Fighting talk: taking liberties with liberty

Monday December 15, 2008

Dennis Hayes, Citizen Number 127659, wonders where the struggle went in the “struggle” for freedom of speech

‘Free speech and its limits’ is the subheading on a display in the ‘Free Speech and Belief’ section of the exhibition Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights at the British Library. The exhibition charts the 900-year struggle for rights and freedoms in the British Isles from Magna Carta in 1215 to the Human Rights Act of 1998 and beyond.

That unquestioning categorical heading ‘Free speech and its limits’ expresses the contemporary attitude to free speech. Free speech is no longer seen as the boundless basis of human potential, of our ability to articulate our experience and test it against the articulated experiences of others; it is something to be curtailed.

I sat and watched a short video of Julian Baggini, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, Peter Hitchens and Jonathan Heawood, Director of the English PEN, discussing ‘Should we be able to say whatever we like?’ The answer should be all four of them saying ‘Yes’ but only Heawood seems to argue for unrestricted free speech.

Vigilance

Hitchens is worried about ‘fighting words’, Chakrabarti, as always, is keen to qualify her comments on ‘Free speech being the life blood of democracy’ by pointing out that ‘No society in the world’ allows absolute free speech but makes the ‘proportionate and necessary’ restrictions to protect people from violence. Baggini outdoes Chakrabarti on this occasion, arguing that speech must be restricted if it leads to ‘injustice’ a rather vague, wide-ranging and worrying suggestion!

Although the recent 3,000 new offences that include many restrictions on liberty are noted and, as Professor Franscesca Klug reminds us in another video, ‘hard fought’ for freedoms are ‘easily lost,’ there is no sense of vigilance here. All the struggles are past struggles.

The chronology is almost self-congratulatory as if you were watching the unfolding of the Hegelian ideal state of liberty as personified by Britain. There is a lot of talk about Britain being a beacon of liberty around the world. If you forget the American and French Revolutions that is!

Legacy

There is much that is excellent in this exhibition particularly, as you would expect from the British Library, is the setting out of 900 years worth of original artefacts, documents and books, but there should be more about what is in them. In the pages of these documents the real struggles come alive, such as in William Clarke’s transcripts of the ‘Putney Debates’ held in October 1647 between senior army officers and the levellers. The lasting legacy of seeing such documents is that you want to know more about the arguments that were used when freedom was fought for and not casually restricted even by its self-styled champions.

Perhaps all members of the British Parliament should be forced to visit the section on ‘Parliament and the People’, because in not protesting at the outrageous arrest of Damian Green and the search of his office in the House, they seem to have lost all memory of parliamentary sovereignty and of their status and duty as our democratic representatives. But they, like this exhibition, have lost their way.

Liberty is a serious issue and we should be active in its defence but not ‘interactive.’ Interaction can be fine and the British Library excels at the best of interaction with its virtual books. Using their award winning ‘Turning the Pages’ software you can turn the pages and read original and often ancient and fragile manuscripts. But turning the struggle for liberty in to an interactive game is not just edutainment. It tells us about what the contemporary curators of museums think about what people want and what they think about us.

Childish

In Taking Liberties you can join in the historical and contemporary debates by picking up a wristband and answering questions in each section. You even have a Citizen Number. I was Citizen Number 127659. Although you cannot be traced or identified, it is scarily New Labour, with a hint of childish wristband wearing activism.

I checked out the votes on the free speech section. It was heartening in a way, if you closed your mind to the self-selecting, liberal well–read audience that was likely to go to this exhibition.

80 per cent of citizens agreed with Rowan Atkinson that the ‘freedom to criticise ideas is a fundamental freedom.’ 66 per cent thought that ‘Despite the problems’ the press ought to be free to investigate what people are up to, and so on. Fairly liberal except in cases were censorship of the Internet and TV was thought necessary to protect the vulnerable, which got the support of half the respondents. Only 13 per cent argued for no regulation.

Contempt

Protecting the vulnerable, which is now all of us, and protecting all of from ‘fighting words’ that lead to violence, are at the core of attacks on free speech. What is needed to defend us from this patronising and dehumanising contempt is debate about why our ‘experts’ and our fellow citizens are so willing to restrict our rights. In the end freedom is about letting us, not those who would protect us, make up our minds about issues. To free ourselves from this contempt is a real struggle that must begin.

At the end of the exhibition you can become part of the struggle for liberty by putting ‘Your Thoughts’ on a ‘post-it’ note on a wall. That’s what freedom of speech comes down to in the British Library – freedom of speech as graffiti or litter that no one reads.

Well, I did. The best comment I found was ‘I’m off to the pub’ and there is still more chance in contemporary Britain of getting into an argument about something of substance over a pint in a pub than playing at being a ‘citizen’ in this exhibition. That is until the government bans heated argument and sends free thinkers out to stand and shiver with the smokers.

Dennis Hayes is the founder of Academics For Academic Freedom. You can visit the exhibition and watch the videos online at Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights