Peter Tatchell and Reggae-bashing

Peter Tatchell has in recent years been running a campaign against Jamaican dance-hall artists who use homophobic language in their songs. His most recent article attacking ‘murder music’ on the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog was a revealing demonstration of practically every dismal contemporary anti-free-speech argument and prejudice going. Let’s take a look at these censorious shibboleths.

• ‘This is not a free speech issue’

Er, yes it is. Attempting to prevent someone from expressing a view is censorship - no ifs, no buts. It’s fine if you want to argue against free speech, but you should come out and say it. Tatchell’s claim that free speech advocates are hypocrites because they don’t defend the free speech of Nazis. Er… again, often they do. Is he ignorant of the ACLU’s defence of the Ku Klux Klan’s right to free speech for instance? He’s either setting up straw men, or he’s profoundly ignorant of the position he’s criticising.

• Censoring thought as well as speech

Peter Tatchell has a great interest in whether Banton and Beenie Man have only ‘cynically’ signed up to his charter to avoid the financially costly campaign that Tatchell waged against them, or whether they’ve really converted to his nice liberal viewpoint. Who cares? He has shut them up. Tatchell’s demand that they think appropriate thoughts is worthy of a medieval Inquisitor.

• Contempt for the audience

The most degrading aspect of attempts to restrict free speech is that they are implicit attacks on the rationality of the listening (and thinking) public. He sees Jamaican reggae fans as a potential mob ready to tear people apart at the mention of the words ‘batty-boy’; a vision worthy of the most fevered white-colonial imagination. There’s no denying there are regular homophobic attacks in Jamaica, but to reduce this complex social phenomenon (hatred of, and violence against homosexuals) to some song lyrics’ supposed capacity to incite hatred is laughable.

• The campaign is chauvinistic

Like so many commentators nowadays, Peter Tatchell jet-sets around the world to find examples of foreigners being beastly to one another (see also his recent trip to Russia). There’s nothing wrong with international solidarity, but grandstanding demands that foreigners comply with our standards only strengthens the hand of our own governments to intervene abroad, and distracts from the hard work of winning the fight for equality in Russia or Jamaica.

• PC censorship sets an awful precedent

Peter Tatchell forgets the case of Canadian feminist Andrea Dworkin, who became the target of her own anti-pornography laws. If Tatchell really wants to imagine that our enlightened government might never use censorship against gays, he’s welcome to his illusions. Let us hope the rest of us aren’t so foolish. As was mentioned on this blog a few days ago, Islamists in Britain were banged-up using laws against ‘incitement’ of the same type that Tatchell argues for. Tatchell may have no sympathy with Hizb-ut-Tahrir or whoever; but his line of argument would criminalise legitimate expressions of violent thought, including everyone from old Irishmen singing Fenian songs in a pub, to angry young rappers insulting the police.

The lesson of the UK to Jamaican gays is that they need the solidarity of the wider community to win freedom and equality. The censorious arguments of Tatchell and other British ‘liberals’ who see their peers as violent idiots, do them a disservice.

Robin Walsh

Race out of the closet

Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered in 1993, has launched a broadside against Boris Johnson, citing a 2002 article in which he refers to ‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ (a pejorative term for black children) and suggesting that when Tony Blair visited the Congo, ‘the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief’. According to Lawrence, ‘This is the most offensive language of the colonial past and it shows that the Tory party is riddled with racial prejudice. No one with such views can be the mayor of a city with the largest black population in Britain.’

Have Lawrence, or the MPs Diane Abbot and Dawn Butler who have jumped on this bandwagon, even read the article? The Telegraph op-ed piece is actually an attack on the British political elite – not black people. Johnson suggests the Queen travels to the Commonwealth so often because it’s the only place she can attract large crowds of flag-waving kids – which is arguably true. More substantively, he lambastes Tony Blair for his constant jet-setting around the world’s troubled hotspots with his arrogant conviction that he can bring peace – while ignoring problems at home such as transport, healthcare and education. It is in fact a perfectly reasonable article that uses the ‘offensive language of the colonial past’ to ridicule Blair’s liberal imperialism and his disconnection from the ordinary people who elected him to solve their problems – not gallivant around the world dispensing his own brand of messianic wisdom. The failure of the ‘liberal’ media to explain this in their reports means Johnson’s enemies can slur with impunity.

