with the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015, we will be publishing a series of articles that complement many of the upcoming debates and discussions. We are offering these articles from Index on Censorship magazine for free (normally they are held within our paid-for archive) as part of our partnership with the festival. Below is and article by Samira Ahmed on how 15 years of multiculturalism and how some people’s ideas of it are getting in the way of freedom of expression from the winter 2013 issue. This article is a great starting point for those planning to attend the Faith and education: an uneasy partnership session at the festival.
Index on Censorship is a global quarterly magazine with reporters and contributing editors around the world. Founded in 1972, it promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
In 1999, the neo-Nazi militant David Copeland planted three nail bombs in London – in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho – targeting black people, Bangladeshi Muslims and gays and lesbians. Three people died and scores were injured.
In response, the government awarded funds to local charities and community groups working on projects to build cohesion among the people that had been the targets of Copeland’s bloody campaign.
The intention was honorable, the impact underwhelming. According to Angela Mason, then head of Stonewall, the gay rights pressure group, the assumption was that all the people targeted by Copeland were “on the same side”. The truth as she sees it was that the government-funded projects exposed the uncomfortable reality that there were strong anti-gay prejudices among Muslim, Christian and black communities in Britain.
How realistic is it to expect a cohesive society could emerge from this kind of climate?
Today, the tensions between freedom of speech and religious belief remain acute – and they are systematically exploited by political groups of all stripes, from the English Defence League to radical Islamists who threaten to disrupt the repatriation of dead British soldiers at Wootton Bassett. The story consistently makes the headlines. The idea that there is an Islamist assault on British freedoms and values is widespread.
The Muslim campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 was the crucial moment in all this. It forced writers and artists from an Asian or Muslim background, whether they defined themselves that way or not, to take sides. They had to declare loyalty – or otherwise – to the offended.
The results have been appalling, and not only in Britain. Most notoriously, the Somali writer and Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali had her citizenship withdrawn by the Dutch authorities just as Muslim expressions of outrage and death threats in response to her writing about Islam reached their peak.
In the UK, local authorities have been all too ready to cave in to pressure under cover of preventing community unrest, maintaining public order or resisting perceived cultural insensitivity.
Sensitivity to religious insult, too often conflated with racism, has frequently taken precedence over concern for free expression. In 2004 violent protests by Birmingham Sikhs led to the closure of Behzti, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play on rape and abuse of women in a Sikh temple.
But the problem is not always obvious. In September 2012, Jasvinder Sanghera, founder of Karma Nirvana, a charity campaigning against forced marriage, ran a stall at the National Union of Teachers conference, distributing posters for schools. She told the Rationalist Association: “Many teachers came to my stall and many said, ‘Well, we couldn’t put them up. It’s cultural, we wouldn’t want to offend communities and we wouldn’t get support from the headteacher.’ And that was the majority view of over 100 teachers who came to speak to me.”
Sanghera said that one teacher who did take a poster sent her photographs of it displayed on a noticeboard in his school. But “within 24 hours of him putting up the posters, the headteacher tore them all down”. The teacher was summoned to the head’s office and told: “Under no circumstances must you ever display those posters again because we don’t want to upset our Muslim parents.”
The delayed prosecution of predominantly Asian Muslim grooming gangs in Rochdale and Oxford has to be seen in the context of the long-standing local authority fear of causing offence. Women’s rights, artistic free speech, even child protection have repeatedly been downgraded in order to avoid the accusation of racism or religious insult.
It’s not as bad as it used to be, according to Peter Tatchell, whose organisation OutRage! promotes the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and has campaigned against homophobic and misogynist comments by Islamic preachers and organisations. “Official attitudes are better in terms of defending free speech but still far from perfect,” he says. However, he adds, “Police and prosecutors still sometimes take the view that causing offence is sufficient grounds for criminal action, especially where religious and racial sensitivities are involved.”
