2 Oct 2007 | Comment, Digital Freedom, News
An unprecedented coalition of British bloggers has come together over the last two weeks to fight an assault on freedom of speech from Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
Lawyers acting for the Uzbek billionaire, who recently bought a large stake in Arsenal Football Club, took exception to allegations made by former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray on his popular blog. However, instead of attempting to prosecute Murray for libel, Usmanov’s lawyers, Schillings, went to Fasthosts, the company hosting Murray’s blog. Under pressure, Fasthosts cancelled the account overseeing Murray’s website bringing the site down.
This had several unintended consequences. Firstly, the cancelled account also looked after several other websites which were also removed. These included those of popular Labour blogger, Councillor Bob Piper, and prominent web activist and campaigner Tim Ireland. Most damaging from a PR point of view, the website of the Conservative candidate for London Mayor, Boris Johnson, was also pulled.
News of the closure of these blogs spread quickly across the blogosphere. Being a friend of Tim Ireland and a blogger myself, I was asked to post on my own blog the reasons for Tim, Murray and the rest going missing.
From there things took on a life of their own. Within 24 hours, over 100 bloggers were linking to my blog, condemning the actions of Schillings and Fasthosts. Mentions on Slashdot, massively popular technology-related news, and many Arsenal fan web forums, saw my blog receiving thousands of visitors as the story spread.
Anonymous blogs repeating Murray’s allegations about Usmanov sprang up. The allegations have been repeated in over 500 separate locations. Schillings boast on their website of being able to starve stories of the ‘oxygen of publicity’ on behalf of their clients. On this occasion, that strategy failed spectacularly. Hundreds of thousands of people, many previously unaware of who Usmanov and Murray were, have now heard about the story.
Within a week, the coalition of bloggers had grown to over 300. What was exceptional about the group was its sheer diversity. The range of support across the spectrum was unprecedented in British blogging; from Lenin’s Tomb and Harry’s Place on the left to Tim Worstall and Samizdata on the right. Differences were set aside in order to face a common enemy. Iain Dale, who runs one of the UK’s biggest blogs and has been involved in a long-running feud with Tim Ireland, rallied to Tim’s defence.
It must be emphasised that this is not about bloggers claiming the right to say whatever they like with impunity and without fear of sanction. Bloggers are, rightly so, as accountable for what they write as journalists. Craig Murray is on record as saying he wants Usmanov to sue him for libel so the allegations can be put on the record. In a statement to the Guardian newspaper, a spokesman for Schillings said that they were not about to sue Murray because ‘they did not want to give him a platform to express his views’. Instead of fighting the case in the courts, Schillings tried to make the story go away completely. The allegations may be true, they may be false, but in the absence of a libel trial testing their veracity, thousands of people have formed their own conclusions.
One of the by-products of all this is a fledgling cross-spectrum campaign to seek reform of British libel laws where they pertain to publishing on the Internet. A number of issues are being examined. A 1999 legal precedent, Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, has meant that web host companies are regarded as the publisher of defamatory statements and can be sued accordingly. It’s a patently ridiculous position – like trying to sue the newspaper delivery boy for the contents of his bag – but one that led to Murray et al’s websites being pulled by a nervous web host.
It’s also worth noting that, apart from a handful of mentions in the mainstream press, this story was disseminated entirely via blogs. It’s another sign that British blogging is flourishing in its own right. Other campaigns are springing up, including one to secure UK asylum for those employees of British forces in Iraq who are facing torture and murder at the hands of militias (a campaign meeting attended by MPs from all parties takes place at the Houses of Parliament next week). The Usmanov affair shows that the British blogosphere can drive an issue on its own terms.
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19 Jun 2007 | Comment
Lord knows, I’ve had my differences with Ken Livingstone, especially when it comes to the politics of the Middle East – but there’s one issue he’s got absolutely right. Last week, to the enormous surprise of much of London’s Jewish community, the mayor agreed with them – and came out against an academic boycott of Israel.
