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LET THEM ALL TALK

Freedom Of Speech
The Independent on Sunday, November 2006

THE prime minister is an idiot. The royal family are a shifty sack of inbred parasites. There are no gods. These words are appearing in a freely available newspaper. Their author – who, for the record, actually believes the afore-declared only up to a point – will go unpunished. Those who read them will find this all utterly unremarkable, and this is wonderful. It is a marvellous thing to live in a country in which one’s right to say what one damn well pleases is taken for granted. However, possibly because that right is taken for granted, threats to it are taken less seriously than they might or should be.
  For we also live in a country in which, in this century, all the following have happened. Five protestors were arrested for silently brandishing placards demanding “decent pensions for all” along the route of the Queen’s motorcade (Wakefield, March 2005). A man was detained for displaying a placard quoting Orwell, and possessing copies of a Vanity Fair article unkind about Tony Blair (London, June 2006). A teenager was punished with an on-the-spot fine by a police officer who overheard him swearing in a private conversation (Deal, February 2006).
  It might be argued that these are trivial incidents, more down to the daftness of a few deeply silly police officers than anything more sinister – and that, indeed, after various degrees of legal wrangling, all the aforementioned desperadoes emerged with their good names unbesmirched. However, it is surely not implausible to suggest that the arresting officers felt emboldened by a government which has tried to bite chunks out of the right to speak freely. The idiotic, redundant law against incitement to religious hatred makes precisely as much sense as legally protecting the sensibilities of (to pick three random examples) goths, communists, and Manchester City fans. The outlawing of the “glorification” of terrorism could well make the discussion of any armed conflict a carnival of farcical prosecutions (and will, presumably, necessitate the application of whitewash to the picturesque Troubles murals of Belfast). Brian Haw, the indefatigable anti-war campaigner, has been the subject of several legal attempts to remove him from his post in Parliament Square – a place which, of all places, should surely be a haven for agitators.
  Free speech is, also, threatened by those who claim to work for a higher force than earthly government. The fanatical fringe of Islam acts against free speech on two levels. It silences, by violence or intimidation, the dissenter, and in so doing, cows many more into acquiescence. Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch director, was shot dead on an Amsterdam street in 2004 by a Muslim enraged by Van Gogh’s film “Submission”; a note stuck to Van Gogh’s corpse with a knife threatened similar vengeance upon Van Gogh’s collaborator, and Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali; neighbours of Ali’s government safe house lodged complaints about the security risk to themselves; Ali was forced to move. During the Danish cartoons controversy of late 2005 and early 2006, no British news outlet published the cartoons in question. Given that British news outlets regularly make sport of Christians with a relish historically rivalled only by the lions of the Circus Maximus, it is difficult not to conclude that their discretion was due not to respect for Muslim feelings, but to a desire not to have their offices burnt and their staff attacked. Most people operate on a default position of anything-for-a-quiet-life. It is a vulnerability well exploited by the professionally indignant.
  There are legal restrictions on free speech, and this is as it should be. It should not be, as the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr famously noted, permissible to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre – although one would like to think that if someone made this panic-inducing exclamation during a performance of “We Will Rock You”, no jury would convict. It should not be – and it isn’t – permissible to incite violence. These are easy, agreeable limits to live within. A government which draws those boundaries in any further is both foolish and counter-productive. Earlier this year, the British historian David Irving was imprisoned for three years in Austria for expressing opinions about the Holocaust. Cranky and objectionable though Irving is, he should not be martyred in a cell. He should be out, about, free to sell his crackpot beliefs in the market of ideas, where they would, and should, be ignored or ridiculed. To enforce rules about expression, to judge all behaviour by whether it might offend someone else, is to remove common sense from workaday human interaction. The inevitable result is such folly as a British Airways employee being banned from wearing a small crucifix, something about which no sane person could possibly have cared less – and something about which BA’s position seems especially odd when one considers that their tail fins are decorated with a flag assembled from the crosses of three Christian saints.
  This feature, then, is free speech upholding free speech, an argument in favour of argument. Views are solicited from three people who care passionately about free speech – a philosopher, a journalist, a human rights activist – and from three people who, in one way or another, test the belief of many in the principle under discussion. Nick Griffin, Anjem Choudary and Stephen Green hold views which most readers of this newspaper would find absurd, bewildering and/or repellent. All have been arrested for propagating those views, and all are difficult men to defend, or offer further publicity, with an entirely glad heart. That said, all were willing to take time to talk to someone who they couldn’t have imagined was going to be overly sympathetic – to participate in the process by which the heat of dispute brings forth the light of truth. That’s how, and why, free speech works.