It seems pretty obvious that Lawrence has been put up to this by Ken Livingstone’s office. On Radio 4’s Today programme last week, he said he was half-way through reading Johnson’s old columns to dredge up muck against him. Very likely the quotations in this article were fed to Lawrence so she could use her apparently apolitical position to attack Johnson as a racist. These are smear tactics of the worst kind, playing on the iconic status of a 14-year-old murder (the police’s role in which, incidentally, Boris recognised – despite his broadsides against political correctness – was marred by ‘racialist’ attitudes) to score cheap political points.

If this is the best evidence they could dig up to ‘prove’ Johnson is a racist, their case is pretty weak and reflects the Labour party’s own desperation – its tactics of trying to discredit Tories by suggesting they’re all closet racists is wearing decidedly thin. Moreover, Lawrence’s attack reveals the regulatory thought-policing that is commonplace among supposedly ‘liberal’ opinion today. In another article, Johnson slammed proposals to make racist speech in private illegal, noting that ‘not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen’. Lawrence refused to accept this, saying: ‘clearly it can never be acceptable to hold those views. Anyway, what is said in private normally manifests itself out in public’. Since Johnson’s enemies are apparently woefully unable to find any public ‘manifestation’ of his supposed racism, perhaps their next call will be for MI6 to bug his kitchen.

Lee Jones

Chants, rants, Rangers and racism

Glasgow Rangers’ new American winger DaMarcus Beasley may have helped his club by more than just scoring the only goal in Tuesday night’s Champions League qualifier against FK Zeta in Montenegro. Rangers went through 3-0 on aggregate, but it was Beasley’s complaints about racist chants from the Zeta fans that made the headlines the next day. Abuse of visiting black players is still common at matches in that part of the world, and no doubt unpleasant for those on the receiving end, but the real significance of the story was that it meant for once it wasn’t the Rangers fans who were being scrutinised.

In recent years, fans of the Glasgow team have been under increasing pressure to stop singing their traditional songs and chants, which have a notably anti-Catholic flavour (long story – I refer curious readers to something I wrote last year). While the songs in question are undoubtedly offensive – as with many if not most football songs, that’s kind of the point – they have little bearing on the real world, and it is not at all clear who is supposed to be harmed by them. The growing clamour to stamp out these songs, with official threats to deduct points from the club if the fans persist, has less to do with the behaviour of Rangers fans themselves than with a colossal loss of perspective on the part of the chattering classes. The sentiment behind calls for something to be done was perfectly expressed by Mike Small, a Scottish lefty from central casting, in a Guardian Comment is Free post this week. It is not only unworldly, but mean-spirited and unbearably self-righteous; I’m tempted to say bigoted.

While the Scottish Premier League delegate (or chief inquisitor) reported fans for shouting ‘Fuck the Pope’ at Rangers’ opening game of the season in Inverness on Saturday, it seems those who travelled to Montenegro heeded the club’s warning to ‘behave’ rather than risk having the team forced to play behind closed doors. The attention given to racist chants by Zeta fans may be a welcome relief for the time being, but ultimately any defensive finger-pointing (like the tiresome insistence that Celtic fans sing sectarian songs too) is only likely to reinforce the censorious culture that threatens to make Ibrox sound more like a kindergarten than a football stadium.

As a Rangers fan, I’m looking forward to the new season, and hope we stick it to the Celtic. I’m less interested in DaMarcus Beasley’s colour than in whether he can be the new Peter Lovenkrands, but with more consistency. That’s the sort of question people should be debating the morning after a match, rather than scrutinising the repertoire in the stands. The inquisitors of UEFA, the SPL and the comment pages can just fuck off.

Dolan Cummings

Won't somebody please think of the children?

