In the aftermath of an Index on Censorship debate in New Delhi, Kirsty Hughes says India’s web users are standing at a crossroads
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DJ Taylor is the author of Orwell: The Life, an award-winning biography of journalist and novelist George Orwell. he speaks to Nigel Warburton about Orwell’s nuanced attitude to free speech and his encounters with censorship
It was a few minutes before kick off last Sunday when when the banners went up. To be fair they were more painted bed sheets than banners. One read “£62 and we’re still here.” Another said “£62!! Where will it stop?” The tone of the first was defiant, the second quietly despairing. Either way, as protests go, they were well mannered.
There had been much debate about the price of away tickets for Manchester City fans at Arsenal. Premiership clubs offer a bizarre pricing hierarchy whereby fans of the most successful clubs (invariably the richest clubs) are charged most for tickets. This might have a degree of fairness if, say, Manchester City’s owner Sheikh Mansour paid for the fans’ tickets, but he doesn’t. The reality is that a Manchester City fan is just as likely to be struggling financially as a Reading or QPR fan.
Even by premiership standards £62 for an away ticket is ludicrously high. Some fans boycotted the match, and 900 of the 3,000-strong allocation were reportedly returned to Arsenal. Others (me included) decided to go, enjoy the match (City’s first league victory at Arsenal in 37 years as it happens) and sing their heart out about the injustice of it all.
City supporter Richard Taylor, an estate agent from Stalybridge, had painted the banner the previous night in Manchester. He says he was impressed with the result. “It’s a lot neater than I thought it would be. Ticket prices are a big problem, especially for away supporters. I thought the banner might get the issue a bit of publicity.”
The banner that was banned from the Emirates at Richard Taylor’s home before the match –
photograph Richard Taylor
“We’d only had it up a few seconds when a steward came over. He said we’ve been instructed by our bosses to take it away. Actually, he said ‘I agree with what you are saying’, but I’ve been told I’ve got to take it away’. I told him he had no right to take it off me, that it was peaceful protest, and there’s nothing offensive about the banner. He said ‘Don’t make my work harder for me because then I’ll have to get the police involved’.”
Reinforcements soon arrived in the form of the Metropolitan police. A couple of officers hurdled empty chairs Sweeney-style to reach the refuseniks. “They came over quite aggressive actually, jumping over the seats to get to us. Two came over to me and two stood at the end of the aisle. They demanded Taylor hand over the banner or be arrested. “Well I wasn’t going to walk out and miss the match. I’d paid £62 for it, so I gave the banner to them. We tried to argue about it, but it wasn’t worth getting kicked out when we’d paid £62.”
Did they say what they would arrest him for? “No.”
By now the whole away end were singing “£62 and we’re not here” [an adaptation of an old Manchester City chant].
This is by no means the first time peaceful protest and freedom of expression have been issues at football matches. In 2010, Manchester United fans said that they had been over-policed after unfurling banners protesting against the club-owners, the Glazer family. In 2008 anti-censorship campaigners (including Index on Censorship) complained after there was talk of banning Glasgow Rangers supporters from taunting Celtic fans with a song about the Irish famine (“’From Ireland they came, brought us nothing but trouble and shame’.) In 1998, Swindon Town chairman Rikki Hunt threeatened to ban fans for life after they had staged a sit-down protest following a 4-1 defeat and chanted for the sacking of their manager.
I asked Arsenal if they felt a football match at the Emirates was an inappropriate venue for protest and whether they did not believe in freedom of expression. The spokesman laughed and pointed out Arsenal’s admirable record on inclusion (they were the first club to be awarded anti-racism campaign Kick It Out‘s Advanced level of the Quality standard). “Of course we encourage freedom of expression, but in this case the banner was just too big. It impeded the views of supporters and was a health and safety issue.” What would Taylor have been arrested for? “Breach of the peace.”
So I mentioned another incident that happened just after Taylor’s banner was removed — police approached a man in the crowd wearing a felt-tip scribbled T-shirt. This time there were around a dozen officers.The police asked him to remove his T-shirt, and eventually he did.
I asked Arsenal if this was also a visibility/health and safety issue. The club said it had no record of this encounter, but asked what the fan had written on his T-shirt. “You can stick your £62 up your arse,” I said.
“Ah well, that’s just offensive isn’t it?” said the spokesman. “It’s nothing to do with the views expressed, just the language.”
At the end of the match, Richard Taylor retrieved his banner — the police had left it with the stewards for him to reclaim. Although he was “disgusted” by the club’s reaction to the banner, he believes it has only served to publicise his cause.
He mentioned model football clubs such as Borussia Dortmund, where he travelled to early in the season in the Champions League. “Our tickets were £24, and we had free travel on the day” For Taylor his campaign has now become two-pronged — not only is he fighting football clubs that charge excessive prices, he is also campaigning against those whom he believes are prohibiting the democratic right to peaceful protest.