AC GRAYLING, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, BIRKBECK COLLEGE
“Freedom of speech,” declares Grayling, “is the fundamental freedom. Without it, you can’t have any of the others – there would no due process of law, because you couldn’t defend yourself, no democracy because you couldn’t argue your case, no assertion of your rights, because you wouldn’t be able to explain why those rights are being threatened. All our freedoms balance on this pinpoint.”
  There is, Grayling notes, no better illustration of this principle than the fact that the guarantee of freedom of speech for American citizens is the first amendment of their constitution – the succeeding amendments barely matter without it. There being no such protection for British subjects, Grayling perceives two threats.
  “One,” he says, “is that we have at the moment a community – the Muslim community – who, for good and bad reasons, are hypersensitive about things said about them. The argument to be won there is that satire and criticism are too important to muzzle in response to those sensitivities, and that they have to be robust enough to rise to the challenge. The answer to anything you regard as offensive is more free speech.
  “The other threat,” continues Grayling, “is that we have a government which puts security and stability, or the illusion of them, before other things. ID cards, surveillance cameras, laws against expression, are all designed to assure us that somehow or other we’re going to be more secure. We’re not, but we will lose rights and freedoms which were won over centuries of bloodshed.”
  There is, also, the most pernicious threat of all: timidity when confronted with the anger of people who care more about us not saying something than we might about saying it.
  “Our greatest danger,” agrees Grayling, “is self-censorship, winning the war on behalf of those who want to defeat us. It is unthinkable what kind of society we’re going to have if we do buckle. An appeal to offended sensibilities is just empty, and nobody should take it seriously. People should live with it, or respond.”
  As to those who express views widely regarded as a reason for the law to intervene, Grayling would prefer to deploy them as unwitting operatives in the struggle for freedom.
  “They are,” he says, “very clear examples of why free speech is necessary. In order to combat those views, you have to refute and challenge them. If you shut people up, people lose the opportunity to hear the counter-arguments. Their existence, in a perverse way, provides the opportunity for the good to do the better thing. Don’t make them martyrs. Show them they’re talking rubbish. There are cases where people should be made to shut up, but they are so few, and the reasons must always be under review. This freedom is like radioactive material – you should only mess around with it under the most stringent circumstances.”

NICK GRIFFIN, CHAIRMAN, BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY
It is unlikely that many readers of this fine liberal broadsheet would have wept waterfalls had Griffin been convicted at his recent trial for inciting racial hatred – and likely that most would have been unable to suppress a titter had word emerged that his cellmate was a violent gay weightlifter called Ahmed. However, the fact remains that Griffin was arrested, charged, and tried – twice – for expressing an opinion, in this case that Islam is a “wicked, vicious” faith. Laws which – quite reasonably – proscribe incitement to hatred of races were deployed, inevitably unsuccessfully, in defence of a religion that encompasses Richard Thompson and Muhammad Ali. Whatever one thinks of Griffin – who accepts with good grace your correspondent’s assurances that he wouldn’t vote BNP with a gun at his head – it is hard not to view this as a politically motivated show trial.
  “The decision came from the highest levels of the Labour Party,” claims Griffin, “to help them claw back the Muslim vote they lost after the Iraq war. After 7/7 it became about showing the supposed moderate Muslim vote that when the state attacks extremists, it’s not just attacking Islam.”
  Unsurprisingly – but not necessarily incorrectly – Griffin believes that there is a more serious menace to freedom of expression than muddleheaded political grandstanding: the threat of violence by those claiming divine sanction. People have uttered milder and/or more thoughtful criticisms of Islam than Griffin, and ended up dead (Theo Van Gogh), in hiding (Salman Rushdie) or hounded out of their country (Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
  “I most definitely am concerned,” he says, asked if he fears for his safety. “This was another thing in the case. The prosecution said that my criticism of Islam was coded criticism of Asians. The worst that could have happened for criticising Asians would have been jail. Criticising Muslims could get my throat cut. The real threat to free speech comes from extra-radicalised young Muslims. Sooner or later, one of them will follow things through, and a Rowan Atkinson or Nick Griffin will be murdered, and all of you [Griffin is here proceeding from the assumption that your correspondent is a member of the milquetoast liberal media elite] will put your heads below the parapet.”
  Griffin is at least sufficiently honest to admit that his trial was a PR goldstrike for the BNP – and that, from a purely political view, imprisonment would have been even better. Were he to be punished again for expressing a belief, by the legal system or godly vigilante, he would make an unappealing martyr. But surely it is unarguable that the best way to express the bafflement or revulsion felt by many towards Griffin’s party is robust, civilised, knockabout argument – which, it must be said, Griffin was happy to provide during a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion.
  “The proper place for the limits to free speech,” he says, “is where they always were under Common Law. People should be able to say whatever they like about an individual or a group. If people are inciting violence, then there were always laws to prevent that, and nothing further was needed.”

