photo credit: Nils Geylen

I’ve only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any “ticking time bomb” scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years.

As Sullivan argues, it’s the bureacratic element that is the most chilling, a faceless largely unaccountable bureaucracy clinically eliminating civil liberties and perpetrating brutalities.  It makes it so much harder to rally against this than against a visible leader such as Bush or Cheney. Although less grave, in the UK the recent story of a council spying on a family for three weeks, because they didn’t believe the family was in the right school zone is actually terrifying, in its sheer pointlessness and in the capacity for something we consider so benign to be spying.

About two years ago, I remember debating with Ed, whether the UK should have a constitution and subsequently a supreme court, at the time I felt we’d done fine without one, but now a full means of redress beyond a mini-media storm seems more than reasonable. Perhaps more critically it’s time we started,  shining the light on bureacracies and demanding transparency from them.

Gathering at Bethnal Green police station

I went to the demonstration for justice for Ian Tomlinson, as I mentioned in this post yesterday. I just felt like, you know, I had to do something. And I guessed in that sense it would be rather more cathartic – for my own benefit, to set my mind at rest – than because I thought it would actually achieve anything in particular.

The statement by the family at Bethnal Green police station, the start of the march, really was very moving, and I’m glad I took part. We needed to make a statement.

However, I think I was right on the second part – the demonstration measured (I guess) 500-600 people at most. Thankfully it got a fairly good (brief) report on the BBC News website.

But on the first part, I was wrong. It didn’t lead to a sense of catharsis for me, just a sense of hopelessness, as the demo was hijacked by various people trying to push their respective political agendas. In this case it was largely the SWP who plastered their logo and website across their banners stating “Who killed Ian Tomlinson?”. There were plenty of others there hawking their Socialist Workers and various other hard left newspapers, and several large banners were on the march for the Union of Servicemen (?), the Socialist Workers and the Stop The War Coalition.

Using this event – a solemn march to demand justice for a man who had died – to push any sort of other agenda just seems to me to be incredibly tasteless.

Marching towards Bank

This wasn’t about “the system”, or about capitalism. It was about a man who died, at least partly due to police tactics. How is that partisan? How could anyone think it appropriate to make it exclusive to their political creed?

Perhaps I am just expecting too precise a message than is possible in a group of several hundred people, and perhaps this protest was extraordinary. But it at least made me reconsider the final paragraph of this comment I wrote on Ed’s G20 post. Do protests work? (Obviously, they do sometimes.)

I’m now watching Persepolis, a really brilliant film – the original French version – apparently the English version isn’t as good (Marjane really can’t sing though.). In the Iranian Revolution, protests against the Shah’s pretty awful regime, only partly down to religious concerns, were hijacked and used to justify wholehearted support for the new theocracy.

Obviously the parallels aren’t direct (er, at all), but it’s an interesting contrast, perhaps.

Maybe I’ll feel better about it all tomorrow.

(Penny Red has another report from a different perspective and highlights an incident I had forgotten)

Nine days have now passed since the death of Ian Tomlinson, and in that time, one thing has become very clear: he did not simply die of ‘natural causes’, as the police at the time suggested. In fact, his death was a very unnatural one indeed – and the police are directly responsible.

It’s easy to get very angry about this sort of thing and descend into hyperbole. But two things have become clear:

1) Police tactics are at fault

The police tactic of ‘kettling’ is unnecessary, counter-productive, and unacceptable. Last year the House of Lords ruled that the practice of ‘kettling’, deployed in the May Day protests of 2001 (where thousands of protesters were held for SEVEN HOURS at Oxford Circus) was compatible with the ECHR Article 5(1), as “the sole purpose of the cordon was to maintain public order, that it was proportionate to that need and that those within the cordon were not deprived of their freedom of movement arbitrarily”.

Let’s hope this senseless policy gets overturned at the European Court of Human Rights. When 3000 people are held in an area of less than 2000 square metres for 7 hours, until 21:30, with no food, water, or sanitary provisions, how can that possibly be justified?

Similarly, with the G20 protests, how can it be justified to hold people for such a long period of time, and only allow them to leave if they agree to provide their details and be photographed?

And how can the police get away with smacking people on the head with truncheons, cordoning off and then baton-charging peaceful climate camp demonstrators (who hours earlier had been pitching tents, playing music, and selling flapjack) and setting dogs on people who had been posing no threat at all?