Unfortunately, his intervention came too late. The very next day, Britain’s University and College Union voted to promote the call for a boycott. Now, I was raised to be respectful of teachers and positively reverential towards academics. Which is why it pains me to say that this decision is almost laughably stupid. But it is. If a student had come up with it, he would find it daubed with a thick red line, from top to bottom.
First, it lacks all logical consistency. Let’s say you accept, as I do, that Israel is wrong to be occupying the territories it won in the Six Day war, whose 40th anniversary is being marked this week. Let’s say that that is your reason for boycotting Israel. Then why no boycott of China for its occupation of Tibet? Or of Russia for its brutal war against the Chechens? Or of Sudan, for its killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, a murderous persecution described by the US as genocide?
If it’s the ill-treatment of Palestinians in particular that concerns you, then why no boycott of Lebanon, whose army continues to pound the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, killing civilians daily? True, the Lebanese government is not a military occupier. But if occupation is the crime that warrants international ostracism, then why no boycott of American universities? After all, the US is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is Britain. Why do the good men and women of UCU not speak out, by boycotting, say, Oxford, Cambridge and London universities? Why do they not boycott themselves?
Maybe academic freedom is their chief concern. That would make sense, given that they’re academics. But if that was the issue, there would surely be boycotts of Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few places where intellectual freedom remains a fond dream. (The awkward truth is that the freest place in the Middle East for an Arab scholar is Israel.) Yet the UCU sees no “moral implications,” to use the language of last week’s resolution, in institutional ties with Damascus, Cairo or Tehran. Only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
For some reason, the activists pushing for this move believe Israelis should be placed in a unique category of untouchability. Never mind the 655,000 the US and Britain have, on one estimate, killed in Iraq. Never mind the two million displaced in Darfur. Never mind the closed, repressive societies of the Middle East. The Israelis are a people apart, one that must be shunned.
But let’s be charitable and forgive the boycotters their inconsistency. Surely any tactic, even an inconsistent one, is forgivable if it does some good. This, though, is where the combined geniuses of the UCU have really blundered. For a boycott will be hugely counter-productive.
For one thing, Israeli academics are disproportionately represented in Israel’s “peace camp.” The UCU will be boycotting the very people who have done most to draw the Israeli public’s attention to the folly of the occupation, to the very people working to bring an end to this desperate conflict. By their actions, the UCU will embolden the Israeli right who will be able to say, ‘Look, the world hates and isolates us: this is exactly why we have to be militarily strong.’
The second error is more subtle. One of the few things that might make Israel change course would be a shift in diaspora Jewish opinion: those campaigning for Palestinian rights and an end to the occupation need to win over Jewish allies. Yet no tactic is more likely to alienate Jews than a boycott. That’s because the very word has deep and painful resonances for Jews: a boycott of Jewish business was one of the Nazis’ opening moves. No one is equating the current plan with that. But of all the tactics to have chosen, a boycott is the very dumbest one.
Advocates say there’s nothing to worry about, this will be a boycott of institutions, not individuals – a necessary move because no Israeli institution has ever taken a stand against the occupation. This, too, is numb-skulled. When do academic institutions ever take a collective stand against anything? Did Imperial College declare itself against the Iraq war? What was the British Museum’s view of UK policy in Northern Ireland? Of course there was no such thing. Institutions of learning don’t take a stand; individuals do.
Which is why it will be individuals who are ostracised by this action. When you boycott the Hebrew University, you’re not boycotting bricks and mortar but the men and women who teach there. The “institutional” talk is just a ruse designed to make this boycott more palatable. It will still end in the shunning of individuals.
And why? Simply because they are citizens of the wrong country, born with the wrong nationality. In 2003 the Linguistic Society of America declared itself against blacklisting scholars simply because of the actions of their governments. “Such boycotts violate the principle of free scientific interaction and cooperation, and they constitute arbitrary and selective applications of collective punishment.” They also amount to a pretty crass form or discrimination: you can’t come to this conference, because you’ve got the wrong colour passport.
