Mrs Grundy rides again

According to today's Guardian, the Government is exploring the possibility of criminalising payment for sex, and a minister is to visit Sweden to examine how the system works there. It is thought that such a law would help to crack down on sex slavery and forced prostitution, but sex workers' spokespersons maintain that it would lead to increased violence and extortion, and that the proper way to proceed is to legalise and license brothels instead of driving prostitution still further underground and making prostitutes even more vulnerable then they now are.

Memories are very short, and the dire social consequences of Prohibition in the USA during the 1920s seem to have slipped from most people's minds. One salutary bi-product of outlawing payment for sex, though, might be to make London a less attractive venue for unsavoury visitors such as Saudi princes - though they would doubtless claim diplomatic immunity if caught in the act.

The Oxford debate

There is an excellent eyewitness account of Monday's events at the Oxford Union here. Also some very interesting comments/discussion.

From the point of view of a defender of free speech, I find it dismaying that so many commentators apparently cannot distinguish between free speech as an inviolable principle, and the merits of the issues being discussed. Surely, whether or not a view is mistaken, obnoxious, or downright wicked is irrelevant so long as it is not advocating coercive violence against others.

In my view, those who maintain that free speech should be limited to the expressions of opinions they agree with, or do not consider harmful, are clueless as to its actual nature. It is always the 'hard cases' - the racists, the Holocaust deniers, even the defenders of paedophilia - who put the free speech principle to the test. Those who would ban or prevent the peaceful expression of such mistaken views because they believe they will do harm by seducing the unsophisticated are themselves the enemies of free speech, democracy, and an open society, as was quite clear at Oxford on Monday night.

Mob rule trumps free speech

The disgraceful scenes at the Oxford Union last night are a salutary reminder of the decay of free speech in this country. Not only the illiberal ‘hard Left’ [what a misnomer!], Islamist and Zionist protesters – a curious coalition – and their rowdy hangers-on, but the mainstream political parties and the various semi-official organs of Political Correctness such as the ludicrously titled ‘Equality and Human Rights Commission’, pay lip-service to freedom of speech as in duty bound; but in practice they attack and undermine it wherever it clashes with their own opinions and prejudices.

If we are to continue to be in any sense an open democracy and a pluralistic society, free speech should be sacrosanct and indivisible. But it is far from being so in the mealy-mouthed Britain of today, where unpopular and obnoxious opinions are not merely frowned upon and derailed from public expression – increasingly and ominously by scenes such as last night’s gratuitous violence at Oxford – but are curbed by an ever growing array of new laws against ‘hate speech’ deemed offensive to those criticised.

This attempt to shelter the allegedly ‘vulnerable’ from honest criticism as well as from poisonous prejudice strikes me as totally undemocratic and wrong.

The traditional principles of free speech are crystal-clear. If it has any plausible meaning, it involves the right to say publicly whatever one wishes to so long as you do not directly incite violence and breaches of the peace, or libellously defame another’s character. As Voltaire is alleged to have said, “I detest what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it”.

Saying it lawfully, of course, does not extend to group demonstrations intended to provoke violence and counter-violence, such as the fracas at the Oxford Union last night. Like Evan Harris MP, I am astounded that the police allowed demonstrators to scale the walls and gain uninvited entry to the Union’s private premises, and even more astonished that the police then washed their hands of their duty to remove the intruders on the pretext that it had become a ‘civil’ and not a ‘criminal’ matter. Something distinctly fishy there, which calls for a public enquiry.

Having spent most of my life actively campaigning for gay rights, often against viciously hate-filled opponents, I am the last person to wish for sexual minorities – or any other minority – to be abused, mistreated and discriminated against. But I am far from convinced that criminalising the verbal expression of ignorant prejudice and even hatred is the wisest way of dealing with bigotry. What counts is the battle of public opinion – the candid convincing of hearts and minds – and this is never won by curbing freedom of speech. On the contrary, it is only by exercising the fullest freedom of speech without fear of legal restraint or physical violence that honest, sincere, open-minded people will reach sensible conclusions based on factual evidence rather than on lies, prejudice and fiction.

Unfortunately, so many of today’s political and social arguments are less and less reality-based. In the scary atmosphere created by the government’s over-hype of the terrorist threat, the distinction between fact and fiction is increasingly blurred until it no longer seems to exist for many people, even including front bench spokespersons.

