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Fight for free speech!

We live in sombre times. On the pretext of protecting us from terrorism, an obviously frightened and increasingly authoritarian UK government is steadily stripping away traditional safeguards of individual liberty and freedom of expression, which at least the older among us had hitherto taken for granted as part of the weft and warp of Britishness. Antony Grey has been looking at our freedoms – and lack of them.

If the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill had become law in the way the government wanted, it would have marked a decisive shift of legislative power to the UK executive, enabling ministers to alter any legislation without reference to Parliament. As it happened, there were amendments, which amounted to a watering-down.

"War on terror"

Even during the Hitler war (when I was a teenager), there was more determination to preserve hard-won freedoms, some dating back hundreds of years, than is apparent today. Winston Churchill’s Coalition government was far more scrupulous about individual liberty in wartime than Gordon Brown’s (and before him Tony Blair’s) New Labour administration is now in peacetime – which is what we still enjoy, despite all the cant about a “war on terror”.

In the 1930s, E M Forster presciently wrote that “we are menaced by something much more insidious [than Fascism or Communism] – by what I might call ‘Fabio-Fascism’, by the dictator-spirit working quietly away behind the façade of constitutional forms . . . Fabio-Fascism is what I am afraid of, for it is the traditional method by which liberty has been attacked in England”.

While the Blair/Brown brigade is overly bossy but probably basically benign, the same may not be true of its successor governments in twenty, or even ten, years’ time. As Forster said, “As soon as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because the possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays.”

If this seems unduly cynical, just look at press reports of local government CCTV supremos boasting, in almost gloating fashion, of their ability to spy on the movements of everyone using the streets – solely for our own good and greater security, of course. Personal privacy, as a civic concept, scarcely exists any more. Nor, it seems, does the old widespread revulsion at snoopers and informers – who are now being egged on by government advertisements to “shop” their erring neighbours. All this is creepily reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s early days.

Section 28

It is true that in a good many respects the social situation of gay and lesbian people has been transformed for the better in the last decade. The shabby smear of Section 28 of the Local Government Act (which sought to criminalise the “promotion” of homosexuality) has long gone (even though belatedly and grudgingly), and civil partnerships have arrived, hopefully to stay. But the much-heralded comprehensive revision of the sexual offences laws turned out to be a sad disappointment.

Although the law relating to heterosexuals and homosexuals was equalised in some respects, many of the changes introduced greater restrictions on personal choice than those of us who campaigned for so long for modernisation had asked for. The sexual freedom of teenagers aged under 18 is still severely circumscribed, and the underlying philosophy of this legislation, as of so much contemporary comment, holds that a great deal of sexual activity, even between consenting parties, is antisocial, unhealthy and damaging.

In fact, healthily active sexuality, of whatever persuasion, so long as it is freely consented to, is the most natural of human propensities. But not, it seems, to legislators and social nannies. As the  nineteenth-century bisexual John Addington Symonds wrote, “In what different orbits human souls can move. He talks of sex out of legal codes and blue books. I talk of it from human documents, myself, the people I have known, the adulterers and prostitutes of both sexes I have dealt with over bottles of wine and confidences.”

In the 1960s, issues of free speech were less worrisome than they are today. There was a generally approved move towards liberalisation of the obscenity laws and theatre censorship. There were no vocal fundamentalist religious groups protesting that their feelings had been wounded by expressions of opinion that denied the validity of their beliefs. But now religious extremists – Christian, Muslim and other faiths – assume it is their God-given right to curtail the free speech of others who presume to question their sacred texts.

While I have no personal hostility towards religious believers of any creed, I do find their increasingly strident efforts – sometimes expressed through physical force – to impose their views of life upon the rest of us extremely disturbing, and undemocratic. As the journalist, writer and social commentator Katherine Whitehorn once immortally said, the trouble with so many “born-again” people is that you wish they hadn’t been born the first time.

They certainly pose an increasingly serious threat to our traditional British tolerance. And it is a one-way street so far as they are concerned. While I acknowledge their freedom to criticise gay lifestyles – though not to stir up hatred against gays or other minorities – they will not tolerate the expression of views that they regard as blasphemous.

It is all very well for our shallow-thinking self-appointed royal pundit Prince Charles to proclaim that respect for other people’s sacred beliefs is a civilised virtue. But, unless we are clueless relativists who think that nothing is better or worse than anything else, the nature of those “sacred” beliefs must surely determine whether or not they are worthy of respect. Would HRH approve of suttee (whereby a Hindu woman throws herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) or female circumcision, I wonder?

I could go on and on, but think I have said enough to demonstrate that, like Forster, I am an old-fashioned increasingly disgruntled liberal. I don’t believe my own efforts in the 1960s for homosexual law reform, or in the 1970s and 1980s for civil liberties and free speech, were useless – but I do wish there were stronger signs of a new generation of passionately libertarian campaigners. There is a great need for standard-bearers such as Gay & Lesbian Humanist: long may it flourish in its new medium.

Antony Grey was secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform society in the 1960s, and served on the executive committees of the National Council for Civil Liberties – now Liberty – and of the Defence of Literature & the Arts Society – now Campaign Against Censorship – in the 1970s and 1980s.