ANJEM CHOUDARY, FORMER HEAD, AL-MUHAJIROUN
Choudary is another figure who makes his right to express himself difficult to defend with especial enthusiasm. His – now dissolved – organisation al-Muhajiroun once held a commemoration of September 11th at which the hijackers who murdered 3,000 people were revered as “the magnificent 19”. He has personally been – by the most charitable reading of his remarks – equivocal about the London bombings of July 2005. He suggested that capital punishment may have been an appropriate response to Pope Benedict XVI’s quotation of Emperor Manuel II Paleologos. And, in March 2006, he was arrested in connection with one of the Danish cartoon demonstrations.
  “For aggravated incitement to racial hatred,” he says, “and incitement to murder. The charges were dropped.”
  Choudary is not a man given to terse explications, but his lengthy monologues can be boiled down to the following contradiction: Choudary values his freedom of speech only insofar as it enables him to work towards restricting everyone else’s.
  “I happened to be born in this country,” he says, “and I continue to propagate what I believe. If your law facilitates that, praise be to God. I don’t thank Tony Blair or capitalism for that. I believe it is a consequence of capitalist ideology, that you do allow a certain amount of freedom, which I can exploit to my advantage, to invite people to Sharia. Which isn’t to say I support the idea of freedom or democracy.”
  The faith to which Choudary adheres has been at the centre of two controversial recent pieces of legislation – those proscribing incitement to religious (as opposed to racial) hatred, and banning the “glorification” (whatever that means) of terrorism. He regards both as irrelevances.
  “At the end of the day,” he says, “you need to make a decision on who decides what is acceptable behaviour. Is it God, or is it man? I think those calling for an incitement to religious hatred law don’t fully understand Islam as an ideology that needs to be implemented as a state level.”
  Chaudary’s Islamic Republic of Britain, it seems safe to assume, will place rather less value on freedom of speech than the Godless, oppressive Britain which permits him to call for its overthrow. He nevertheless maintains that Islam is the victim of discrimination in this country – and, by his stringent standards, it probably is.
  “I think,” he says, “all law, education and welfare should be covered by the Sharia. We do believe that we should cut the hands of thieves, stone the adulterer, and in capital punishment for the apostate, and those who insult the messengers of Mohammed. None of those can be implemented, and because I can’t enforce those beliefs, there will always be discrimation.”

STEPHEN GREEN, NATIONAL DIRECTOR, CHRISTIAN VOICE
Green’s organisation is best-known for its campaign against the popular light entertainment “Jerry Springer: The Opera”. Not content with – peacefully, in fairness – picketing theatres, they reacted to the BBC’s decision to screen it by publishing home phone numbers of BBC executives. They also persuaded a cancer charity, Maggie’s Centres, to refuse a £3,000 donation from the show, threatening demonstrations.
  Green’s promotion of his somewhat old-school interpretation of the gospels has had consequences. The Co-Operative Bank informed him that Christian Voice’s money was unwelcome. In September 2006, he was arrested at the annual Lesbian & Gay Mardi Gras in Cardiff, for distributing pamphlets quoting the verses of Leviticus and Romans which imply divine disapproval of such events (or “open display of perversion,” as Green describes it). He was charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act (“threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour”). Green pleaded not guilty, and the charges were dropped. He is assembling a suit for wrongful arrest.
  “It should alarm everybody,” he says. “Because it can happen to anybody. It’s very, very worrying.”
  Green does not appreciate the irony that a campaigner against the freedom of expression of librettists should get his collar felt for freely expressing himself.
  “I’m very much opposed to censorship,” he claims, “by which I mean the government telling us what we can and can’t say. But I draw the line at blasphemy.”
  A fairly thick line, it turns out.
  “The current blasphemy law,” he says, “if enforced properly, wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
  Nobody has been imprisoned for blasphemy in this country since 1922, when John Gott, a pamphleteer, got nine months for comparing Jesus Christ to a clown. Which seems an over-reaction.
  “Punishment isn’t the issue,” says Green. “The issue is that you have the law so these things should not take place. It’s a matter of respect for almighty God – from that derives respect for everything else. Ordinary discourse denying the existence of God is fair enough. Humiliation and ridicule of almighty God isn’t. That’s why we demonstrated against the Springer opera, and we’ll do the same if Eric Idle brings [Monty Python musical] ‘Not The Messiah’ to these shores.”
  But isn’t the very notion of humanity humiliating or ridiculing God just a bit daft? Ditto the idea of protecting Him from insult with laws? Isn’t he capable of, you know, looking after himself?
  “Yes,” says Green, “and that’s the scary part, because he looks after himself by bringing judgement against nations. It’s a very worrying thing.”