The pressure isn’t necessarily overt but individual writers say they are struggling to work out where the lines are being drawn.
Writer Yasmeen Khan’s work ranges from making factual programmes, including documentaries for BBC Radio Four, to writing and performing comedy and drama. She says: “The pressure not to ‘offend’ has certainly increased over the past few years,” though she adds that it has probably affected writers and performers outside a particular religion more than believers.
Being seen as a religious believer can be an advantage when it comes to commissioning or applying for grants, she says. “But the downside is that you’re sometimes only viewed through that lens; you don’t want to be seen as a ‘Muslim writer’ – you just want to be a writer. It can feel like you’re being pigeon-holed by others, and that holds you back as being seen as ‘mainstream’. I’ve seen that issue itself being used for comedy – I was part of an Edinburgh show for which we wrote a sketch about an Asian writer being asked to ‘Muslim-up’ her writing.”
Luqman Ali runs the award-winning Khayaal Theatre company in Luton. It has built a strong critical reputation for its dramatic interpretation of classical Islamic literature. He dismisses the assertion that political correctness has shut down artistic freedom: “There would appear to be an entrenched institutional narrative that casts Muslims as problem people and Muslim artists as worthy only in so far as they are either prepared to lend credence to this narrativeor are self-avowedly irreligious,” he says. He contrasts what he sees as the “retrospective acceptance” of historic Islamic art and literary texts in museum collections with “very little acceptance of contemporary Muslim cultural production, especially in the performing arts”.
In 2011, the TLC channel in the US cancelled the reality TV series All American Muslim, a programme about a family in Michigan, after only one season. The cancellation followed a campaign by the Florida Family Association that was reminiscent of the UK group Christian Voice’s campaign against Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2005. Lowe’s, a national home-improvement chainstore and major advertiser, pulled out of sponsoring the show after the group claimed the series was “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values”.
Lowe’s denied its decision was in response to the Florida Family Association campaign. But amid the hysteria generated, including protests outside Lowe’s stores, ratings for the show plummeted. Many Americans decided not to watch it. As with Jerry Springer: The Opera, a small group had created a momentum of outrage that led to a fatal atmosphere of threat and intimidation around a piece of mainstream – and until then, highly successful – entertainment. The Bollywood thriller Madras Café was withdrawn from Cineworld and Odeon cinemas in the UK and Tamil Nadu, India, after a campaign by Tamil groups who found it “offensive”.
Veteran comedy writer John Lloyd, speaking at a British Film Institute event marking the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of the satirical news programme That Was The Week That Was in 2012, said there was now an obsession with “compliance” by tier after tier of broadcast managers, which he felt had suffocated satire. “Now,” said Lloyd, “everyone’s jibbering in fright if you do anything at all.” He contrasted the current climate to his experience working for Not The Nine O’ Clock News when, he said, he was “encouraged to provoke and challenge”.
Writer and stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, who co-wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, is currently working on a new series of his award-winning Comedy Vehicle for BBC Two. He believes a general uncertainty about British legislation on religious offence is affecting what gets produced: “It’s all very confusing. I don’t know what I am allowed to say. There is a culture of fear generally now in broadcasting. No one knows what they are allowed to do.”
“In Edinburgh in August 2013, a (nonbroadcast) show in a tent funded by the BBC at 9.30pm saw the BBC person running it pull a song by the gay musical comedy duo Jonny and the Baptists about laws concerning gays giving blood because it ‘promoted homosexuality’. This at 9.30pm, in a country where it is not illegal to promote homosexuality, and not for broadcast.
“In series one of Comedy Vehicle, I had a bit on imagining Islamists training dogs to fly planes into buildings. This was pulled on the grounds that it appeared deliberately provocative to Muslims because of the dog taboo in Islam. I looked into this, and read a load of stuff on it. There is no dog taboo in the Muslim faith.”
