23 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
The parliamentary struggle over the UK government’s gagging bill, which has overshadowed Westminster in recent months, is all but over. And the end result is bad news for British democracy.
Yesterday ministers secured their final victories against freedom of speech campaigners. Their plans to make it much harder for charities to get their voices heard during election periods – exactly when their contribution is needed most – are about to become law as a result.
The transparency of lobbying, non-party campaigning and trade union administration bill, to give it its full title, has troubled civil liberties activists from start to finish.
Its attempted clampdown on the public affairs industry by forcing third-party lobbyists on to a statutory register, has been roundly dismissed because in-house lobbyists – the vast majority – are simply not included.
This flawed solution to the bill’s main target has been accompanied by a brutal attack on the voluntary sector. The government’s aim was to force small-scale charities, community groups and the like on to a complicated regulatory regime.
Such would have been the chilling effect of this law that most local-issue campaigning during elections would have been stifled when it came to election time. No surprise the legislation was dubbed the ‘gagging bill’.
As it was, bitter opposition to the proposals finally forced ministers to the negotiating table. Instead of lowering the threshold at which charities must begin reporting their activities to the Electoral Commission watchdog, it was increased to £20,000.
This was a major concession. There were other, smaller retreats too, on how long ‘election time’ actually means — it was reduced from one year to 7.5 months — and by excluding some costs like spending on translation into Welsh, or security, from controlled expenditure.
Ultimately, though, these alterations failed to change the bill’s big impact: that important voices encouraging politicians to make promises, and then holding them to their word, are to be stifled.
The Lords did its best to limit the damage. It inflicted embarrassing defeats on the government, which meant when the bill returned to the Commons yesterday MPs had to vote on whether or not to overturn the changes.
As the bill was being debated in the Commons chamber the atmosphere was one of resentment and frustration from the opposition benches — and a smug superiority from ministers. They knew they had already won the war. Now they were about to win the last of its battles, too.
A critical division came over staffing costs. For the bigger household names, like Countryside Alliance or Oxfam, this really matters.
The gagging bill is reducing the total amount a campaigning group can spend in a general election period from £988,000 to £390,000. Say it employs ten staff on a £20,000 salary — by including the staffing costs, the amount actually available to spend on leaflets and demonstrations and advertising is slashed still further.
Yesterday the government whipped its MPs against the Lords amendments. Groups like 38 Degrees had been mobilising their members to urge wavering MPs to rebel. In their offices earlier this week, staff expressed delight as the number of emails sent to backbenchers who’d previously expressed disquiet shot upwards.
Back in parliament, the mood at this campaigning onslaught was grim. One MP I spoke to was so worked up he got his staff to forward me the emails as they came in, to demonstrate just how disruptive they were. The flood which followed was, indeed, deeply irritating – about 50 poured in over the course of just a couple of hours.
Elsewhere, a Tory veteran even phoned up the police to complain about a group of activists wanting to petition him at his home. The bitter irony of this didn’t pass unnoticed.
Ultimately, all the efforts to sway the Commons didn’t make much of a difference. When it came to a vote the coalition’s majority was reduced to 32. But it still won, and the Lords’ improvements were consigned to history.
What caused this diminishing of our democracy? It’s mostly the result of those in power simply not caring much for the views of others. The latest reports from Downing Street indicate that senior No 10 strategists are desperate to find ways of reducing the pledges which candidates make during general elections. It’s much easier to avoid breaking promises, after all, if you haven’t made them in the first place.
And yet that is exactly what democracy, and free speech in Britain, are about: the ability to highlight when politicians are not sticking to their commitments, and the opportunity to encourage them to stick by a cause. Charities are a vital part of this, but the gagging bill is undermining their ability to make the case.
The result is not so much a law which makes it almost impossible for small-scale charities and voluntary groups to campaign during general elections, but one which merely makes the lives of their employees more difficult and awkward.
At the end of it all, democracy in Britain has got just a little bit worse. Our future elections will be slightly poorer affairs than before. The country we were in 2013 is not the country we shall be when, in a short while, the Queen finally hands royal approval to her government’s gagging bill.
This article was published on 23 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
16 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
Derek Clark MEP (Image: Euro Realist Newsletter/Wikimedia Commons)
The UK Independence Party has promised it will ban the teaching of climate change in schools, if elected in May next year.
The party’s 2010 manifesto included a pledge to ban Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth from schools.