Two stories came out in the UK last week that dealt with risks or threats to 'our children'. Both mooted solutions to are censorious in character.

In the first, the Professional Association of Teachers demanded, at their annual conference, that YouTube be banned on account of 'cyber-bullying'. Some people evidently have more sense, such as the head of the BeatBullying charity (who no doubt has added to the bullying paranoia itself) who proclaimed, 'calls for social networking sites like YouTube to be closed because of cyber-bullying are as intelligent as calls for schools to be closed because of bullying.'

Secondly, following the implementation of the junk food advertising ban, The Guardian reports that marketers are following kids online, sometimes using social networking sites to created branded 'friends'. Although Ofcom's remit doesn't stretch to online advertising, The Guardian notes that, 'the Advertising Standards Authority's code of conduct was recently extended to include online marketing to children, [but] it has left open a loophole that many brands exploit. That is that anything classed as 'editorial' is exempt from the ASA code.' One fears that calls to extend these regulatory bodies' purview are not far away...
[NB: Against the contention that advertising is not a free speech issue, see this article by Brendan O'Neill].

Not to be outdone by the poms, the Australian Labor party is seeking to stop marketers using cartoons to advertise their greasy/sugary wares to children. For an attack on such nonsense, read the Manifesto Club Interest Group in Australia's blog on the subject.

Alex Hochuli

A Danish denier and irate Israelis

The recent decision by the Danish Arts Council to grant research funding to a holocaust denier has attracted criticism from commentators in Israel. This is both baffling and alarming when you consider that the subject of the student’s study is the involvement of Danes in Hitler’s SS, and not the existence or otherwise of the Final Solution. There is no need here to extrapolate from the particular abhorrence of holocaust denial, the legitimacy of the moral indignation that it provokes, and the need for it to be fought wherever it raises its ugly head. But it must be fought on the proper grounds, using the proper tools; and that is the ground of open and informed debate, using the tool of reasoned argument. What is not acceptable is the attempt to suppress unfavourable beliefs through legislation or through the refusal of funds for academic study.

The fact is that morality and moral censure, no matter how justified, have no say in the process of allocating research funding. It is worth remembering that some of the greatest advances in human history have been the product of research considered heretical or immoral at the time. In the context of fund allocation, the only relevant criterion is the academic merits of the scholar's submission. This doesn’t mean that, free from the shackles of moral oversight, any offensive crackpot theory may count on megabucks for its investigation as, clearly, part of what it means to have academic merit is not to fly in the face of extensively researched historical data. If the Danish student in question had attempted to get money for a project on holocaust denial, it would have been rejected on this basis.

But the fact is, he did not. His submission wasn’t a crackpot theory, but a legitimate area of study. It was merely his incidental belief in an offensive theory that has attracted so much controversy. Not only is this idea absurd (should hard-line but non-violent Muslims be barred from studying the ecology of the Galapagos Islands? Are anti-immigration campaigners to be denied access to Quantum Theory?), but it is hugely dangerous and self-defeating for a thriving democracy. The moment the determination of government funding for students depends on the applicant’s personal beliefs is the moment academic freedom wheezes its last breath, to be replaced by a stultifying and oppressive conformity in the academic community - supposedly the vanguard in thought and attitude - which would then suffuse society as a whole. The fact that such obvious dangers are lost on the detractors of the Danish Arts Council’s decision is worrying, and indeed hypocritical given the much-lamented boycott by British institutions that Israel’s academics are currently enduring. So it seems that denial and myopia are the order of the day.

Beau Hopkins

'English, motherfucker, do you speak it?!'

Although it is not a 'free speech' story, strictly speaking, this news item from the Scotsman indicates that people who immigrate to the UK will no longer be free to learn to speak...English, that is. Or certainly not as freely as before.

The UK government has decided, in yet another authoritarian clampdown on freedom of movement, to shut down 'bogus' language colleges to dissuade immigrants from entering the country. Now, anyone who has ever walked down London's Oxford Street will have noticed a number of first floor offices advertising themselves as reputable language schools. You may even have thought to yourself, 'that might be a bit dodgy'. Or if you're 'a bit dodgy' yourself, you may even have thought them to be a front for any number of illicit activities, starting with prostitution, via forgery and money laundering, and ending with drug-smuggling. But most people don't think like that. I certainly don't.