If the charge against David Irving is that he denies facts for which there is copious and convincing evidence, the proper way to demonstrate this is by demolishing his arguments – as was conclusively done in his unsuccessful libel action against Deborah Lipstadt – not by rioting against his freedom to speak. If the British National Party’s views are wrong-headed, obnoxious, and fuelled by hate, the proper way to combat them is not by denying them platforms and rioting which lets them pose - with a smidgeon of justification – as aggrieved martyrs; it is to out-debate them.

But if the self-styled anti-fascists – who all too often act out a passable imitation of fascist street thugs – prefer the sort of behaviour they perpetrated last night, it is they, and not their enemies, who are among the worst betrayers of our hard-won democratic freedoms. Whether knowingly or not, these misguided people are contributing to the destruction of our increasingly fragile open society.

Blessings of religion

Another example of religious idiocy here.

Nutty, and flaky at the edges

Tony Blair complains that as prime minister he didn't feel able to talk openly about his religious beliefs, in case people thought he was a nutter. What escapes him is that millions of us think he is a nutter regardless of his religious beliefs.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury moans [to a Muslim magazine!] that Americans are deluded by their “chosen national myth...that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity”, and doesn't draw the obvious conclusion. But then he wouldn't, would he?

From the Fox's mouth

Rupert Murdoch says he controls the political line of the Sun and News of the World, but not those of The Times and Sunday Times. [Although he often asks their editors what they are doing, and it would be very surprising if he didn't bend their ears if not their policies.]

The Australian-born US citizen media tycoon also believes that if Sky News acted more like his US Fox News it could become "a proper alternative to the BBC"! This throws a fascinating insight upon the Dirty Digger's conception of fair and balanced reporting. Not that the BBC is perfect in this respect, but it's streets ahead of Fox.

A shocking business

In today’s Independent, Joan Bakewell inveighs against the reluctance of feminists to protest against a horrific sentence recently meted out in Saudi Arabia upon a nineteen-year old woman who was ordered to receive two hundred lashes and be imprisoned for six months. Why? Because she had been the victim of a gang rape!

Shurely shome mistake? you ask. Not at all. Because, you see, this saucy lass had broken Saudi law by brazenly travelling in the same car with her boyfriend. They had the misfortune to be waylaid by a gang of seven men who proceeded to rape them both. And for their unIslamic immodesty they, as well as their attackers, are both being punished.

As Joan Bakewell says, “this is so totally at odds with the way we think and behave towards women that it’s hard to know how to get any purchase on the mind-set behind it”. But do we really need to? Must we be forever empathising with and seeking cultural excuses for barbaric brutality? This is sheer multicultural idiocy. Does it really matter whether Muslim susceptibilities are offended if we dare to say that such laws and such behaviour are primitive, disgusting, and utterly unacceptable to any 21^st century person who considers themselves civilised?

It does, of course. Coincidentally with this verdict, HM the Queen was welcoming King Abdullah, the absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, to a state banquet at Buckingham Palace, and there was much governmental prattle about the “shared values” of our two countries. It would be interesting to know precisely what these “shared values” are thought to consist of. Obviously there is a common interest in oil, petrodollars, and lucrative armament contracts lubricated by slush funds. But the common cultural, religious, and social shared values entirely escape me.

Predictably, the Bush Administration has refused to condemn this wicked sentence because it is “an internal Saudi decision” and the USA, as we all know, NEVER interferes in the internal affairs of other sovereign states. But one might have hoped for better from the British government. No doubt there is official reluctance to criticise the Saudis over anything whatsoever in case they cut off the oil, or maybe even our heads. The one thing they are unlikely to cut off is the flow of Wahhabist preachers – funded, needless to say, by the petrodollars we pay for Saudi oil – who infest British mosques preaching hatred of Western values, ‘infidels’, and fomenting violent jihad.

It really is time that this mealymouthedness ceased, and that our elected rulers spoke out for decent human values. As Frank Furedi observes in his new book, Invitation to Terror, Western effectiveness in combatting our shadowy and imprecisely defined enemies is currently paralysed by a fear-induced unwillingness to speak obvious truths, and to call a spade a spade. For my part, enough is enough and until official British voices muster sufficient self-respect to speak out loudly and clearly against this atrocity I hang my head in shame for my country.