Freedom of speech

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Lord Justice Leveson and the baby killers

I have worried about Hugh Grant’s understanding of power ever since he started bringing up baby. I first saw him reach for the innocent child at one of the party conferences, where he was on stage arguing for statutory control of the press. He had his stock reply ready when someone asked whether he wasn’t being naïve about the likelihood of politicians or politicised bureaucrats seizing the opportunity to censor. ‘The phrase that is always used is ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’. I have always said I don’t think it is that difficult to tell what is bath water and what is a baby. To most

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Mo Yan’s malignant apology for ‘necessary’ censorship

The Chinese writer Mo Yan collected the Nobel Prize for Literature last night. In his acceptance lecture, he reiterated his view that a degree of censorship is ‘necessary’ in the world, and compared it to airport security. The comparison is utterly base. Airport security is a fleeting restriction on personal liberty; a social contract entered into freely by making the decision to travel by air. Censorship is a legal mechanism imposed on entire societies by a self-appointed oligarchy that maintains itself by persecuting and prosecuting individual transgressors. Mo Yan’s logic is as flawed as his apology is malignant. Having said that, his enthusiasm for censorship was quite restrained on this occasion: he told Granta recently that

Stephen Mcewen

Simin Daneshvar, Persia’s first female novelist and hope for Iran’s future

There is a Persian proverb which states that ‘books are a man’s best friend.’ Persian literature from the kings of antiquity to the last Shah of the Peacock Throne has, for the most part, been dominated by its proverbial male companion. When presented with today’s Islamic Republic, an unfamiliar Western reader can easily believe that a female literary voice cannot possibly exist underneath the seemingly anonymising chador, the Islamic female dress most closely associated with Iran. Instead, all that would appear to emanate from Iran is a male voice: Ahmadinejad defending arms programs; the Mullahs dictating morality; Khomeini, father of the nation, ever-present from beyond the grave, still influencing the

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Zoe Heller versus Salman Rushdie and Joseph Anton

The literary world anticipates Salman Rushdie’s response to Zoe Heller’s cauterisation of his memoir, Joseph Anton, in the New York Review of Books. Heller’s pointed review is deeply considered. It is a delight to read, even though some of its arguments are uneven and some of its conclusions are trivial next to the themes of Rushdie’s unlovely yet important book. Heller is, in my view, right to slam the grandiloquence of Rushdie’s ‘de Gaulle-like third person’ narration. The technique succeeds in alienating Joseph Anton (Rushdie’s secret service nom-de-guerre) from normality; but its relentless oddness irritates to the point where the reader might lose sight of the fact that Joseph Anton is actually Salman

Wednesday

The Spectator

Why The Spectator won’t be part of a state licensed media

Anyone picking up a newspaper in recent days will have noticed that the press has been writing a lot about itself. Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into press practices and ethics has created anxiety at a time when newspapers were already haemorrhaging sales and influence. David Cameron’s government’s response to the report is nervously awaited, and a group of 42 Tory MPs is urging him to seize a ‘once-in-a-generation’ chance to regulate the press. They threaten to rebel if he doesn’t. The Prime Minister will be vilified whatever he decides to do. As the oldest continuously published weekly in the English language, The Spectator has seen this all before. The technology

Sunday

David Blackburn

Rotherham’s ‘political commissars’ reinforce the need for a free press

‘Clearly she has morphed somewhere in her career from social worker to political commissar.’ These are the words of Minette Marrin, writing of the social worker at the centre of the fostering scandal at Rotherham Council in the Sunday Times. Marrin’s article unpicks Rotherham Council’s position, turns it over and concludes that: ‘[The] thoughtless, obstinate political correctness of the Joyce Thacker (Rotherham’s senior social worker) variety is rampant throughout social services. Many of them are highly politicised in plain party-political terms as well. It’s a national disgrace and a national disaster. In adoption, for instance, it is such misguided attitudes that make it so very difficult for a child in

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

David Blunkett warns MPs against regulating the press

David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, has has his private life in the newspapers often enough to yearn, Hugh Grant-style, for a world where the press is not free but obliged to operate within parameters outlined by the government. But I’ve interviewed him for Radio Four’s Week in Westminster (it airs at 11am this morning) ahead of next week’s Leveson report and he has come out against the idea state-mandated regulation. It was an unusual discussion: the supposedly illiberal Blunkett, himself a compensated victim of hacking was defending press freedom. A Tory, Nadhim Zahawi, was urging David Cameron to act. As a former Home Secretary, Blunkett’s words carry some weight. He

Friday

J P O'Malley

Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain

In his new book Classified: Secrecy and The State In Modern Britain, Dr Christopher Moran gives an account of the British state’s long obsession with secrecy, and the various methods it used to prevent information leaking into the public domain. Using a number of hitherto declassified documents, unpublished letters, as well as various interviews with key officials and journalists, Moran’s book explores the subtle approach used by the British government in their attempt to silence members of the civil service, and journalists, from speaking out about information that was deemed classified. Moran points out the inherent hypocrisy at work, when leading political figures of the 20th century, such as Lloyd

Thursday

Steerpike

We ask the questions

The enemies of a free press, also known as the mysteriously funded Hacked Off campaign, are positively salivating at the prospect of new legislation to regulate the press. I hear that their press conference, held after lobbying the three party leaders, at Four Millbank yesterday gave a glimpse of things to come. Professor Brian Cathcart and former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris waxed lyrical about their relentless pursuit of justice for their celebrity backers like Hugh Grant, and the lesser known victims of press mistreatment. Despite being promised the chance to quiz the victims, journalists in the room got increasingly irate as the double act hogged the limelight. The tension

