14 Aug 2014 | News and features, United Kingdom
Top flight football is back! Back! BACK! After an agonising entire month since the World Cup Final with nothing to sustain people but the made-up soccer tournaments designed to draw American crowds, and the Commonwealth Games, and the England India cricket tests, the people of Britain can relax, and fall trustingly into the loving arms of the Premiership.
Once more, it will be deemed legitimate to spend Saturday afternoons in a pub, watching other men watching football; once more we can spend Saturday nights complaining about Mark Lawrenson and Alan Shearer’s dull observations on Match of the Day; once more Arsenal will be a little disappointing.
I say “once more” but of course the football never really ends, it just sleeps for a few weeks every year. But now it is awake.
At this point, fans of leagues that are not the premiership will be pointing out that their leagues started last weekend, and they’re right.
And what was the main story from the (non-Premiership) Football League this week? The news that Millwall fans had upset their Leeds United rivals with a new chants about serial sexual abuser Jimmy Savile, a Leeds native. Not to exactly repeat it, but the chant essentially suggested that Leeds fans may be the offspring of Savile.
Milwall’s manager Ian Holloway criticised his own fans, saying: “Let’s stop and think about what [Savile] has actually done. That’s the most important thing and we don’t see that. ‘Oh, it is a bit of banter’. It isn’t funny, is it? I don’t think so.”
Now clearly, some Millwall fans did find this funny. Or they found the idea of offending Leeds fans funny. Because offending the opposition has for a long time, been part of going to football.
My home team, Cork City, who play in Ireland’s Airtricity League, have a pretty good relationship with Derry City. Derry, despite being based in Northern Ireland, play in the Republic’s league. Their fans are mostly nationalist rather than Unionist, and they are a widely respected group , admired for travelling long distances in large numbers to support their team, and making a lot of noise when they get there.
In spite of all this admiration, Cork fans greet Derry fans, who have literally travelled the length of the country, with the chant “What’s it like to have a Queen?” a dig at the fact that Derry fans live in the United Kingdom whether they like it or not.
It’s certainly calculated to offend, but that is the point of that much-vilified concept, “banter”. It’s part of the contest, complementing the action on the pitch (sometimes bettering it during dull games).
Football banter (or, in modern usage, “bants” or even “#bantz”), can range from the strange to the self-deprecating to the plain awful. When tiny Barnsley FC had a brief glimpse of top-division glory in the 96-97 season, they would sing “Barnsley – it’s just like watching Brazil” (it wasn’t). Fans of lower league Gillingham became famous in the late 90s for a slightly lewd song involving celery, that had absolutely nothing to do with football or Gillingham.
Chelsea fans, or anyone who’s ever been on a District Line underground train on the day of a Chelsea home game, will know the interminable tale of the man (men) who went to mow a meadow.
That’s the more innocent end of things.
Inevitably, things do not stay so innocent.
There’s references to incidents’ in rival clubs’ histories (“who’s that lying on the runway…” referring to the 1958 Munich Air Disaster that killed several Manchester United players), there’s the digs at perceived poverty (“In your Liverpool slums” or, as used happen in the 1980s, fans from southern English teams chanting “Unemployed, unemployed, unemployed” at Northerners. There’s the historical rivalries (Rangers fans singing “The Famine’s Over, Why Don’t You Go Home” at Celtic’s Irish-identifying supporters).
Personal abuse towards players, particularly those regarded as turncoats, can turn vicious: racist, homophobic, and ableist in nature. Rangers goalkeeper Andy Goram, having admitted to mental illness, was subjected to the chant “There’s only two Andy Gorams”. One chant directed at England defender Sol Campbell, who moved from Tottenham Hotspur to north London rivals Arsenal, managed to pack pretty much every modern taboo into three lines.
In the countries of Europe, South America and Africa where it is the majority participation sport, its supporters are not especially worried about upholding the image of the game. Supporters of minority sports will be aware of the constant feeling that one has to talk up your pastime not just as more entertaining, but more edifying than other sports in order to justify your devotion. Hence constant appeals to the spirit of cricket, and the inherent sportsmanship of rugby union (at least when players aren’t gouging each others eyes out).