Oh, but none of these arguments stopped the boycott of South Africa, say the pro-blacklisters. Except these situations are completely different. In South Africa, the majority of the people were denied a vote in the state in which they lived. Israelis and Palestinians are, by contrast, two peoples locked in a national conflict which will be resolved only when each has its own, secure state.
Ken Livingstone is right: to launch a boycott of Israel now would hurt, not help the search for the peace that might end this Middle East tragedy. And that, when all the posturing is put to one side, is all that should matter.
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21 May 2007 | Uncategorized
Trying to remember when all this started, I rooted out from my shelves the other day a copy of a book I wrote as a young reporter on the Guardian. Its front cover is cracking and a bit faded with the passage of 27 years, but the cartoon by John Kent that we commissioned is still legible. It shows Mrs Thatcher making the imperious demand, ‘What’s our biggest state secret?’ The cabinet secretary, then Sir Robert Armstrong, replies wittily: ‘Our incompetence!’ The book’s theme was the disgraceful way successive governments, both Labour and Tory, had colluded to fend off a freedom of information act, regarded elsewhere in the civilised world as a key component of a decent democracy.
In my little polemic, I laboriously traced the controversy all the way back to the 1960s – a weary trail larded with memos from senior civil servants about ways they could head off this ‘formidably burdensome’ idea, and with evasions from such politicians as the Labour premier Jim Callaghan. He complained heartrendingly that ‘the business of government is difficult enough as it is’. The problem, as I saw it then, was that Whitehall and Westminster were at bottom very undemocratic places, which had never abolished the prerogative powers of the monarchy, but simply inherited them to use for their own purposes. The rest of us were regarded not as citizens, but as subjects – and indeed, ‘British subject’ was how we were still oppressively described on our passports in those days.
The young Tony Blair put it well when he was in opposition in 1996: ‘Information is power, and any government’s attitude about sharing information with the people actually says a great deal about how it views power itself, and how it views the relationship between itself and the people who elected it.’
Where I went wrong, back in 1980, was in naively imagining that an anachronistic democratic deficit was bound to be very shortly corrected. Instead, it took until 1997 before the Blair government came to office, saddled with an unavoidable commitment to introduce a freedom of information act. For all his fine words, Blair too did his very best to wriggle out of it, with the result that it was three years before a much watered-down version finally reached the statute book. Even then, few people noticed the small print, which allowed a theoretical maximum of five years before the Act actually had to be implemented. I don’t think a single one of the campaigners imagined the government would have the brass neck actually to delay implementation for the full five years. But they did.
As passed, the Act has an array of exemptions. The most noxious is a ministerial veto. Any minister can certify that disclosure of a piece of information would ‘prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs’. As the original drafts circulated round Whitehall, civil servants and politicians in every department wrote themselves further exemptions – for ‘commercial confidence’, ‘international relations’, ‘policy formation’, ‘ministerial discussions’, ‘parliamentary privilege’, dealings with the royal family, anything to do with the intelligence services. Exemptions can be claimed (and have been, interminably) in bogus attempts to delete all civil servants’ names from documents, allegedly under the privacy rules of the parallel Data Protection Act.
Our efforts to make use of the Act on the Guardian soon established that quite a few civil servants were unwilling to operate it in good faith. It takes a month at best to get an answer (‘20 working days’). Within a short time, departments were exploiting a piece of small print to claim an extra minimum of 20 further days ‘to consider public interest factors’. Many officials take a timid and precautionary approach, refusing to release anything for which an exemption can plausibly be claimed. An internal appeal then takes as long as the ministry can get away with.
A second appeal to the Information Commissioner, hopelessly overloaded, understaffed, and banished to a provincial office in Wilmslow, generates a result, often of mixed quality, after an inordinate delay of up to nine months. Only then is it possible to go to the Information Tribunal, where – at last – a degree of lawyerly rigour can be found.
