{"id":40995,"date":"2012-10-17T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T07:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=40995"},"modified":"2017-03-28T12:49:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T11:49:03","slug":"dominic-raab-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=40995","title":{"rendered":"Index Interview: The salami slicing of free speech"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nConservative MP Dominic Raab talks to Mike Harris about civil liberties, free speech and how he “wouldn\u2019t lose any sleep” if the UK’s communications data bill were canned<\/strong>
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This is the first of a new Index Interviews series<\/em><\/p>\n

LONDON, 16\/10\/2012 (INDEX). Dominic Raab\u2019s father fled Czechoslovakia just before the Second World War. The Conservative politician cites the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of his biggest political influences and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn<\/a> as the writer whose life he most admires. In many ways, his style is from another generation of politicians; he shoots from the hip describing Vladimir Putin as \u201ca very Machiavellian, ruthless politician\u201d, he is unaccompanied by an aide, and, rarer still, he doesn\u2019t check his BlackBerry every five minutes.<\/p>\n

Index is meeting Raab in a side room off Portcullis House, Parliament\u2019s new office block for members of Parliament (MPs) and their staff. On the agenda are free speech issues both in the UK and abroad — from the Leveson Inquiry<\/a> to the Kremlin\u2019s suppression of Russian NGOs.<\/p>\n

Offence and self-censorship<\/h5>\n

Let\u2019s start with an easy question: Does he believe the culture of offence has got worse? He does.<\/p>\n

“There is certainly much more legal restriction on what you can say. We\u2019ve seen it with the incitement to religious hatred debate,” he says, “the glorification of terrorism debate and the ASBOs (Antisocial Behaviour Orders) that originated under the last government.\u201d His concern is that these limitations are making society less open: \u201cWe\u2019re narrowing the space where free speech and open debate takes place.<\/p>\n

Raab defends preacher Philip Howard<\/a>, who was banned from street preaching by Westminster Council in 2006:<\/p>\n