Football doesn’t have this problem. It doesn’t have to convince anyone of anything. It has the most fans, therefore it is the best sport. Even in countries such as Ireland where actual match attendances are low, the omnipresence of English (and increasingly Spanish) football means fans don’t feel obliged to impress anyone. With that assurance comes a certain cockiness: to adapt the popular chant: “We are football, we’ll do what we want”. Or perhaps “[Everyone] likes us, [so] we don’t [have to] care”.
The game is played to different rules in the soccer stands.
The question is what, if anything, should be done about this. The Scottish government’s attempt to silence sectarian singing at Rangers vs Celtic “Old Firm” games, the Sectarianism At Football Act, ended up in the ludicrous situation of a Partick Thistle fan being arrested for singing a song lampooning the Catholic vs Protestant posturing of the two big Glasgow clubs (“Fuck your Pope and Fuck Your Queen”). The law has been derided as “mince” by one senior sheriff, and the opposition Labour party has vowed to scrap it should they win the next Scottish election.
Meanwhile, south of the border, attempts to stop footballer supporters using the word “Yid” ran into trouble due to the fact that fans of Tottenham – a club with strong Jewish self-identification – quite liked using the word, having re-appropriated the term. It did not help that the campaign was led by writer David Baddiel, himself Jewish, but more importantly in that argument, a Chelsea fan.
Must anything be done at all? I think (and I speak only for myself) that it is reasonable for footballers to be able to go about their working life – i.e. the 90 minutes on the pitch, without being subjected to racial or homophobic abuse, certainly not from players and not from fans either.
But this is only a call to, at most, uphold the law as it stands. Football clubs are private entities that can make their own rules, but they should be wary of cracking down on the songs, the slights, and yes, the top, classic, legendary banter that make football what it is.
As for the idea of specific football laws, as in Scotland? As the song goes: No, nay, never.
This article was posted on August 14, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
7 Aug 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
First, the inevitable throat clearing and hand wringing. The most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas has been beyond horrendous. As I type, the ceasefire is holding. Over 1,800 Palestinians have lost their lives, more than 300 of them children. Dozens of Israelis, mostly young conscript soldiers, are also dead. There is an enormous imbalance, in firepower and in defensive capability. Better men than I have gone mad attempting to imagine a way to stop this happening again. Even that statement, I realise, reads like a cop out, but a particular sense of despair looms over this latest manifestation of a war that is only ever dormant at best.
Some clearly feel that the horror has gone too far. Author Hari Kunzru, for example, has decided to join calls for a cultural boycott of Israel. Writing on his Facebook wall, Kunzru cited an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post which suggested the “dismantling” of Gaza and the “relocation” of its non-humanitarian population. Kunzru also cited “”the targeting of schools and hospitals, the picture of a child my son’s age being dug out of rubble that reduced me to helpless tears, the total disregard of the Netanyahu government for international laws and norms…” as signs that Israel was a country that had “lost its moral compass”.
This is notable not because Hari is a well-known figure in the arts world – there are enough of those willing to sign up to any cause that comes along, and more than enough already willing to tell us exactly what they think about Israel/Palestine, or Cuba, or any other issue to which sections of the left are drawn to, like particularly verbose moths to the flames of revolution, or, worse, the great unspecified “resistance”.
No, this is notable exactly because Hari Kunzru is not one of those people. Hari is thoughtful and unshowy. And Hari has actually put in real work for free speech. I recall, in 2012, scrabbling to find a local sympathetic lawyer who would represent Hari when he faced serious risk of prosecution for reading from the Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literary Festival, in solidarity with Salman Rushdie. He has made himself available for organisations such as Index and English PEN well beyond the call of duty. So when someone such as Hari Kunzru identifies with a cultural boycott, it means we have to take the question seriously.