If there’s one video you watch today – assuming you’ve watched the videos of the police beating Ian Tomlinson (1, 2)- watch this one. Riot police march in to beat unarmed, peaceful protesters, with their hands in the air. Then watch this one from the film Goodbye Lenin, which depicts the Stasi’s tactics of violently breaking up demonstrations. That there is any resemblance between the two at all is appalling.

How can these things not be seen as a deterrent to future protest, and a breach of Article 5?

2) The policeman responsible for Ian Tomlinson’s death should go to prison – and for a long time. But he’s not the only one.

I’m afraid, not for the first time, that I am going to have to disagree with the charming commentator on this (very good) Daily Mail article (via) who said:

“Ian Tomlinson, drunk and out for trouble, decided to deliberately walk into a riot situation and blatantly obstruct the police. He was pushed out of the way. He died because he was a chronic alcoholic and was likely on his last legs anyway. The police did nothing wrong and, compared to other European countries, acted in a very restrained manner. This whole media frenzy is pathetic, transparent and more to the point, very boring. Nobody cared about this man when he was alive, not the media, not the readers of this column and certainly not his family, so let’s have less of the crocodile tears and public lamenting now he’s dead. If people want to criticise the police then do so, but don’t assume everyone is of such low intelligence that putting a bit of spin about a story of a drunk having a heart attack will prompt any right-thinking person into outrage and anarchy.”

- Dom, UK, 10/4/2009 10:40

Ian Tomlinson wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was a bystander, making his way home from selling newspapers. The video clearly shows him shuffling away from the police with his hands in his pockets.

But even if he was doing something wrong, that is obviously no excuse for smacking him in the legs and violently throwing him to the ground. The policeman actually lunged at his back. The only threat to public order was from that policeman himself.

As others have pointed out, this particular piece of brutality which led to Ian Tomlinson’s death was not exceptional; there were countless examples of this on the day. So yes, this stupid thug should go to prison, and for a very long time, both for what he did and to set an example to others thinking of going the same way. But this goes much higher than that.

The Met is not only responsible for the police tactics, it’s also responsible for the disgraceful way that it responded to Ian Tomlinson’s death, briefing that it was “of natural causes” and that demonstrators threw bricks, bottles, etc. while police were trying to save his life. And the media’s responsible for unquestioningly lapping it up. It’s since “emerged” that he was an alcoholic Milwall fan staying in a bail hostel. Oh, well that’s ok then.

So what’s going to happen now?

Well it’s clear that IPCC inquiry is not going to be sufficient. As the Guardian’s editorial on Thursday noted,

“And what kind of independent body is it whose first reaction to the Guardian’s evidence on Tuesday night was to call at our offices (accompanied by a City of London policeman) and ask for it to be taken off the website?”

Surprise! The CCTV cameras “weren’t working”. Sorry, that must have come as a shock. And from that Channel 4 News interview, the chairman of the IPCC is clearly an idiot.

We need a full judicial inquiry, and the only way we’re going to get that is if sufficient pressure is placed on those who can make it happen. Protests might not help much, but it’s better than nothing.

Join the protest against police brutality, tomorrow (Saturday 11th April) at 11:30, at Bethnal Green police station.

I want to have confidence in my police service again. I want to trust them, and to believe that they’re there to protect me. How can I do that when nine days ago, a man died at their hands, and they don’t seem all that bothered?

Some more coverage:

• Liberal Conspiracy: Who’s to blame for this accidental death?
• Liberal Conspiracy: So who will excuse police brutality now? (includes lots of other links)
• Liberal Conspiracy: I still blame police brutality (2nd April)
• Chicken Yoghurt: Ian Tomlinson: video reveals G20 police assault on man who died
• Bloggerheads – Why aren’t these people working to protect us?
• Laurie Penny – Fuck.
  

photo credit: Alain Bachellier

Yesterday UK business secretary Peter Mandelson was approached by a woman named Leila Deen who proceeded to pour a cup of green custard over his head.  You can see the video here.  Deen, a campaigner against airport expansion, was protesting about the Government’s decision to give Heathrow a third runway, one which Mandelson allegedly had a large role in. After “sliming” Mandelson, she proceeded to give an interview to the press nearby and then calmly left the scene, the police briefly stopping her merely to ensure she wasn’t travelling to Parliament and to wish her a lovely day.

