18 Aug 2015 | Academic Freedom, mobile, News and features, United Kingdom, Youth Board
This is the fourth of a series of posts written by members of Index on Censorship’s youth advisory board.
Members of the board were asked to write a blog discussing one free speech issue in their country. The resulting posts exhibit a range of challenges to freedom of expression globally, from UK crackdowns on speakers in universities, to Indian criminal defamation law, to the South African Film Board’s newly published guidelines.
On 12 February 2015, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act became law in the UK. If the fact that it is the seventh counter-terrorism bill in 14 years wasn’t enough to demonstrate the creep of governmental control, part five of the new legislation poses a direct and disturbing threat not just to freedom of expression but to knowledge and thought as well.
Part five of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act places a statutory duty on public authorities to prevent terrorism. Under this remit falls schools and universities; places that used to be woven with the notion of free thought. The directions contained in the statute are unclear and gives universities the right to ban, exclude and prevent discussions that certain officials deem to incite radicalisation.
However, freedom of academic thought or discussion is not even the sole concern. London School of Economics Student Union’s community and welfare officer Aysha said: “Students who go to support services will now not be entitled to confidentiality under the new act if that person is deemed a ‘threat’, which is incredibly racialised.” In short, there is the potential that students would be unable to voice personal concerns, or the need for support, due to stereotypes that this act will enforce.
Jade Jackman, UK
Related:
• Harsh Ghildiyal: Defamation is not a crime
• Tom Carter: No-platforming Nigel
• Matthew Brown: Spying on NGOs a step too far
• About the Index on Censorship youth advisory board
• Facebook discussion: no-platforming of speakers at universities
17 Aug 2015 | mobile, News and features, United Kingdom, Youth Board
The new cohort of the Index on Censorship youth advisory board was launched last month. The board is already participating in discussions on Facebook.
Members of the board were asked to write a blog discussing one free speech issue in their country. The resulting posts exhibit a range of challenges to freedom of expression globally, from UK crackdowns on speakers in universities, to Indian criminal defamation law, to the South African Film Board’s newly published guidelines.
In the first of a series of posts, youth board member Matthew Brown explores mass surveillance in the UK.
Matthew Brown is a member of the Index youth advisory board. Learn more.
I don’t often begin writing by quoting Herman Goering but on one account he was worryingly accurate. Goering stated that: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Increasing levels of surveillance are often justified as essential in protecting us from imminent attack but the recent revelation that GCHQ spied illegally on Amnesty International, an organisation relying upon the secrecy of their communications with human rights defenders, demonstrates the extent to which state surveillance methods are now out of control.
It is easy to scorn states known for their dictatorial regimes but our society has only progressed to its current position through holding the state to account. If we fail to continue to do so, then the slide towards a world in which freedom of expression is restricted at any given moment the government decides appropriate is inevitable. The interception of the correspondence of NGOs raises the worrying question of how these organisations can continue their crucial work if their confidential correspondence is likely to end up out of their hands.
Matthew Brown, UK
Related:
• Tom Carter: No-platforming Nigel
• About the Index on Censorship youth advisory board
• Facebook discussion: no-platforming of speakers at universities
21 Jul 2015 | Campaigns, mobile, Statements, United Kingdom
Free speech is a fundamental British value, UK Prime Minister David Cameron insisted on Monday in a widely trailed speech outlining how his government planned to tackle “the struggle of our generation”: Islamic extremism.
Cameron made some of the right noises. He talked of the need for voices countering the extremist narrative to be heard more loudly: to be featured more often in newsprint, or given more airtime in broadcast. More speech is a good thing. One of the reasons why organisations like Index champion free speech as a fundamental good is a belief that more speech is the best counter to speech you dislike or with which you disagree, and that allowing those plethora of voices and ideas to be heard is what allows societies to advance. As author Elif Shafak wrote in a recent article for Index magazine: “The response to a book is another book. The response to a cartoon is another cartoon. Words need to be answered with words.”