But this week UKIP Education spokesman MEP Derek Clark has said the party will go even further. Clark told Index on Censorship:
We will still ban Al Gore’s video for use in schools if I’ve got anything to do with it. I will not have much opposition within the party. It is, of course, not just this video which needs banning; all teaching of global warming being caused in any way by carbon dioxide emissions must also be banned. It just is not happening.”
Dr Nick Eyre, Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Energy at the ECI and Oriel College Oxford and Co-Director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said of the proposal: “It is anti-scientific nonsense – as well as a worryingly repressive approach to education. The very strong link between climate change and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is overwhelmingly accepted by the global scientific community, and has been for at least 25 years.”
A recent IPCC report shows that scientists believe with 95% certainty that humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming. A 2013 study by UK Energy Research Centre, however, showed that 46% believe that climate change is ‘partly caused by human activity’, 22% believe that climate change is ‘mainly caused by human activity’ and another 6% believe that climate change is ‘entirely caused by human activity’. In total 74% of those surveyed believed that human activity is responsible for climate change.
This article was posted on 15 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
An earlier version of this article stated: “95% of scientists believe that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.” It has been edited to: “scientists’ believe with 95% certainty that humans are the ‘dominate cause’ of global warming.
This article was amended to include the total number of people in the UK Energy Research Centre study who believe that human activity is responsible for climate change.
9 Jan 2014 | News and features, Politics and Society, United Kingdom
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
The British government’s plans to jail people the courts judge to be persistently ‘annoying’ has been defeated in the Lords – but remains a serious threat to freedom of speech in the UK.
Ministers’ baffling proposals would dramatically broaden the scope of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). They want to replace these with the so-called Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance (IPNAs), which could still become law if ministers hold their guns when the legislation returns to the Commons later this year.
But right now the broad coalition of campaigners who have fought Clause 1 of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill are celebrating after the Lords last night decisively backed an amendment reversing the change.
The debate revealed just how extraordinarily blasé the government’s attitude to the reforms is. Rapidly lowering the threshold needed for an injunction will, ministers hope, make it harder for groups of miscreant youths to dodge having an ASBO slapped on them. What has left so many people really shocked is their inability to realise doing so would have terrible consequences for free speech.
Instead of only being applicable where a person or group causes or threatens to cause “harassment, alarm or distress”, the new injunction ministers were proposing to introduce was supposed to apply to all behaviour deemed “capable of causing nuisance or annoyance”.
It sounds laughable – and it is. Yesterday’s debate saw peers point out all kinds of behaviour which could be included in this definition, from smoking at a bus stop to handing out flyers to winding up the fan of a struggling football club. Carol-singers, bell-ringers, buskers, canvassers, trick-or-treaters, clay pigeon shooters, nudists: All would be affected because they would all be guilty of behaviour which could “reasonably be expected to cause” annoyance.
Those who repeatedly defy an injunction handed down by the courts, who many believe would have little option but to interpret the law more broadly than the government would like, would end up in jail.
Worst of all for our democracy, political protests would become much more vulnerable to being broken up by police under the changes.
“I suppose there are some in this House who might not have attended a demonstration or march,” Baroness Mallalieu told peers yesterday, “but I would wager they are in a minority.” She was talking about the kind of protest which irritates others because of delayed traffic, or the loud chanting, or the time taken off work. These would obviously fall under the scope of the changes. The baroness was not the only peer to quote Lord Justice Sedley’s ruling in a 1997 high court case, when he declared: “Freedom to only speak inoffensively is not worth having.”
There are further fears about the changes, too. Applications for IPNAs can only be made via agencies of the state, like the police or local authorities or government departments. Some believe vexatious obsessives would bombard them with demands for an injunction until they got their way.
Others think the change would result in people being moved on by police officers before the cases ever got to the courts. Ian Blair, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, recalled being on duty in Soho when a local resident demanded steps be taken against a man leafleting. “My Auntie Mabel is annoying,” Blair remembered his colleague saying, “but I’m not going to arrest her just for it.” His fear is that changing the word would lead to countless examples of police officers taking a different attitude in the future. They would go for the path of least resistance by breaking up all kinds of activity which has nothing to do with harassment and everything to do with freedom of speech. “This,” Blair summed up, “is a piece of absolutely awful legislation”.
The defeat which followed was a big one, by 306 votes to 178. But the government’s hold over the Lords is not that strong and since 2010 there have been over 80 such defeats. Ministers could simply reinsert the clause back into the bill when it returns to the Commons – meaning campaigners may have won this battle, but could still lose the war.