Mandelson’s reaction was to note “Whilst I’m prepared to take my fair share of the green revolution on to my shoulders, I’m less keen on having it on my face”.   Deen herself remarked “the only thing green about Peter Mandelson is the slime coursing through his veins”. Finally Gordon Brown pitched in: “If anybody doubted the greening of Peter Mandelson and his willingness to take the green agenda on his shoulders, we’ve seen it in practice this morning.”

So it was a bad day for puns. But, according to an article written shortly afterwards, it was a good day for liberty. Martin Kettle, writing in The Guardian, seems to think this was one in the eye for civil liberties campaigners:

If, as some too readily claim, we were all now living in a British police state, then the official response to Leila Deen’s green custard assault on Lord Mandelson in London this morning would not have passed off so easily. In a real police state, Deen might well be lying dead in the street as gun-toting security guards reacted to the assault. Or she might have been whisked away to a secret police centre to be tortured and locked away. Cameramen who witnessed the incident would have been rounded up, their video confiscated and their cameras smashed. And there would have been nothing on the state TV about any of it.

Why stop there? Why not bring in all the cliches? You surely aren’t going to miss this chance to express your surprise that you yourself, on pain of hearing about the incident, were not taken to Room 101 where a wire cage containing a rather lively rat would have been strapped across your face. And what about the mechanical hound that has your scent and will track your book-loving self across town? You can’t forget about the mechanical hound!

Oh, give me strength. The idea that since protesters like Leila Deen aren’t arrested – or worse – those pesky civil liberties campaigners need to dial the tone down is nothing more than a pathetic strawman argument and one that crops up time and time again in some form amid the rhetoric of those who want to put a curb on the entirely necessary cries of outrage from the civil liberties movement. Of course, when campaigners use terms like  “police state”, they don’t do so to insinuate that we are literally in one right now (though much legislation of recent times has shared its characteristics). No, the point of such a loaded term is to warn that we may be on the slippery slope to one at some point in the not-so-distant future. I can’t help but feel that if liberty campaigners were forced to be completely accurate then they would lose some of the urgency in their argument, since claiming we are becoming “a nation that is beginning to resemble one which could descend in a not too large amount of time into something that is most precisely described as a police state” is frankly not all that catchy.

To repeat: No-one’s saying we live in a bona fide police state right now. But if commentators like Kettle keep using ridiculous strawman arguments like this one, rather than addressing the undeniable and insidious erosion of civil liberties that is taking place, then one day not so far away cries of “police state!” will cease to be a warning and become a rather apt description.

photo credit: sunface13

So you may have noticed that my attempted liveblogging/twittering (tweeting?) from the Convention on Modern Liberty was not particularly successful, mostly because I just spent the time watching the debates, but also because I got a bit confused with twitter. All very complicated, this Interweb – it’s not a truck you just dump stuff on, it’s a series of tubes, you know.

The convention on the whole was pretty good. I had some preconceptions that it might be a bit worthy (or just outright smug) but in the end it was really interesting. Nothing particularly new but it brought together a lot of things in a more coherent way.

The aim of the convention was to spark debate and draw attention to the erosion of civil liberties in the UK after the last ten years.

A few things were worth noting (below the fold).

1. “If I hear someone using the term citizen again I am going to self combust”

This point was raised in the first Plenary after Shami Chakrabarti’s speech (and her unsuccessful call and response of “hell no”, I think this rhetorical device always sounds a bit weird and can have the unfortunate effect of turning thoughtful conventions into zombified rallies).

To begin with I thought that it was going to be a boring pedantic point, but it was actually quite interesting. As the woman (who used to work for the excellent Unlock Democracy) went on to say, “The state does not belong to me. It belongs to this strange construct called the Crown in Parliament. We need a new constitutional settlement”. In fact Republic had a stall and were a partner at the convention, and they argue (among other things) that the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of an elected head of state would help to enhance and protect civil liberties. Although I agree with their general aim (and stuff like this only helps to reinforce that view), and that our various aborted constitutional reforms have had the effect of concentrating power in the Prime Minister rather than simply removing it from the monarch, I’m not sure how secure the general claim is. This might just be because I haven’t thought much about it so let me know in the comments!

2. Rights need to be entrenched

There was some pushback, particularly from Conservatives at the conference, on a fairly general feeling that judicial review is the only way to ensure that laws comply with constitutionally-codified fundamental rights.