Sadly, it became clear throughout the speech – as it has become clear through successive legislation in recent years – that Cameron and his government are not really committed to free speech. No, they are committed to ‘good’ speech, to speech that the government and its supporters decide is palatable. They are committed to funding and advocating the ideas and narratives of which they approve (“If you’re interested in reform; if you want to challenge the extremists in our midst; if you want to build an alternative narrative or if you just want to help protect your kids – we are with you and we will back you – with practical help, with funding, with campaigns, with protection and with political representation”) and banning those they don’t. His speech on Monday was, as ever, short on details in relation to the practicalities, but Cameron once again reiterated the notion that the government wants to introduce further curbs on ‘non-violent’ speech, in other words speech that falls short of inciting violence.
That is not what a commitment to free speech means. Free speech – the kind that allows democracies to flourish – allows people to espouse views that others find offensive, insulting, and even complete anathema to your way of life. And it allows other people to dispute those views. Free speech protections are what allows both the holocaust denier the right to spout nonsense about the Nazis and the wider population to refute them.
But Cameron does not share that commitment to free speech. The kind of free speech protection the Prime Minister envisages permits some as yet undefined version of acceptable speech but seeks to outlaw whatever this government deems beyond the pale. And herein lies the danger. Any attempt to proscribe ideas, or the voicing of ideas, beyond direct incitements to violence undermines the very principle of free speech – and ultimately undermines its benefits for civil society as a whole.
You only have to look at how widely drawn Cameron has to make the net to capture the ‘non-violent extremist’ narrative to understand how easily any group who challenges the government, or the prevailing majority view, might be drawn into his net. This is not the society we want to live in, where public speakers might have to register two weeks in advance and be vetted before being allowed on a podium, as was indicated in an earlier version of this speech trailed before the election. As former attorney general Dominic Grieve said recently: “When in doubt you should always go for the free speech option.” Grieve recently told Index: “In a free society people do have a right to be insulting about other people’s beliefs…I think that the free society requires that there should be should be the possibility of doing it.” This belief is at the core of any democracy and is worth fighting for. Something that David Cameron conveniently seems to be willing to relinquish.
Even more worryingly, Cameron goes even further by suggesting that not only may we be punished for this ill-defined non-violent speech, but we might also be required to demonstrate publicly our lack of support for such ideology. “We must demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism too,” the Prime Minister declared. Quite how this thought-police style demands will be enforced in practice is difficult to imagine – perhaps Katie Hopkins might be forced to make public apologies in areas of their country known for high levels of immigration for failing to show the correct British levels of ‘tolerance’ when she wrote about gunships and migrant boats?
We need to champion free speech
Some people seem to view free speech as a “nice-to-have” add-on, a mere luxury principle tacked on the end of other more basic rights. But respecting free expression is a fundamental tenet of democracy. It is qualified by other rights, but assessing those balances is something that should be done by a court of law not by an ever-creeping extension of government power to proscribe people and views it does not like. Cameron laid this blatant disregard for democracy bare last month when he said: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.”
As soon as you have to fear not just breaking the law, but state interference for ‘non-crimes’ as well, you no longer have a democracy. And with no test for what words might put you in the category of law-abiding undesirables, how do we know when the ‘offence-hunters’ – sniffing out anyone who seems not to defend sufficiently ‘British values’ – might come for any one of us?
David Cameron raises the fearful spectre of an intolerant, violent Islamist state that wants to bring an end to the freedoms we cherish. If we are to succeed in protecting those freedoms, then we cannot let the government undermine the very values he says he is defending. If we let that happen, we will have already lost. Instead we need to defend the rights of everyone – including the extremists – to voice opinions we find abhorrent, or risk finding our ability to say we disagree with those views is lost too.
This article was posted on 21 July 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
2 Jul 2015 | Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
It is probably a sign of the success of our society that people like me spend so much of our time defending the rights of jerks.