The concept of boycotts, and particularly cultural and academic boycotts, have for a long time been problematic for people engaged in the promotion of free expression. Most criticisms of censorship are based on a fundamental assumption that communication of ideas is, in and of itself, a good thing. Some vague belief abounds based loosely on the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
This can sometimes sound naive, but it does lead to useful perspectives on any argument: 1) that there are entirely sincere, well-meaning people, who may hold views completely anathema to your own, and 2) following from that, in formulating any position on proscription of certain attitudes or beliefs, or people, one must imagine being on the wrong end of the argument – a kind of categorical imperative crossed with the “golden rule”, that can end up making the certainty of others unsettling.
Boycotters often carry that absolutism and conviction that brooks no argument: a simple righteousness anchored in the belief that their view of the world is so self-evidently correct that anyone who is unconvinced by them is either deviant or deficient.
Then there is always the question of who benefits from boycotts? And who is hurt? The traditional, free expression view on cultural boycotts is that they punish precisely the people who are most outward looking and also most likely to seek change in their own countries. Is it fair to punish the artists for the actions of the government, as we have seen with the cancellation of Israeli show The City at the Edinburgh Festival following protests by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign? Or to request that the UK Jewish Film Festival should ditch Israeli government funding before it can use a venue, as Kliburn’s Tricycle Theatre has, in the name, it says, of attempting to depoliticise the event?
It is argued that theatre companies, dance troupes etc are legitimate targets for boycott if they benefit from state funding, but in truth, there is hardly a theatre company in the civilised world that does not take funding from government agencies: indeed, most western liberals see state agency funding of arts as a sign, even a crucial part, of a healthy democracy, and it is rare that state-funded companies engage in Red-Army Choir style propaganda tours – though Venezuela’s Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar, decked out in baseball jackets in the colours of the national flag, can sometimes feel a little too Potemkin for comfort.
Writing on the subject (£) of anti-Israel boycotts back in 2012, Irish Times literary editor Fintan O’Toole drafted these five rules for artists and writers invited to perform in countries with dubious records:
1) Don’t take money, directly or indirectly, from governments that systematically abuse human rights, or from oligarchs who benefit from those abuses.
2) Give a significant part of your fee to human-rights defenders or oppressed artists in the relevant country.
3) Don’t accept any restrictions on your own freedom of expression when you’re in that country.
4) Don’t perform to audiences forcibly segregated on lines of race, gender or ethnicity.
5) Don’t let yourself be used for propaganda purposes.
This was very much the approach used by Sweden’s Loreen during and after the Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Azerbaijan in 2012. The singer made efforts to meet opposition figures and voice their concerns in press conferences and TV interviews, and was widely praised for it.
In fact, O’Toole’s rules are not a million miles from the boycott pledge signed by Hari Kunzru, which states: “We support the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. In response to the call from Palestinian artists and cultural workers for a cultural boycott of Israel, we pledge to accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding from any institution linked to its government until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.”, though there is a crucial difference in that the boycott statement punishes both state and non-state entities, thus preventing signatories from accepting invitations from, say, a hypothetical human rights group.
And this is the problem I will continue to have with boycotts against nations, particularly nations’ cultural endeavours. They seem too blunt, too broad and flawed. Even the much-cited cultural boycott against South African apartheid went awry, with the bizarre irony of Paul Simon being criticised for technically breaking the boycott by travelling to the country to work with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the black acapella singing group that was far from a friend of the regime.
But the problem is that for many seeking to register their disgust at the actions of foreign governments, boycott seems the only option. Perhaps it’s time for those of us uncomfortable with the idea of shutting down free speech to figure out new avenues of expression.
This column was posted on August 7, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
24 Jul 2014 | Digital Freedom, News and features, United Kingdom
(Photo: Shutterstock)
Last week, the social web, at one end of its endless, pendulum-like swings between mawkishness and self-righteous fury, discovered a letter from the head teacher at Barrowford primary school, East Lancashire. It was a sweet-natured letter, congratulating students on their exam results and then going on to note all the things exams can’t measure and examiners don’t know:
“The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do.
“They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day.”
…and so on; examiners did not that “know that you have travelled to a really neat place or that you know how to tell a great story ” etc etc etc.