Many applicants give up, disheartened, after weeks of slogging through the mud to gain a few inches in what feels like a bureaucratic battle of the Somme. This is no accident: delay and obstruction are time-honoured tactics in Whitehall, whether designed to wear down a transient minister who has too many bright ideas, or to see off importunate members of the public. Matthew Parris recently pointed out, in a column in the Times: ‘I do know what it is like to be a civil servant in Whitehall, because for two years I was one. There is a culture there that sees the public as a damn nuisance. The culture is endemic and needs to be stamped on very hard indeed.’
One of the first acts of Charles Falconer at the Department of Constitutional Affairs was unhelpful to the cause of openness. He set up what he called a ‘clearing house’. Under this, all requests that were at all interesting, or that came from the media, had to be sent off to the DCA for vetting instead of being promptly answered. Individual departments such as the Home Office also set up a rigmarole of internal filters, providing for reference up to the top; weekly submissions to ministers of forthcoming disclosures; and prolonged meetings with press officers and private secretaries in the interests of news management. There was a neurotic fear of loss of control. Rather than the hoped-for culture change, parts of Whitehall have instead been showing signs of a nervous collapse.
Of the 62,852 requests made to central government since 1 January 2005, 36,558 have been granted. Seven departments, including Lord Falconer’s own, refused to give answers to more than half the requests they received. The Act badly needs to be strengthened.
Nonetheless, some results did start to come through at different levels. Many councils began to routinely publicise restaurant health inspections. This followed an exercise in which our requests uncovered an entertaining spat with Heston Blumenthal, owner of the upmarket Fat Duck at Bray, about the most appropriate temperature for his celebrated pork cooked in brine. More significantly, MPs were forced to disclose at last their expenses claims, revealing wild variations between neighbouring politicians, some of whom definitely seemed to have their snouts in the trough. The identities also came to light of the recipients of millions in EU agricultural subsidies, including Prince Charles. The minutes of the BBC governors’ meeting were disclosed, in which they got rid of Director-General Greg Dyke, remarking that the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell didn’t like him.
And then, a bare 18 months after the Act came in, a counter-attack began. The new bid for censorship involved the old collusive framework of ministers and civil servants – the politicians resenting their loss of information control, backed up by officials saying they objected to the amount of work involved in making disclosures.
In July 2006, Falconer circulated a private paper to cabinet colleagues, outlining a subtle and bureaucratic scheme to enable ‘the most difficult requests – generally received from determined and experienced, rather than casual, requestors – to be refused on cost grounds’.
What Falconer called ‘serial requesters’ were, of course, the very people on whom the public rely to dig out important material – the media, pressure groups, opposition MPs.
Falconer’s plan was to push through apparently minor changes to the small print of the regulations, by means of secondary legislation. He would effectively restrict organisations such as the BBC or Oxfam to four requests a year per department. This would be done by ‘aggregating’ all the requests from different journalists, or individual campaigners, and claiming that, taken together, they breached cost limits.
A second arm to the scheme was to make it even easier to reach those cost limits, by adding in notional charges not just for extracting the information but also for what lawyers in their bills call ‘perusing’. (Falconer is a commercial lawyer by trade.) And on top of that, he wanted to charge for all the time that ministers and top officials spend meeting each other to debate ways to block awkward requests. In other words, the more significant the request, the easier it would be to refuse to answer it.
This scheme to block access to FOI only to those who seek to make use of it has a certain Kafkaesque quality. Falconer accurately predicted that opponents would say that ‘the government is seeking to undermine the Act by underhand means in order to shield itself from legitimate scrutiny’. To meet this image problem, he proposed to commission a supposedly independent cost-benefit analysis.
Frontier Economics, a small consultancy with former cabinet secretary Andrew Turnbull on the board, was accordingly paid £75,000 to knock out a quick study. They produced a sheaf of dubious statistics, purporting to show that FOI cost Whitehall £24m a year, and that much of the demand came from a handful of media – mainly the BBC, the Guardian and the Sunday Times. The small print revealed that the time of ministers had been costed at a purely imaginary £300 an hour. The time taken in consultations had been arrived at by taking the numbers of hours logged by officials – and then blithely doubling the figures. The figures for newspaper use were extrapolated from a single week. Nowhere was it pointed out that the initial years of the Act would be far more expensive than subsequently, because every issue was a precedent. Nor was it explained that the government spends far more – £300m a year – on hundreds of press officers to pump out its own propaganda. And nor was it said that £24m a year is in fact fantastically cheap.