Racists, misogynists, Christian fundamentalists, jihadists, wannabe jihadists, counter-jihadists, homophobes, trolls, Top Gear presenters, True Torah Jews, Nazis; cretins of all colours and creeds. In modern, liberal Europe, these are the people who tend to get in trouble over free speech. In the past, they were the ones in charge.
That is not to say everyone else is entirely free from censorship; and of course, the reason we defend free expression as a good in itself is because we understand that the powers used to silence the craven can also be used to silence the virtuous, but by and large, it’s the oddballs who tend to get into trouble. Them and journalists.
And so we turn our attention, wearily but determinedly, to the case of the “anti-Jewification” protest which was due to take place in London’s Golders Green on 4 July. As others have pointed out, anyone hoping to prevent the “Jewification” of Golders Green is, frankly, a bit late. But then, we know full well that Judenfrei policies have experienced some success in the past.
The stationary protest will now not take place in Golders Green, but instead in central London – Whitehall to be precise, away from Golders Green’s Jewish community. Ironically, many Jews are now planning to make their way to Westminster to stage a counter-demonstration.
As Richard Ferrer, editor of Jewish News, noted: “Saturday’s rally is fast turning into the social event of the season for the capital’s Jewish community. When it was originally announced, synagogues braced themselves for their lowest Shabbat attendance figures in years. I had a family lunch booked, but had to make sure it didn’t clash with the scheduled Holocaust denial and book burning.”
It does all sound rather fun, but the moving of the Nazi demonstration does raise questions about the nature of protest and how it is policed.
A demonstration must be disruptive, by its very nature. So there’s a dilemma raised by the moving of a protest from the scene of its target, in this case the Jewish community, does it become effectively meaningless? What happens if a swastika waves in a side street in Whitehall, with no one there to fear it? Does it still resound?
The police decision to move the demonstration, in spite of earlier claims that they were powerless to do so, has effectively neutered it. It’s meaningless.
Now here’s the question: should the police have a right to neuter protest in that manner? Or does the fact that the neo-Nazis are allowed stand in the street and make their little speeches, even if it’s not the street they wanted to stand in, mean that their free speech has been fully protected? I’m not entirely sure we’ve thought about this fully. But I do recall past campaigns against “designated protest zones”, for example during the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
I don’t really know what the answer is here: I guess the simple point is that one should be free to protest outside institutions but not outside people’s homes. But then what about the UK Uncut protesters who staged a “street party” outside then-Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s home?
This case of the relocated anti-Semites is interesting exactly because it has not turned out to be Britain’s Skokie case. To briefly recap, Skokie was an Illinois town where many Holocaust survivors had settled.
In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America proposed a march there. They were opposed. The case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. The ACLU backed the Nazis’ right to march. Eventually, the court upheld the Nazis’ right to march. But they never actually did. [For more on this case, read Index on Censorship magazine, Vol 37, Number 3, 2008].
In 2015 in north London we have a similar but different case. There are some Nazis wanting to march in a Jewish neighbourhood, there are some people who object. But there is no great call to principle, no great desire to take up the cause seemingly on either side. It’s hard to even get anyone on the Nazi side to own up to who exactly is in charge. Joshua Bonehill, the Somerset Stormtrooper and all round troll, is widely believed to be responsible. He was arrested early this week on suspicion of incitement to racial hatred. No one seemed that bothered.
This is the British way of free expression; a matter of practicality rather than principle, a pliable concept, one that can almost always be tempered by appeals to taste: it is simply distasteful for Nazis to demonstrate in Golders Green; just not done to burn a poppy.
By and large, taste wins out in these compromises. Remember that the Chatterley ban only came to an end because it was deemed that the book was of high enough literary quality, not because adults have the right to read what they damned well please.
Tastefulness being the characteristic the British most pride themselves upon means it’s rare that anyone will argue against it. It’s a soft tyranny most people seem happy to live with.
This article was posted on 2 July 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