In any case, the government seems to have found yet another way to plug those mythical 'porous borders' that allow those 'foreign hordes' looking for work to slip through. It is unclear from the report whether the schools are alleged actually to be fronts for other illegal activity (dope, cash, ho's) or whether the colleges are simply fakes that allow foreigners to pretend to be students to allow them to stay and work in the UK. It seems though that the latter is true, in which case the government doesn't even have the 'crime-fighting' justification - it's simply a brute crackdown on immigrants. Further, it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to a couple of dodgy language schools that have popped up. Worse, many of these schools provide a service (at the cost of a few hundred pounds per student) that the state no longer adequately provides - i.e. a place for new immigrants to learn English. If the government were indeed serious about being 'able to offer international students the assurance that they are applying to trustworthy and good quality learning institutions in the UK', in the words of the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, they would fund language schools.

Regardless, Bill Rammell, felt compelled to make the point that, 'the government welcomes the many genuine international students who come to study in the UK each year.' But anyone wanting to learn to speak the language, or worse, only pretend to for something as spurious as earning a living, is NOT WELCOME. To Rammell, 'genuine' international students are probably those that are well-educated, middle-class, and who more likely than not already speak some English.

The irony of this story is that Gordon Brown told The Sun on the very same day: 'We are going to take a far tougher line. I want a message to go out - if you come here you work and learn our language.' That's right, and if you think you can sneak in to this country and work by signing up to learn our language, well buddy, you're seriously mistaken! Er...?

The insistence that immigrants learn English, integrate and take part in civil society is a desperate and populist move. It is a further irony that the ability to converse with fellow citizens, to speak freely - integral to taking part in the political process, being an active citizen as well as a good neighbour, etc - has been so seriously limited by this government in other ways. Now they are even making it difficult to learn English in the first place, or to use that avenue to covertly get in, get a job, get paid, get involved, get educated, get the vote, get a life... Get it?

It's like being stuck between a rock and a... an... er... um... er... what's that word again?

Alex Hochuli

Is it cuz I iz in your mind?

Nigel Marlow, principal psychology lecturer at flagship managerialiser of universities, London Metropolitan University, has developed a programme for businesses to test for ‘implicit racist attitudes’ in job applicants. Dubbed 'violator of the subconscious' by the mainstream press, and recently bemoaned by shadow work and pensions secretary Philip Hammond ('where does it stop?'), the test has quickly gained stardom as the 'thought-police' of our times.

Its celebrity, however, is likely to be short-lived, given its utterly reductive measurement criteria: the test consists of a quick-fire flicking of black and white faces on a screen which the potential racist immediately puts into categories of ‘good/positive’ and ‘bad/negative'. It begs the question: which is worse? That all people are exhaustively either black or white or that we’re allowed only two responses to those we meet – positive or negative? As the Telegraph points out, people hold associations for all sorts of reasons. The test assumes our primary reaction to each other is based on skin colour, not, for example, on whether we are attracted to each other’s faces or are distracted by that spot under your nose. It will only ‘catch’ people who aren’t aware enough of their reactions to control them. If you’re one of those pesky racists with phenomenal mind-control however, you get to prolong your silent and harmless affront to humanity.

Throw in the language of ‘unmasking’ racists, and you have the perfect game of tag for bored office-workers. But beyond the distraction of the test's obvious absurdity lies the more worrying assumption that an instantaneous, pre-rationalised generalisation based on skin-colour counts as racism, and that civilised society is therefore being undermined by our subconscious. Apparently, for Nigel Marlow and London Met, attempting to monitor and manage attitudes I’m not even conscious of and making my knee-jerk emotional responses more important than my rationally reflected ones counts as upholding civility. If this is the thought police, they'll be no more effective than the body police who hang around London tube stations, glaring at all the brown people.

Sarah Boyes