Armed with this threadbare study, Falconer sought to act quickly. It is possible that he will not get away with it in the end. The FOI Act does not actually allow discrimination between requesters. But the omens are bad. An Act that ought to be strengthened is proving instead to be, day by day, under an insidious attack.
MPs themselves, smarting no doubt from the revelations about their own expenses, have not risen up against this plan. Instead, they have cooked up a private member’s bill of their own, promoted by former Conservative chief whip David Maclean, to exempt themselves entirely from the Act. The Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill is said to be designed to prevent disclosure of letters from MPs to public bodies on behalf of their constituents – or, of course, on behalf of other, less salubrious, interests. Ostensibly, the concern is for privacy. But the Act already protects constituents’ identities. The real effect of the bill would be to enable politicians not only to mis-spend the taxpayers’ money but also to lobby under cover. This is the very opposite of accountability.
Along with the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons Jack Straw is backing the bill, which is being given a fair wind by the government. Straw says privately, ‘Many members on both sides of the House would welcome it.’ And how do we know that he says that? Through the old-fashioned means of a leaked letter. Perhaps we shall all be forced to go back soon to much more traditional methods of trying to penetrate the secretive parts of government.
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25 Apr 2007 | Comment
Last week, Germany, in its capacity as president of the EU, attempted to outlaw Holocaust denial in the EU. In the end, the resolution that emerged was the classic result of hard-fought compromise – that is to say, nobody got what they wanted. States that already had a Holocaust-denial law, such as Germany, Austria and France, did not manage to foist one on countries such as the UK and Ireland, who claimed to be worried about freedom of speech and inquiry. Meanwhile, those countries that did not have laws concerning the Holocaust now find themselves having to pay lip service, as members of the Union, to the watered down proposal – criminalising “trivialisation” of the Holocaust.
Even if the majority of nations in the EU do not sign up to this (and they have every right not to), damage has been done to the EU’s self-image as protector of human rights and free speech, and it is unsurprising who was among the first to point this out.
Step forward the man in the beige anorak.
Speaking to Spanish TV earlier this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran did not hesitate to pick up on the EU’s stance. Of course, Mr Ahmadinejad has form on this: he is the man who responded to the Mohammed cartoons controversy by sanctioning an exhibition of viciously anti-semitic Holocaust denial cartoons, with the expressed attempt at exposing the west’s “hypocrisy” on the portrayal of taboos.
We can agree or disagree on whether he had a point at the time. Personally, I don’t think he did: In terms of taste and offence there’s a difference, not least of historical distance, between mocking a centuries-dead religious leader and an abysmal event from which many still literally bear the scars.
But when one looks at events in Luxembourg over the past week, and Mr Ahmadinejad’s response, one cannot help but see he has a certain logic on his side when he asks: “Does [the] EU consider questions as a crime? Today, anywhere in the world, one can raise questions about God, prophets, existence and any other issue. Why historical events should not be clarified [sic]?”
We all, of course, can imagine where these questions lead (if you can’t, ask David Irving). But how many of us can bring ourselves to disagree with Mr Ahmadinejad’s words above, however much we may be suspicious of the sentiment? If the EU can allow people to raise questions about one thing, then why not another?
We may write off the resolution as a gesture (though, again, David Irving might have something to tell us about that), but even in the gesture, the damage is done. The EU is seen to be the superpower that protects the sensitivities of Jews, but not those of Muslims.
And Ahmadinejad has been quick to take advantage. At a time when already too many in the Middle East see the EU as in the pocket of Israel, this at best pointless resolution will only serve to drive yet more into the arms of the Iranians, who, after the propaganda victories of the second Lebanon war and the hostage crisis, are more and more managing to portray themselves as the champions of the Middle East’s Muslims.
Originally posted on Comment is Free