A BBC spokesman said: “The band were invited to perform on our open garden stage which was run as a family friendly venue for the 24 days it was open to the public. With the possibility of children and young people in the audience, we asked the band to tailor their short set to reflect the audience. They did so, and in one of these, a late night notfor- broadcast show, their set included the song which Stewart Lee refers to. The BBC has a strong track record of offering comedians opportunities to perform their edgiest material without restraint during the festival and we will continue to do so.”
Lee described the Jerry Springer: The Opera debacle, explaining that the pressure group Christian Voice “were able to scupper the viability of the 2005-2006 tour” of the play by informing theatres they would be prosecuted under the forthcoming incitement to religious hatred bill if they staged the play. The bill was later defeated by one vote in the Commons, and soon after the House of Lords scrapped the blasphemy laws. “But,” says Lee, “I think the public perception is that both these laws still exist.”
He says he doesn’t like to make a fuss: “The BBC is beset on all sides by politically and economically interested partners who want to see it destroyed. I wouldn’t expect the BBC, any more, to go to the wall about something I wanted to say. I’d just say it somewhere else – on a long touring show for example – and get better paid for it anyway! I am also anxious not to appear to contribute to the notion that ‘political correctness has gone mad’. People say, ‘ah but you’ve never done stuff about Islam’. I have. Nothing happened. But I have not done stuff about Islam in the depth I have stuff about Christianity as it is not relevant to me in the same way.”
Lee says his writing for tours isn’t affected by the fear of offence because his solo tours are “cost-effective and largely off the radar of the anti-PC brigade or people looking for things to complain about”.
However, he says, when it comes to the television series, he does consider the power of offence. “It affects what I write,” he says. His new show addresses the Football Association’s objection to the word “nigger”. He suspects that the BBC might get cold feet about this bit. “So I will drop it and use it live and on DVD. I don’t see TV as the place to experiment with certain types of content any more.”
But he says that one of the most important things about freedom of speech is that it applies to everyone. “I don’t think a lot of the jokes that, say, Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle do are worth the annoyance they cause, but I would defend their right to say them.”
So what, if anything, has changed for writers and what they feel they can write about since his experience with Jerry Springer?
“It’s all much worse,” Lee says. “But for many reasons: lack of funding mainly.” In April 2013, culture secretary Maria Miller addressed members of the arts industry at the British Museum, arguing that: “When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact.”
But as Lee points out, “it’s harder to justify funding something worthwhile in the current climate if people are storming the publicly funded theatre, such as Behzti, in protest.” “It has lost its moral authority in many ways,” he says, adding that ratings are at the forefront of commissioners’ minds.
There have been high-profile attempts to link comedy and Islam, such as the recent Allah Made Me Funny international standup tours. The Canadian CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie defied self-styled Muslim community leaders’ complaints about insult and offence to run for six highly-rated seasons, finishing in 2012. The BBC’s own Citizen Khan, which begins its second series in 2014, has similarly ignored claims of insult. Both sitcoms combine a Muslim family setting with very familiar sitcom themes.
In Britain, the overly cautious attitude to free speech and religion supposed to create community harmony has coincided with growing fundamentalist intimidation often promoted within enclosed immigrant communities. Sikh gangs have targeted mixed weddings in temples, and there have been tense stand-offs between Sikhs and Muslims over allegations of sexual grooming in Luton and elsewhere. British Ahmadiyya Muslims, who fled persecution in Pakistan, have struggled to draw media attention to the orchestrated hate campaigns being conducted against them by some Sunni groups. We need to feel free to criticise religious groups when they cross lines and commit crimes, without worrying about the cultural upset.
As Kenan Malik has said, the refusal to confront these issues in open and frank discussion, is “transforming the landscape” of free speech. Even in the United States, where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, there are serious questions being asked about what free speech actually means – particularly when it comes to religion.
The right to free speech should never be half-hearted. People have the right to be offended, but they don’t have the right to stop others speaking, discussing and debating ideas.