All very sweet sentiments, and new and traditional outlets went crazy for it. The letter went viral, and then the mainstream media, including BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme, covered the fact the letter had gone viral.
There were a few problems with the well-meaning letter, though. As Toby Young pointed out in the Telegraph, it was incorrect to say the people who “scored” the children’s Key Stage 2 achievements “do not know each of you the way your teachers do”; part of the assessment is done by teachers at the schools.
Meanwhile, children in East Lancashire do not, generally, go to “really neat” places. American kids go to “really neat” places. Barrowford kids might, say, get taken to Turf Moor to see a Burnley match, or more likely at this time of year, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and it would be proper good.
The reason for these disparities was simple: large sections of the letter had been lifted from elsewhere; apparently, it’s been circulating in various forms since originally being written by a Mary Ginley of Massachusetts in 1999.
When various people (including me) pointed this out on Twitter, they were seen as being somewhere between the Grinch and ISIS in terms of spoilsport misanthropy. “So what if it wasn’t original?” we were told. The sentiment was correct, and that’s what was important.
It may seem unduly curmudgeonly to complain about a rural school’s end of term letter, but the point of interest here is how quickly it spread, and how blase people have been about the basics of who actually wrote it.
Consider another example: after Algeria went out of the World Cup, it was widely rumoured on Facebook, Twitter and other networks that the team had donated its fee for the tournament to “Gaza”; not the ICRC or MSF, or even Hamas, just vague “Gaza”.
It felt good, and it felt nice, and it was plainly not true. But no one really cared whether it was true or not because (a) Algeria had been quite an enjoyable team to watch, b) people wanted to think someone was doing something about Gaza, and c) well, the Algerian team were Muslims, so they’re probably concerned about Palestine (I never said this was a well-thought out view).
This pattern was repeated when German Muslim player Mesut Ozil was similarly reported to have donated his fee to “Gaza” after his team’s eventual World Cup triumph. The news spread like wildfire, because people wanted it to be true. It wasn’t. Ozil had already pledged his cash to projects in Brazil.
The Gaza conflict has provided more of these moments: a picture of thousands of Orthodox Jewish men protesting in New York is widely touted as a pro-Palestine protest; it is not. It is taken from a protest against Israeli conscription laws in March; a meme circulates quoting actor Robert De Niro comparing Israel to a mad dog; there is no evidence that he has ever said this.
But these things, like the school letter, circulate because they feel right and they make us feel good.
As the old line says “a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on”. The speed with which we can now move information around surely compels us to be even more mindful of this fact. And yet, what’s the answer? Social media thrives on the instantaneous; slowing it down could be severely damaging to the positive aspects of it. Draconian Chinese laws on “spreading rumours” are reported to have severely affected the number of interactions on social media. In democracies, it would likely be impossible to prevent feelgood-but-false memes, as well as straighforward propaganda, to spread without a massive crackdown on free expression.
For a long time, the web has demanded that we “become our own editors”, ensuring that we take in a broad amount of information rather than merely reading the sites we like on the topics we like, avoiding challenging or new ideas.
But the editorial process must always involve a high level of scepticism; some of the greatest journalistic failures of the past 40 years, such as the Hitler Diaries Hoax, or Piers Morgan’s disastrous publishing of fake pictures of Iraq war abuses in the Daily Mirror, came down to an editor’s and others involved required scepticism being overwhelmed by a story that was simply too good to be true. Disaster ensued.
The same must apply for anyone who thinks themselves vaguely “active” in the political sense on the web. Inaccurate information ultimately damages your cause. So the next time you see a meme on NHS spending, Israel, or whatever it is you care about, think before you tweet: Is this too good to be true? Do I have any way of checking this for myself?
This article was published on July 24, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
5 Jun 2014 | News and features, Religion and Culture, United Kingdom
Poets, we all agree, are terribly misunderstood and undervalued. If it were not for poets, how would we know what things were like other things. How would we live! How would we love! How would we die! They are a priestly class, helping us to mark out our minutes with prayers in pentameter.