Simon Hattenstone is a feature writer for the Guardian and a Manchester City supporter. He tweets at @shattenstone
As the trans/Moore/Burchill spat draws to a close, and an article that gave much offence to trans folk is taken down from the Observer’s site — it is time, perhaps to reflect how this episode encapsulates, in one seamless narrative, the two or three most serious issues facing free speech in the UK today.
Over all lies the question of censorship.
I do not believe Julie Burchill’s article should have been published: doubt it would find space in a respectable publication were it written about any other minority; and have little time for the many in the press who defend it on grounds of free speech.
Once up, though it should not have come down as it did.
The damage was done, in terms of hate speech published and serious traumatic stuff distributed where it could do most harm, in the original publication. 48 hours on, copied, commented, archived its dread power was mostly spent. (And meanwhile, the fatuousness of the Observer decision to remove the piece was instantly exposed by the Telegraph’s mischievous counter-decision — to put it back up! Will they, one wonders, be paying a repeat fee to the Guardian for the privilege? Have they even, one wonders, sought permission not just from the author — but the article’s original publisher, the Observer?)
It leaves an awkward hole on the Observer website, filled by an apology that most in the trans community feel is mere token: too little too late, and the suspicion that it only finally went when Observer lawyers pointed out the paper could run the risk of prosecution. From whom is not entirely clear.
One person who took the matter to the police did not get very far. They told him, he claims, that they could not act because no identifiable group of individuals had been targeted. Huh?
They suggested, instead, he try the Press Complaints Commission. But the PCC won’t intervene because no named individual is targeted (which is why some groups would like to see a right of class complaints under whatever new regulations are put in place post-Leveson).
Still, the legal dimension does drain, somewhat, the worth of the apology — as does recent press conduct in respect of their sacred cow of freedom!
The Observer, happy to host the initial carefully confected abuse, stuck doggedly to its rules of moderation. Why, though, bother to moderate at all, I inquired, not altogether facetiously — as another commenter, reproducing an extract from Burchill’s piece with “women” substituted for “trans women” found their post blocked.
There is much lack of consistency here. The same press that squeals “censorship” at the least attempt to regulate, is other times busy taking out libel writs when people say nasty things about them (Daily Mail take heed!). Meanwhile, if you live by a creed of happily dishing up offence to all and sundry, Moore and Burchill, don’t be surprised when someone trumpets that offense back at you.
If questions of censorship topped the bill in this case, lesser issues also played a part: the question of online etiquette, for instance.
As Brooke Magnanti writes eloquently in the Telegraph, today’s world is more interconnected than ever before. Any and every faux pas regarding a minority community is magnified: so politeness is more than its own reward. It is the price one pays for not being continually distracted from what one wants to say by the need to apologise for every least deviation from the currently acceptable mode of expression.
Barrier to free speech? Yes: sort of. But also common courtesy: for why would you go out of your way — as Suzanne Moore clearly did at the start of this episode — to insult the subject of one’s writing?
Then there’s the “cabal” thing: the suggestion by Julie Bindel that online nastiness might be being orchestrated — in this case by a bunch of trans activists. Well, hardly. It makes as much sense to detect caballerous behaviour in informal links on the journalistic side of the kerfuffle: from the saccharine tributes paid by Burchill to her friend, Moore — or the pre-tweeting of a line from what Burchill eventually filed by colleague and co-author, Nick Cohen, approximately 24 hours before it went live. Nothing wrong with this, especially as it appears to reflect behaviour exhibited by most journalists, myself included.
However, the online “monstering” of Moore that Burchill objected to was probably the least organised behaviour around. Elsewhere, I’ve likened it to the murmuration of a flock of starlings, wheeling this way and that in instant response to external stimuli: “mobbing” any predator, actual or potential, that puts their nose above the parapet.
But that’s not right, either. We live, all of us, nowadays, with the reality of social networks. If Moore writes something offensive about trans folks, then, she must get that her views will percolate at light speed across the web. The angry and the obsessed and the merely voyeuristic will turn up, in a trice, to deliver a good drubbing and the net effect (no pun intended) is likely to be horrid.
I’ve been on the receiving end of net monsterings twice. They are awful and not for the faint-hearted: a sort of bullying lite, with most individuals making reasonable if sharp comment, but the whole being much worse than the sum of the parts, and the total effect being one of intimidation. I sympathise with those on the receiving end. I sympathised with Moore.
But I am not sure where to go from there. Bullying is bad. But how, short of implementing online some exceedingly illiberal “common purpose” laws do you stop it? I’m stumped.
Moore temporarily rejoined Twitter to address the issue, and while she may not exactly have agreed to kiss and make up with the trans community, she has agreed to talk about kissing and making up.
Meanwhile, the speech issues of our age, the responsibility of press and public alike for online offence rumble on unresolved — albeit with a growing sense, in the trans community and elsewhere, that they are already returning to their bad old ways.
Jane Fae is a feminist and writer on issues of political and sexual liberty