18 Aug 10 | Uncategorized
The Guardian reports that West Yorkshire police chief Sir Norman Bettison is to ask Home Secretary Theresa May to ban the English Defence League from marching through Bradford later this month, after 10,000 people in the town signed a petition against the march.
The key word here is “march”. The police are clear that they have no powers to stop the “anti-Muslim” EDL from holding a “static demonstration” — i.e. the boring standing around bit, which one doubts appeals to the average EDL supporter.
One could, open and shut, say that this is the end of the argument, free-expression wise: the EDL aren’t being stopped from speaking, they’re just being stopped from moving and speaking.
Of course, that’s disingenuous on two counts. Firstly, the EDL march would be aimed at the city’s Asian neighbourhoods — part provocation, part harassment of the Muslims of the city.
Secondly, can we truly say that the right to free expression is adequately protected if police and politicians control where and when we can exercise it in the public sphere?
Provocative marches are, of course, nothing new to these islands. The most frequently cited example is Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts’ attempt to march through the then-predominantly Jewish East End — the “Battle of Cable Street“. That ended in rioting, and is widely remembered as a defeat for the British Union of Fascists.
When I last cited this incident myself, I asked if the locals had actually been wrong to block the march.
The Times’s Oliver Kamm responded, suggesting that yes, they probably had been:
Yes, those who tried to stop the British Union of Fascists from marching in the East End in October 1936 were wrong. The BUF had a democratic right to march in peacetime, and the attempt to stop them did them a power of good. Mosley was looking for a way to call it off anyway, so that he could get to Berlin and secretly marry Diana Mitford Guinness in Goebbels’s drawing room (which he managed to do two days later). Support for Mosley in the East End increased after the Battle of Cable Street, as did antisemitic violence. Thugs attacked Jews and their properties, in the so-called Pogrom of Mile End, a week later.
This is an interesting answer, but it perhaps implies that the people who attempted to block the BUF’s march were more tactically incorrect than morally wrong.
More recently, last weekend saw the annual Apprentice Boys’ Parade in Derry pass without incident. Northern Ireland’s parade season has proved a flashpoint for many years now, most infamously at Drumcree yet no one has ever seriously suggested banning marches. There is, of course, arbitration and negotiation on routes, insignia and the like. Could the Parades Commission model be applied to groups such as Islam4UK and the English Defence League?
16 Jun 10 | Uncategorized
Back in January, then Home Secretary Alan Johnson announced he was to ban far-right Islamist group Islam4UK. I wrote about the subject at the time, and debated the ban on Sky News with Liberal Conspiracy‘s Sunny Hundal, who supported the ban.
My points then were fairly straightforward; apart from being kneejerk and illiberal, the ban seemed utterly futile. Islam4UK was just the latest manifestation of Al Muhajiroun, a group of followers of Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Tottenham Ayatollah.
Al Muhajiroun had disbanded after it was threatened with a ban. Then it was suceeded by the Saved Sect, which distinguished itself by attacking George Galloway and Muslim Council of Britain leader Iqbal Sacranie during the 2005 election. This they did on the grounds that democracy is haraam, and no one should encourage Muslims to vote.
In early 2006, the group organised the most notorious of the protests in the UK against the Mohammed cartoons, subsequent to which several people were convicted of incitement to murder.
The Saved Sect was set up about the same time Al Ghurabaa. Both were proscribed in 2006. Then Islam4UK sprung up.
You see what’s happening here? Today’s papers report a protest against a soldiers’ homecoming parade in Essex by a group called Muslims Against Crusades.
Look familiar? Same tactics, same flag, same slogans, same typeface, same people. So all that banning’s worked then.
12 Jan 10 | Comment, News and features, United Kingdom
The Home Secretary’s decision to ban an extremist group shows exactly why we must not allow sentiment to overrule free speech says Padraig Reidy
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11 Jan 10 | Uncategorized
In an interview in the Irish Times on Saturday, comic Dara O’Briain had some harsh words for Ireland’s new blasphemy law:
“I think it is a ludicrous notion that you can sue people for blasphemy,” he says. “I think it is an absolutely abhorrent idea that religion in and of itself must remain without question and cannot be insulted and cannot be attacked. I don’t say this in a childish, petty way. I am not going to rush to become a challenge or a test case for it, but it is insane in this day and age that a quasi-medieval church-and-state symbiosis should exist and that somebody will step in.”
O’Briain also voiced his support for the libel reform campaign:
“It is not that I think that comedians are going to be hit with this, I don’t think we are,” he says. “A company would look ridiculous for suing a comedian for a joke about a brand of shampoo, or a set of razor blades, but it is worrying that cardiologists can be sued for making quite justifiable and fair comments about medical equipment on Canadian TV in a British court.”
Read the full interview here.
Index on Censorship chief executive John Kampfner updated Observer readers on the campaign’s progress:
Just before Christmas, the justice secretary responded to the flurry of activity around our campaign by announcing his own inquiry. He asked our two groups, Index on Censorship and English PEN, to nominate one among our number to sit on his group.
When I found out that they had invited Carter-Ruck and Schillings, two major law firms which feast on chilling the free speech of scientists, authors, NGOs and journalists, I suggested to Straw’s people that the two authors of the libel report, Index’s editor, Jo Glanville, and PEN’s director, Jonathan Heawood, should both be members of the inquiry team. As it stood, the composition ran against Straw’s “apparent desire to be seen as a reformer”, I suggested. They quickly relented, arguing that my term “apparent” was unfair. We shall see. This Labour government, after all, has form, creating commissions with the purpose of delaying or diluting change or delivering whitewashes. Perhaps this time Straw may deliver positive change. If he doesn’t, we won’t be bashful in our response.
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Read more here.
And in the same paper, David Mitchell defended the right to be offensive in the light of Islam4UK’s proposed demonstration in Wootton Bassett:
The thing about freedom of speech is that people are allowed to say offensive, indefensible things; that we needn’t fear that because we’re sure that wiser counsels are more likely to convince. “Let the idiots and bullies speak openly and they will be revealed for what they are!” is the idea. It’s a brilliant one and, in confident, educated societies, it almost always works — certainly much more often than any of the alternatives. Why has Alan Johnson lost confidence in this principle? Why have the 700,000 signatories of a Facebook petition calling for the event to be banned?
Read the full article here