PETER HITCHENS, COLUMNIST, MAIL ON SUNDAY
Peter Hitchens is the most readable and articulate conservative Christian currently permitted space in British media. He is not so ingenuous as to claim that his views are suppressed – he has a page in the Mail on Sunday, and a readership of hundreds of thousands. He does, however, perceive a threat to free speech in the parameters in which public debate is framed – by a liberal consensus which proceeds on the assumption that opinions like his are crazy, however many share them.
  “I don’t think they do it intend to suppress contrary opinions,” he says. “I think they can’t imagine the existence of contrary opinions. A consequence of believing that you are morally right is to believe your opponents are morally defective.”
  While Hitchens’ appearances on “Question Time” have not gone unpunctuated by the odd snort of contempt while an opponent is in mid-tirade, he differs from much conservative and Christian opinion in having no desire to see his beliefs protected by law.
  “A free mind,” he says, “responds to a contradiction with interest, and tries to come up with a justification, rather than just refusing to address it as if their opponent is insane. The reason people get angry about contrary opinions is that they’re unsure of their own. Incitement to violence should be prevented, otherwise I think people should be able to say what they think, and be forced to defend it in debate. When you argue with people, you discover new truths.”
  Of another bugbear of conservative commentators, the unwritten but pervasive strictures of political correctness, Hitchens takes what may seem a surprisingly nuanced view.
  “I get into trouble,” he says, “when I stand up for political correctness insofar as its arguments for good manners are unanswerable. But I think the spread of self-righteous political correctness is very dangerous, the most conformist movement since the Reformation. When people think they’re right and good, there’s nothing they won’t do.”
  There is little doubt about who Hitchens is talking about.
  “I’m fearful,” he says, “because I see the slow construction of what could be, in the wrong hands, a seriously repressive apparatus. We’ve seen the use of public order legislation to police attitudes to homosexuality – that rather unloveable man from Christian Voice getting arrested in Cardiff, for example. Lots of letters I get use words like ‘insulted’ and ‘offence’, and the Public Order Act could be used to prosecute for statements of opinion. It’s not impossible that, within 10 or 15 years, I might be arrested for expressing an opinion.”
 
SHAMI CHAKRABARTI, DIRECTOR, LIBERTY
“There is no question,” says Shami Chakrabarti. “Free speech is under threat.”
  Liberty, a human rights organisation, has lobbied and campaigned vigorously against this government’s encroachments upon free speech. However, if there’s one thing all parties to the argument agree on, is that completely free speech is neither feasible nor desirable. So, where does an organisation dedicated to freedom believe the limits should lie?
  “If you believe,” says Chakrabarti, “in the post-war human rights settlement, as I do, then no, you don’t believe in limitless free speech – that would mean no protection of intellectual property, no restriction on incitement to murder. There is no democracy that doesn’t have necessary and proportionate restrictions. Then it’s a question of where the pendulum rests in relation to a particular issue.”
  It is a sign of the times that the particular issue which recurred in every interview done for this feature was the question of whether opinions – specifically, opinions pertaining to religion – should be legally protected from contradiction.
  “There is no right,” she says, “not to be offended. And if people start asserting such a right, freedom dies. There’s a cultural shift going on here, and we’re in danger of becoming a slightly cantankerous society. The idea of offence infantilises the population. As a consequence they become less able to rub along together, less able to engage in discourse with common courtesy – which is not a legal limit, but an intelligent limit, on free speech.”
  And, like everyone else interviewed for this feature, Chakrabarti felt that one of the gravest threats to our right to speak freely was the people we employ to protect it.
  “Authoritarianism in politics didn’t begin with this government,” she says. “Michael Howard was the first real authoritarian Home Secretary, but his work has been built on by his successors. There is a philosophical weakness in our politicians. They don’t believe in anything. They also have an addiction to legislation. This is why we see such lowest common denominator responses to crises. But I think you have to look at free speech in the broader context of threats to our liberty. Sometimes people suggest that racial equality and free speech are in opposing camps, I disagree. It’s all about people being unable to cope with difference.”
  Chakrabarti says that she considers herself an optimist, that momentum is gathering in favour of a reassertion of what Britons have, for centuries, considered as much a right as the air they inhale.
  “I think there should be a right to offend,” she says, “but it’s not a duty. We have to separate the law from the personal, ethical and social decisions we make every day. Someone disagreeing with you – that should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end.”

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