The Home Office’s official line, from crime prevention minister Norman Baker, is: “The bill was never intended to ban noisy children or carol singers and does not do so as currently drafted. I am disappointed the Lords fell for what appear to be scare stories.”
There might just be grounds for optimism, even though the timing is particularly painful. Next month, it becomes possible once again to insult others without the fear of being arrested for doing so under the Public Order Act 1986. That was a similar outrageous infringement of freedom of speech which is now being reversed after MPs defied the government last year.
Will they repeat that courageous stand to protect this most basic of civil liberties when the government’s attempt to outlaw being ‘annoying’ returns to the Commons? Let’s hope so.
This article was published on 9 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
3 Jan 2014 | Religion and Culture
This year’s Burning Man festival featured a temple, built by hundreds of artists in the space of a few days. There are not many photographs I can link into this article. The majority of them have been destroyed, along with the temple itself.
Some participants of the festival, which takes place in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, have expressed that it seems a shame, or that they can’t help but have mixed feelings about destroying something to which they have dedicated a colossal amount of effort. Others enjoy the fact that they are burning their creations, the making of which they were able to focus on without the nagging distraction of feeling compelled to sell afterwards.
I have never been to Burning Man or anything overly comparable, however in November 2011, I went to the Artist’s Bonfire at the Islington Mill in Manchester. As with Burning Man, the premise is that primal expressions of self can still exist in a modern day context, a context which involves health and safety regulations, and in some cases arts council funding.
I was amused and surprised by the Telegraph’s backlash against the event, which subsequently added to it an even greater feeling of illicitness, that then became mixed with feelings of uncertainty. I had hoped that by going I would be making a small statement against drives towards profit, popularity and ego, which, in my mind should have little to do with artistic experience. But then I decided that, if any profits were made out of a bunch of artists burning their work, then whoever took that money is surely coming from the same mindset that I was naively seeking to undermine.
When it came to it, my contribution to the experience was a cop-out. There were students burning sculptures of cities that had required blueprints in order to build them (the blueprints were burned too). A professional artist immolated an extraordinary self portrait, which leads to other questions: Is it a form of self harm? Does it matter if it is? Is it a simple purging of the painfulness of being painstaking? Was I attempting to self-promote through annihilation?
I was nervous when it was my turn to throw to the fire. Even though all I burned was something that was made in a digital format, and which was backed up on several mediums of hard drive. In fact, due to laziness, what I threw onto the fire was a completely blank disc. I made a shaky speech about the wonders of modern technology, how its capacity for preservation means that the destruction of art is nothing to fear.
Age old connotations regarding censorship make these occasions worrying. There are Hitler’s book burnings and the equally insane pyres overseen by a chief of the NYC police department in connection with the Occupy movement. Luckily the worst case I’ve witnessed in the flesh was a ridiculously puerile feud between two local entertainment guides, which culminated in a brief burning in the car park of a small music venue.
A more historical instance is the destruction of the work of the poet Sappho. That much of her work appears now to be in fragments seems to overshadow it in the minds of many of her critics, shrouding her work and its context in a series of fascinating myths. These myths raise such questions as ‘has the work been destroyed by natural causes?’ and ‘was her work smashed by jealous invaders who not only begrudged her of her art but scorned her sexuality?’ Sappho, for whatever reasons, may also have felt it necessary to destroy the poems herself.
Earlier this year, experimental pop artist Grimes blogged about techno band The KLF, mentioning their decision to burn a million pounds.
Bill Drummond explained: “We wanted the money, but we wanted to burn it more.”
For Grimes and TheWoodQuarter, this stunt feels uncomfortable, compromising the artistic integrity of an otherwise respectable band: “it’s not something you would do if you had ever experienced poverty”.
Their concern echoes The Guardian’s review of Mark Knoop’s Piano Activities, a concert in which the pianist destroyed his piano. I might have been inclined to concur with the reviewer’s outrage were it not for his total denial of destructive relevance, which he deems “creatively redundant” post John Cage and punk. Although the reviewer is careful to state that “censoring [artists] would indeed have been wrong”, he makes the claim that “destructive performance misreads the temperature of a culture where a siege mentality reigns”. This is compounded with dogma: “Once music has been razed to the ground by Cage, Paik and others, it’s time to build”.
For me, such argument is a form of destruction in itself. It is more dangerous than a person trashing his own piano because it seeks to persuade that there is a specific and given “time” for a specific and given artistic ethos. A stance that requires art to be an advantageous strategic building block further entrenches it within the realm of commodity.
This article was posted on 3 Jan 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