Incidentally, the very articulate Dominic Grieve, on the panel of the first plenary, was challenged on the Tories’ policy to abolish the Human Rights Act and their desire for “fewer rights, more wrongs” (whatever that means). He said that he wasn’t sure what it meant, which is understandable because it’s a pretty weird soundbite; alternatively his response was a semantic quibble to avoid the fact that his party has a far from perfect record with regards to civil liberties. (He had a good line: that Conservatives are just as prone to eroding human rights as anyone else, but that when they do so they get a voice in the back of their minds: your grandfather wouldn’t have approved). I realised half way through the afternoon that I was sitting next to him, we made eye contact and I like to think we rolled our eyes and scoffed in mutual understanding! I get the impression that he would like the Tories to make a much firmer commitment to fundamental freedoms than is the case at the moment.

Anyway – back to the substance of the point: although there’s quite a lot of debate even within the Conservative Party about this, they seem generally to be against giving “unelected judges” the power to strike down laws. Douglas Carswell MP, in the afternoon seminar I attended, argued that we should be increasing participation and devolution (all of which I agree with, if not his methods – referenda and direct democracy), rather than taking the power out of the hands of the people. But I don’t think this will really work, because aside from weakening governments through electoral reform (I had a good chat with ERS as well which helped to clear up STV vs AMS/AV+), protecting the rights of the minority from the tyranny (or parentalism) of the majority will always be a problem.

Douglas Carswell agreed with Weber’s view that judges, like all civil servants, are essentially self-interested individuals (see public choice theory) who have their own views and biases. But this concern doesn’t really seem to have stood up in reality; judges on constitutional courts have a pretty good record of doing the job they’re employed to do. Even the incredibly activist German Constitutional Court basically reflects underlying societal trends and protects human rights, and its strong activism is a reflection of the institutional framework initially established. Besides, Constitutional Court judges always face restrictions on their activity: public opinion, constitutional amendments (except – and it is a big except – the perpetual clauses of the German Basic Law, which frequently have a big impact), and the fact that, as Hamilton said, the judiciary “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” Plus, as Ely says, “the judges do not check the people, the Constitution does, which means the people are ultimately checking themselves” (he doesn’t agree with that, but I can’t remember a better quote, and that book’s well worth reading for an alternate perspective anyway).

On the other hand, with Ely (and Douglas Carswell today) are those who variously say that judicial review is inherently undemocratic, open to abuse, and as Noah Webster eloquently puts it, the “assumption of a right to control the opinions of future generations, and to legislate for those over whom we have as little authority as we have over a nation in Asia”. But I think this rather misses the point: democracy is not just free elections and the ability to do anything you want, as the winner in those elections. Democracy includes a whole host of other values and freedoms (speech, expression, trial, etc). Even Dahl’s (1971) famous minimalist procedural definition of democracy as competition open to participation requires these basic rights to function properly. (And others, such as Linz, very explicitly include these rights in their definitions.)

Greater participation and better, more independent and more principled MPs would both help the situation, but an entrenched bill of rights would make much more of an impact.

3. The Ends Justify the Means (always, and even if they’re totally unrelated)

The Labour Minister Michael Wills bravely attended the afternoon seminar on Protecting Rights, which I appreciated even if might not have appeared so at the time! It lended weight to some of this I was reading a couple of days ago (via), even if that might be a bit strong in places. The strange cognitive dissonance of the  Minister, who seemed to be led by an almost blind acceptance of any erosion of civil liberty if it could have some perceived marginal benefit, was amazing, although maybe not surprising. We were told variously that we were against increasing voter participation, solving the problems of housing estates, and most bizarre of all that we were against free school meals (at which point I wanted to conduct a quick poll of the room). All of these problems – and so many more! – could be solved through the government’s planned data sharing laws. In any case, that’s not what most people thought, and we are all well off (apparently), so who are we to talk about anything. When we disagreed in the Q&As, we were misquoting him, so he was going to put his remarks on his website.