But as with any priestly class, they deal in mystery. And demands to decode that mystery are heretical.
This is certainly the impression one would get judging from the reaction to Jeremy Paxman’s comments on poetry and public engagement this week.
Launching the shortlist for the Forward Prizes for poetry, the judging panel of which he chaired, Paxman, with a nod and a wink so heavy that he would have been in serious trouble if the wind changed, suggested that contemporary poetry had “connived in its own irrelevance” by failing to engage with the everyday lives of “ordinary people”. “It’s the general public that poets have to start engaging with,” said Paxman. “And that, I’m, sure, is why the people at Forward said ‘will you join the judging panel’”.
Translation: “The people at Forward knew that me saying something even slightly controversial about poetry would get their prize column inches, and I’m happy to oblige.”
Paxman went on to suggest, whimsically, a public inquisition where poets would explain their work to members of the public, rather than just to other poets.
Frankly, good on Paxman for recognising his use to the Forward Prize. That is not to say he is an man with little to say about poetry; indeed, he’s contributed greatly to the cause of poetry by wheeling out his “Jeremy Paxman” act free of charge for it. He was also, of course, in very careful to praise contemporary poetry and the marvellous books he’d read as a judge.
But that praise was as naught to some poets, who instead chose to pick up on his idea of a people’s panel to judge poetry, and his naughty use of the word “inquisition”.
For people who deal mostly in metaphor, the poets who rose to the bait took the Newsnight presenter’s words remarkably literally.
Todd Swift, a poetry publisher who runs the Eyewear Imprint, wrote that an inquisition was “a strange thing to ask for in an anti-clerical democracy – the idea of burning unrepentant poets at the stake after torturing them is only barely witty in a world where in many many nations, poets really are tortured and silenced.”
Oh Todd. He didn’t mean an actual inquisition.
Swift goes on to say, with an apparent lack of irony that would have horrified the more famous poet of his name: “Only in middle-class (upper class?) London could a white man think interrogating and potentially killing poets was a clever and useful corrective trope. It smacks of easy intellectual arrogance. I find many journalists despise, or fear, or dislike poetry, mainly because poetry is the best-written and most compressed form of language, and is smarter than journalism.”
You tell those journos and their easy intellectual arrogance, Todd!
Swift finishes off by saying “it becomes clear [Paxman] didn’t really read any of the 175 books he was meant to judge”, a statement that is almost certainly defamatory, as any journalist would have told him if he’d asked.
George Szirtes, a poet well respected by his peers, went down a slightly different route. Szirtes, a refugee from the Soviet tanks that rolled over his native Hungary in 1956, compared Paxman’s suggestion to Stalin’s demands for socialist realism from the USSR’s artists.
Szirtes makes some good points writing for the Guardian, but unfortunately they all follow from a sly trick he plays writing that Paxman’s fanciful inquisition would be a place where “poets would be required to explain themselves and, presumably, answer for their failure to be simpler.”
That “presumably” appears to give Szirtes a license to put words in Paxman’s mouth. Suggesting people explain their work is not at all the same as demanding it be simpler, merely that they be capable of (and interested in) talking about their work to non poets.
As another poet, Katy Evans-Bush, put it, writing about the furious condemnations of Paxman on Facebook (Facebook is where poets go to fight; no one is quite sure why). “Heaven forfend that someone from the wider world should look into your ‘cave of making’, see your ‘pellety nest’, and remark on it. ”
This all matters because poetry matters. Poetry is where we learn to play with words, to deal in metaphor, wordplay, the non-literal, the non-prosaic. How often have you heard someone say they’re “not into” or “don’t get” poetry. It’s frustrating, but poets should see that as a challenge, rather than turning in on themselves. That’s not a call to dumb down; it’s a call to act up. When you’re egged on to do so, it’s simply not enough to cry “Stalin!” and retreat further. That’s exactly the hyperbole and self regard that puts people off. If you care about an art form, you should want people to know about it. Otherwise it is youv-vnot Jeremy Paxman or the Forward prize or anyone else – who is censoring poetry.
This article was published on June 5, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
