Entangled Alliances

Last week I wrote about the banning of the right wing Dutch MP  Geert Wilders from the UK by the British Government, who feared that the airing of his unpleasant film “Fitna”, a rather incompetent attack on Islam and the Qu’ran, would “threaten community harmony”. As I hope I made clear this was an unforgivable breach of the basic tenets of free speech, regardless of what a nasty little bloke Wilders is.

The Home Office’s decision has since been the subject of a vigorous online debate and a rather reassuring defence of free speech by the majority of liberal commentators. So much so, in fact, that on today’s podcast of The Guardian’s “Another thought for the day” – an inspired secularist response to the dominance of the religious viewpoint on Radio 4’s “Thought for the day” – Nigel Warburton points out that the decision has actually been beneficial, in the sense that it has triggered this debate in which people’s fundamental beliefs have been variously reaffirmed, challenged and, perhaps, re-evaluated.

We therefore find ourselves, at least at first glance, in a pretty weird situation. The cause of free speech is being aided by… the curbing of free speech. Noooo, my brain is mellllting!

What makes this situation all the more problematic is that, had Geert Wilders been allowed into the UK, there is the distinct possibility that all that would have happened is that he would have gone to the House of Lords, played his rubbish film, then left and the national discourse would have been all the more poorer for it. Of course, this ignores the fact that there was already something of a public dialogue going on before the government’s decision, albeit rather one sided in favour of the Ban Wilders Brigade. But we can’t ignore the likely possibility that, no matter the strength of the furore before Wilders was refused entry, the debate afterwards was more extensive.

My point, if I actually have one,  is that rather than see the healthy debate stoked by the Home Office’s decision as a silver lining, we must see it as a further indictment of the state of free speech in this country in recent times. It’s no good fortifying the barn after the horse has bolted. Where was the vigorous public debate before the government’s edict? It’s also no good saying that the negative reaction to their decision will make them think twice in the future.  The fact is, governments mostly respond not to the  general distastes of public commentators, whose views in matters like this rarely filter down to the general public, but to ascertainable, tangible special interests.

In this case, the government’s decision was a result of correspondence to the home office from House of Lords Labour peer Nazir Ahmed, at least according to the man himself . Ahmed claimed to be representing the Muslim community at large in his efforts to ban Wilders. This, then, is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: an identifiable, specific group of the electorate influencing government policy while free speech advocates, being too diffuse, diverse and discordant, influence nothing.  (I should add that despite the disingenuous claims of  Ahmed, not all public Muslim authorities agreed with him; for example the Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim think tank, proposed the excellent idea of engaging Wilders in a proper debate)  The lesson here is clear: governments are afraid of distinct slices of the electorate. They are not, alas, afraid of well-intentioned liberal commentators, however great in number they may be.

I’m not saying that the debate prompted by Geert-gate (as someone must have called it by now) hasn’t been a healthy one for its own sake. I’m just pointing out that our dialogue needs to serve two purposes: on the one hand we need a vigorous public back and forth for the sake of free speech itself, but on the other we need that debate before the fact so as to have a chance to remind the government of the value of free speech and, perhaps most importantly, we need those who vigorously support freedom of speech to be become an actual constituency rather than just a presence in the liberal broadsheets/online community. Otherwise we might find ourselves in the situation – if we’re not there already – where we can talk a good debate but don’t have the right government to show for it.