4. More data please!

The bloggers forum at 1pm-2pm was interesting, but one of the best points made was that a more proactive release of accessible, comparable data would be highly beneficial to the democratic process. The Power of Information Taskforce Report looks promising on that front, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

5. What next?

This was probably the biggest thing for me that the conference didn’t seem to strongly address, although perhaps there will be some good follow-up stuff and it should hopefully spark some debate anyway. In the opening plenary, one of the panelists voiced their support for a questionnaire (of the sort often used by civil society groups in the US) to be sent to all MPs, with a list of clear unambiguous questions, and then hold them to account before and after the election. I think this is an excellent idea, but it can’t really be done by existing human rights organisations like Amnesty and HRW, as they have to be nice to MPs in order to persuade them. Would it actually be that difficult to set up outside of existing structures?

Oh yeah, and Will Hutton got told off by Helena Kennedy (he was making weird generalisations about Muslims). Philip Pullman on the other hand was great! Watch it here (2nd plenary)

Despite the large support from excellent groups like MySociety there unfortunately isn’t any wifi here so i won’t be able to provide too much during the day.

Update: I got a bit bored / frustrated at Twitter and in a knee-jerk reaction deleted my account. sorry! (there’s an aftermath post here).

As professionals committed to the principles of internationalism and cultural exchange, we are dismayed by new Home Office regulations which will curb our invitations to non-EU artists and academics to visit the UK. All non-EU visitors now must apply for a visa in person and supply biometric data, electronic fingerprint scans and a digital photograph.

The Home Office’s 158-page document also outlines new controls over visitors’ day-to-day activity: individuals must show that they have at least £800 of savings, which have been held for at least three months prior to the date of their application; the host organisation must keep copies of the visitor’s passport and their UK biometric card, a history of their contact details; and if the visitor does not turn up to their studio or place of work, or their where-abouts are unknown, the organisation is legally obliged to inform the UK Border Agency.

We believe that these restrictions discriminate against our overseas colleagues on the grounds of their nationality and financial resources and will be particularly detrimental to artists from developing countries and those with low income. Such restrictions will damage the vital contribution made by global artists and scholars to cultural, intellectual and civic life in the UK.

Iwona Blazwick, director, Whitechapel Gallery; Antony Gormley, artist;Eddie Berg, artistic director, BFI Southbank; Sandy Nairne, director, National Portrait Gallery; David Lan, the Young Vic; John E McGrath, theatre director; Malcolm Purkey, artistic director and acting CEO, Market Theatre Foundation, South Africa; Nicholas Hytner, the Royal National Theatre; Nicolas Kent, Tricycle Theatre; Brett Rogers, director, the Photographers’ Gallery; David Barrie, director, the Art Fund; Jeremy Deller, artist; and 49 others

Vanessa Thorpe in the Observer has background.  This is an interesting topic which seems at once to concern freedom of conscience, immigration, civil liberties and, one assumes, reactionary moves during the recession.  If you’re interested in signing the online petition against the Government’s move (you’ll be in good company), it’s here.

And of course, with some data, there’s just no way to remove it:

“Where you make use of the communication features of the service to share information with other individuals on Facebook, however, (e.g., sending a personal message to another Facebook user) you generally cannot remove such communications,” the Facebook terms of service agreement reads.

This should give pause to any Facebook user who plans to get a job or have children some day. Heaven forbid you decide to run for Congress 20 years from now. And we haven’t even mentioned Facebook’s Beacon disaster, which saw the company introduce an advertising platform that followed users around the Web and reported their behavior to friends. Facebook quickly backtracked after a similar uproar.

Really worth reading the article in full.

If you didn’t catch the NYT debate, I think Maciej Ceglowski has the best of it when he argues:

In real life, ephemeral conversations are not a luxury — they are part of what it means to be human. We weren’t built to remember everything that has ever happened in our lives — every movie night, bake sale or gossip session — nor would we want to. But online, it’s as if everyone is wired for sound, and every potted plant is hiding a camera. Our expectations as social beings don’t match the autistic reality of our computer systems.

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.

The test of a nation’s commitment to freedom of speech comes not when it gets the chance to defend the eloquent, the correct or the reasonable, but when it’s forced to stick up for the idiots, the racists and the unapologetic dickheads of the world. Well, this week the British government was given the choice of defending someone who fits all those categories and then some, yet once again they came up pathetically  short.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch MP and leader of the far right Freedom Party. His main qualities, as far as anyone can tell, are his devoted xenophobia, intolerance and hatred of muslims. Wilders is one of those lovely characters who demand respect for their own rights while trampling on the rights of others. He has made a film – by all accounts poorly-made, ignorant and indisputably intolerant – called “Fitna”, a documentary that connects verses from the Qu’ran to terrorist events like 9/11, and calls for a ban on the Muslim holy text along with the rejection of Islam itself. A UK Independence Party peer, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, invited Wilders to show his film in the House of Lords (yes, it really is that bad). Last Tuesday the British Government said that they would refuse him entry into Britain to show his film. Wilders came anyway. He was… refused entry.  Here’s what the Home Office, in a letter to Widlers on behalf of the Home Secretary Jaqui Smith, had to say on the matter (emphasis mine):

“(your presence) would pose a genuine, present and significantly serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The secretary of state is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in the film and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public safety in the UK.”

