Red Nose Day: no controversy allowed

Comic Relief fancies itself as the gutsy charity comedy extravaganza that dares to uncover destitution abroad and poverty at home while encouraging the general public to donate wads of cash to help out. Yet now it is revealed that the supposedly cutting-edge comic institution has axed Jade Goody from this year’s proceedings, which are due to take place in two weeks’ time. Why? Because Goody has become persona non grata since her appearance on Celebrity Big Brother last month, and Comic Relief can’t be seen rubbing shoulders with such a person or giving her any more air time.

Goody had already recorded a spoof version of A Question of Sport for Comic Relief. Yet organisers say it will not be shown because “Red Nose Day is all about raising money and anything that could potentially detract from this is not helpful.” Following her bullying of Shilpa Shetty on CBB, when she referred to the Bollywood actress as ‘Shilpa Poppadom’ and described her as a ‘liar and fake’, Goody has been hounded by politicians and commentators. She has been described as a blight on modern Britain, bringing shame on the nation with her vile words and bad behaviour. Recently, Goody revealed that she no longer knows what is acceptable speech when talking about ethnic minorities, and constantly worries about whether she is being ‘accidentally offensive’.

Goody’s story shows what happens when we leap upon people’s words – whether they are part of an unthinking outburst or just a stern sentence or two – and demand that they apologise for them/withdraw them/promise never to say them again. In Goody’s case, it has given rise to an individual who doesn’t know what she can and cannot say, and to authorities who take the safe bet of just not allowing her near our TV screens. We end up self-editing ourselves, and to be on the safe side the authorities edit us, too.

Brendan O’Neill

A tyranny of one

The British House of Fraser chain has pulled a promotional poster from its 61 department stores across the UK and Ireland after one woman complained that it was ‘racist’. Promoting this season’s fashionable colours, the poster declared: ‘Black is back, White is right.’ The woman who complained said these words reminded her of a 1960s racist poem. The store’s management pulled the ad, seeming to accept the woman’s assertion that the marketing team must not be very ‘culturally aware’.

Society has always had its fair share of self-appointed moral guardians, usually groups of individuals with that unfortunate combination of over-sensitivity and over-zealousness. Such illiberal groups, made up of hundreds or just scores of people, have been able to convince individuals, businesses and councils to back down over the merest slight or ‘risque’ advert or campaign – and thus to police public space and debate. Yet now we have moved from the tyranny of the minority to the tyranny of the individual, where one seemingly thin-skinned complainant can determine what is appropriate for the rest of us to see and hear. This is more pernicious than anything Mary Whitehouse’s army did in the past - and it is happening more and more.

Read my full article on the new tyranny of the individual at spiked - click here.

Alex Hochuli

Students ‘git smok’d’ for Facebook postings

This article from The Phoenix shows how US students are being punished for their choice of words on Facebook, the US student networking site.

A student at University of Central Florida was brought up on ‘personal abuse’ harassment charges for calling a candidate for a student-government office a ‘Jerk and a Fool’ on Facebook. A 15-year-old whiz-kid Korean-American student, at Johns Hopkins University, was suspended because of his Facebook ad for a ‘Halloween in the Hood’ party, in which he urged students to "come dressed in yo’ bomb ass Halloween costume or git smok’d".

The authors of the Phoenix article conclude that a bit of Facebook rudeness is good for students’ health: "In the ongoing search for identity and individual truth, students will engage in conversations others may view as inappropriate, just as they always have. As pleasant as politeness may be, it is of minuscule importance compared with the necessity of robust discussion on our college campuses."

Josie Appleton

National Identity Register: shutting down debate

With a few delicate and superficially reasonable words, Home Office minister Joan Ryan today exemplified the government’s dismissive attitude to the discussion surrounding ID cards and its impatient dismissal of fears over its erosion of privacy.

She was speaking in response to criticism from opposition parties of the revelation by Tony Blair, in an email to the 28,000 signatories of a petition against the introduction of ID cards on the Downing Street website, that the police would be able to search the National Identity Register to check fingerprints found at crime scenes. Although Mr Blair insisted that this would enable the police to solve those crimes committed by people whose fingerprints aren’t on their own database, it raises the unsettling prospect of the police having free roam of all the information held on the NIR, together with the inevitable proliferation of innocent people under suspicion.

The qualification that they must check all fingerprints against their own database before requesting permission to access the NIR offers little consolation, as it is precisely the kind of people who wouldn’t have their fingerprints on a Met database that would suddenly fall, in vast numbers, under its scrutiny. Not that the police aren’t already assisted by their ability to access information on a scale that no other country in the world can match. Britain’s citizens are the most heavily surveyed in the world, and the country’s DNA database is also the world’s largest, at some 5% of the population.

However, Ms Ryan’s response was unequivocal, despite the fact that Mr Blair stands accused of contradicting an earlier promise to parliament that police would not be able to go on such ‘fishing expeditions’. “Surely no one would suggest we should put obstacles in the way of police investigating crime”, she said.

The significance of Ms Ryan’s statement lies in its painfully demagogic attempt to exclude discussion on the issue and its ostracisation of the NIR’s doubters, with its implication that those who would oppose or question the massive exposition of personal information to the police are, naturally, assisting criminals. This kind of false dilemma encapsulates the government’s condescending approach, not only to its increasing infringements of individuals’ rights as it seeks to readdress the balance in favour of collective entitlements to security and safety, but also to the debate about those infringements.

It follows a precedent of destructive non-argument set by Mr Blair himself. With reference to his promotion of the NIR, perhaps the most recent example is found in an article he wrote in the Daily Telegraph in November. Mr Blair backed up his assertion that the civil liberties argument against the introduction of NI cards “doesn’t carry much weight” with what he saw as the public’s general acceptance of the use of biometric data. To illustrate this, he cited the two million Americans (roughly 0.6% of the population) who use the “Pay by Touch” scheme, whereby their fingerprints are linked to their bank accounts, and the fact that the scheme is currently on trial here in Britain. Apparently this means that biometric technology is so ubiquitous in our daily lives that the question of privacy has become irrelevant for us.

This is precisely the kind of non-argument that heightens the anxiety which it is supposed to assuage. But perhaps most importantly, its lack of substance points to a disdain for a meaningful engagement with the opponents of the ID card system. Indeed, while they are advanced on the pretext of participation in a discussion, arguments such as this one, and that offered by Ms Ryan, merely suggest an ingrained contempt for debate.

Beau Hopkins

Reds under the bed at Oxford?

A minor ‘red scare’ appears to have erupted at Oxford University. Two American undergraduates were instructed to read work on ‘dependency theory’ for their custom-made course on development and international political economy. Dependency theory, though now marginalised, was a huge part of the field, particularly in Latin American writing, from the 1960s through to the 1980s. It suggested that the world comprised a developed, Western, capitalist ‘core’ and an exploited, dependent ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’ in the Global South. It simply isn’t possible to teach this subject properly without discussion of this theory.

Nonetheless, the students denounced their tutor to the director of their study abroad programme as ‘a communist’, and the director responded by cancelling the course and transferring the students to another tutor who would teach them mainstream economics. Although it’s amusing that ‘communists’ continue to inspire such alarmed reactions, the director’s response is extremely worrying: rather than explaining the importance of being exposed at university to all sorts of competing viewpoints and judging between them, she endorsed their view that their own prejudices should dictate how and what tutors may teach.

Lee Jones