Sunday

Friday

Nick Cohen

The internet is proving to be a tool of censorship, not emancipation

The case of Adrian Smith, the Christian the Trafford Housing Trust demoted for politely expressing his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook, is one of the most disgraceful I have come across. Much will be written about the contempt for freedom of speech and conscience Mr Smith’s po-faced and prod-nosed employers showed. Mr Justice Briggs was clearly upset that legal technicalities prevented him from giving Smith more money. ‘I must admit to real disquiet about the financial outcome of this case. Mr Smith was taken to task for doing nothing wrong, suspended and subjected to a disciplinary procedure which wrongly found him guilty of gross misconduct, and then demoted to

Friday

Douglas Murray

The complexity of the war on free speech

Free speech in Britain is being pulled in two completely opposite directions. On the one hand, thanks to the increasingly tortuous mission-creep that is the Leveson Inquiry, there are a range of demands for greater regulation of the print press.  Today’s rather surprising letter to the Guardian by various Conservative MPs is an example of some thinking on this. What is odd is that this should happen at exactly the same moment when the internet is pulling us in an opposite direction. It is all very well to come up with ever more labyrinthine ways in which to keep the print-media in line, but this increasingly looks like advocating temperance

Thursday

Alex Massie

Another Hateful Decision by the European Court of So-Called Human Rights – Spectator Blogs

How much longer must we put up with this kind of thing? A bus driver who was fired for being a member of the BNP has won a long legal battle claiming his dismissal was a breach of his human rights. Arthur Redfearn, 56, was sacked from his job in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where he drove mainly Asian adults and children with disabilities. Judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled today his employer Serco Ltd dismissed him only because of his membership of a political party. This breaks Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the Freedom of Assembly and Association, the chamber

Sunday

Camilla Swift

What kind of regime imprisons people for what they tweet? Oh, hang on…

The King of Bahrain certainly doesn’t seem to like it up him. In this week’s Spectator, Kirsty Walker said her last complaint – before quitting journalism — was from the King objecting to her being rude about his regime. A Bahraini man has just been sentenced to six months in jail for ‘defaming’ the king on Twitter. Three similar Twitter users are up on similar charges next week. David Cameron should be making clear how appalled he is at this repression – except he is not in a very good position to comment. After last year’s riots, police threatened to arrest users for inciting the looters. It seemed daft: would you really arrest people for writing

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Jimmy Savile and the dangers of received wisdom

What does the Jimmy Savile case tell us about received wisdom? Over the last few weeks it has become clear that one of the most famous people in Britain was known by very many people to be an active, abusive paedophile. Many other people in broadcasting knew it. People in charities he was associated with knew it. People in hospitals he was associated with warned child patients about how to get around it. The person who founded Childline, no less, had heard about it. But nobody said or did anything. We are told that there were various reasons for this. Savile himself is said to have threatened that there would

Monday

Douglas Murray

A protest beyond parody

Yesterday 10,000 Muslims travelled from across Britain to the London offices of Google to demonstrate that they do not understand anything about the country they live in. The protest was one of a number planned against a film uploaded onto Youtube some months back. One of the organisers, Sheikh Masoud Alam, described the film thus: ‘This is not freedom of expression, there is a limit for that. This insult of the Prophet will not be allowed.’ Sadly, for him, the Sheikh is wrong.  What he terms ‘insult’ of a historical figure is most certainly allowed and judging by the quality of their argument, it seems unlikely Mr Alam and friends

Friday

Tim Marshall

‘Arab Spring’ is a misnomer

What do you do when confronted with a prejudice so strong it takes your breath away? In my case, I did what was immediately necessary. I took a deep breath to replenish lost oxygen, and moved on. It wasn’t the time or place to take on this particularly ugly example of intolerance; but it is an intolerance which needs to recognised. I was giving a lecture at a charity that trains journalists from around the world. Some are already making their way in the industry and are expected to do well. I was talking about my theory that the term ‘Arab Spring’ actually clouds our understanding of what has been

Shiraz Maher

Britain’s illiberal state

It can seem surreal, almost otherworldly, to read about our judiciary these days. Just a few days ago my colleague Douglas Murray wrote about the peculiarity of imposing a custodial sentence on Matthew Woods for posting bad-taste jokes on Facebook about the abduction of April Jones. As if to confirm that the Bar is indeed trading in absurdities, another court has now sentenced Barry Thew to eight months in prison (four of which relate to a bail offence) for wearing a t-shirt on which he scrawled the crude message: ‘One less pig; perfect justice’ and ‘killacopforfun.com haha.’ It should be obvious that one need not laugh at the jokes of

Thursday

David Blackburn

The politics of the Nobel Prize for literature

The Nobel committee have delivered their verdict on the literature prize: Mo Yan is new laureate. Over at the books blog, I explain why this is an important decision politically. Yan is the first Chinese citizen to win the award, a reminder that the country’s culture influence is growing together with its political and economic power. In that sense, the award has recognised that we are living in a new age. Yan’s books have been banned from time-to-time by the Chinese authorities, but he is accused by many of being too close to the party line. Several human rights activists are appalled that he has won the prize. However, others