This statement, on its face indefensible, has been defended in some quarters as falling safely under the freedom of speech dictum which most civilised nations now follow. This is, of course, John Stuart Mill’s famous assertion that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” . The Home Office’s idea of a “threat to community harmony” has therefore been taken up by some as falling under this exception of preventing harm to others. For example, Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne, writing in the Guardian, quotes Mill and makes the dodgy claim that there is a “serious risk that  Wilder’s views could create substantial harm to ethnic minorities in this country”.  Earlier in the same piece he boasts of having in the past “defended people with some particularly odious” views  like the Austrian holocaust denier Dr Gerald Toben. Quite why there is a such a serious risk attached to Wilder’s views and not Toben’s will have to remain a mystery,  since Huhne couldn’t be bothered to explain it.

In fact, though shelves of books have been written debating what is considered okay under JS Mill’s ‘harm principle’, it is very clear what is not okay. And vague, meaningless warnings of a “threat to community harmony” are certainly not okay.  The classic Mill example relating to incitements to violence that aren’t justified by freedom of speech is the image of the angry public protester, making a speech in front of a dangerous mob and telling them to go and burn down the rich landowner’s house. In such a situation of direct proximity and danger, no-one in their right mind would begrudge the restriction of an individual’s right to free speech. The Home Secretary’s example of a “threat to community harmony”, however, is so vague as to have lost all meaning. Where is the proximity? Where is the direct risk of violence?  A “threat to community harmony” is so ridiculously ambiguous as to potentially include examples of speech much less racist or obnoxious than Wilder’s. For example, what if a standard newspaper column – say a respectfully provocative criticism of religion in, oh, I don’t know, The Independent-  happened to hit on a sore spot in the British community … even to the extent of causing a riot? Should we therefore ban all opinionated newspaper columns, just to be on the safe side?

Actually that example of a standard newspaper column causing a riot wasn’t just a hypothetical one. It actually happened. In fact, in one of those suspicious, maybe-we’re-all-in-one-big-truman-show coincidences, it actually happened this week, while Wilders was being kicked out of Britain. It all started with a column written by Johann Hari, in the Independent last week. You can find the column here. Essentially, Hari criticised the application of religious pressure to turn a United Nations role designed to protect free speech into one that investigated the “defamation” of religion.  He then went on to make the point, respectfully, that religious ideas should not have superior rights over non-religious ideas. I’ll let Hari explain what happened next:

An Indian newspaper called The Statesman – one of the oldest and most venerable dailies in the country – thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested – or worse. They brought Central Calcutta to a standstill. A typical supporter of the riots, Abdus Subhan, said he was “prepared to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the Prophet” and I should be sent “to hell if he chooses not to respect any religion or religious symbol? He has no liberty to vilify or blaspheme any religion or its icons on grounds of freedom of speech.”

Then, two days ago, the editor and publisher were indeed arrested. They have been charged – in the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech – with “deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings”. I am told I too will be arrested if I go to Calcutta.

Hari’s column was not racist, or xenophobic. It made a respectful, secularist point about how it is unfair of religious followers to assume that their ideas are more valuable, and deserving of more protection, than anyone else. Yet it caused riots in what many people assume to be a secularist democracy that respects free speech.

Under Jaqui Smith’s loathsome definition of unacceptable speech, Hari’s column should never have been written. Had the riots happened in Britain instead of India , would we see a crackdown, not just on the rantings of an unimportant xenophobe who is simply seeking attention, but on respectful newspaper columns as well? The lesson here is clear. The speech of the ridiculous is just as sacrosant as the speech of the sane. There is a very slippery slope between banning the speech of idiots and banning the speech of everyone else. In short, there is a threat to community harmony… and its name is the Home Office.