A Day to discuss our freedom, privacy and rights - Saturday, 23 January 2010
Chaired by Kate Adie, broadcaster and author
Speakers include:
Henry Porter - journalist, campaigner, novelist
Frederick Taylor - historian and writer of WW2
Katharine Whitehorn - columnist and broadcaster
Oliver Baines - environmental campaigner
Stephen Otter - Chief Constable for Devon and Cornwall
Ursula Owen - campaigner for free speech
Inspired by their visit to The London Convention on Modern Liberty, Jane Turnbull (Literary agent for former publisher) and Jessica Mann (novelist and journalist) decided to hold a conference on the freedom and rights of the British citizen in Cornwall. Concerned by the erosion of Britain’s long tradition of liberty, in response to perceived threats of terrorism, Turnbull and Mann gathered together a panel of writers and thinkers, attracted a huge audience, and enabled a debate to take place.
What a great opportunity to hear a range of opinion, and what a fascinating debate it proved to be. As Chair, the always impressive Kate Adie, warned about complacency, as did Henry Porter who reminded us of the story about the frog: drop it into boiling water and it will jump out; put it into cold water and slowly raise the heat and it won’t notice until maybe too late.
Ursula Owen, co-founder of Virago, and an advocate of free expression asks ‘should we be protected from offence and insult?’ in her talk, the subject being ‘Is offence the new censorship?’ and it’s interesting to look back at some of the colourful insults from Jacobean times where insult slinging was something of a sport, frequent in Shakespeare, and parodied by Monty Python – ‘I squeeze my spots at you’ in the 1970s. Verbal abuse is allowed by ‘characters’ in fiction, on stage and in film, but deemed an offence elsewhere so, for example, where someone may have been described as ‘fat’ prior to the nineteen-eighties, he/she would next be described as ‘clinically obese’ and now perhaps we may have to be simply factual, ie X appears to weigh over twenty stone which, although correct, lacks – to a writer – the satisfying sound and feel of the word ‘fat’ which lands on the page or leaves the lips with a smack. But should any one take offence at a fact? You are fat, you are thin, you are black, you are white, you are mixed race, you smell bad, your ideology sucks. She tells us the lawyer and legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who is passionate about free expression, says it ‘makes us human,’ and he has some agreement with the idea of censorship, but to be human is to be flawed. We will make mistakes, we will hurt other people, and we must rely on rational law to identify what is seriously an ‘offence’ and what is merely offensive.
Stephen Otter, present in his uniform of Chief Constable of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary stands before us, open and reasonable, referring to his appearance as that most likely to offer a threat to the audience of some censorship and restriction of our liberties, defusing any suspicion of his presence and motives in his first sentence. Adroit, he points out that our favourite demand of the Police is to make drivers slow down in villages and towns and our most bitter grip against the Police is that motorists are persecuted for driving too fast through villages and towns. There’s the rub. He says ‘we want security and liberty in equal measure,’ and indeed we do. There are two sides to every point debated today.
Everything in life must always be balanced, hence the scales of law. If citizens fail to take responsibility for their own actions and the actions of others, we cannot, like infants, wail until someone else sorts it out: in doing that we relinquish autonomy and hand it, on a plate, to the state. Personal responsibility must sit equally alongside knowing our ‘rights.’ ‘There’s an absence of effective social control,’ says Otter and, it is lamentable that minor authority figures from my childhood and adolescence have now disappeared from our communities, (park wardens, bus conductors, railway station platform attendants, milkmen and newspaper delivery vans, all those working unsocial hours who spotted the unusual and to whom you could turn if there was a problem). In their absence, people need to look out for themselves and, if this makes you want to become a vigilante or get yourself a gun and protect your home from intruders, hold back, you can take these ideas too far in your paranoia. The eyes and ears of the community are now electronic, technology having replaced the human element and, with that, some discernment. A clip round the ear from a park warden would today be seen as assault and it is now impossible to return to the immediacy and simplicity of being shamed by adult disapproval. I got thrown off a bus once, when I was thirteen, with my two friends – our behaviour was very loud and annoying – and we were dumped, very shame-faced, on the roadside between two towns. The double-decker drove off in a cloud of triumphant diesel smoke and we had a long walk home with plenty of time to Think Very Hard About What We Had Done. We didn’t do it again.
Otter’s message is that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, rural communities used to look after themselves – they were also poor, hungry, and had the common lands enclosed and taken away from them, forcing them into the towns but that’s another story. What changed, he says, was that people began to feel that it was someone else’s responsibility to protect them: I would have to think more deeply on this point because it’s hard to say which came first; laws which persecuted the starving for stealing an apple or the perception that the law did, in fact, protect the citizen.
Otter believes that ‘technology has gone too far’ and it’s interesting to think that, because of relatively modern inventions such as television, the car (drinking and driving) and the internet, people stay at home and ‘go less abroad’ than pre-1950 when there were weekly dances, pubs were full and people played cards and made music together, got into brawls and had to get themselves home without public transport of any kind. When they were courting, my father used to walk my mother home from a dance, then walk himself back again, or on another night go on foot and ferry to St Mawes for a dance, possibly fall in the water on the rush to jump back on the boat at the end of the night, but generally take responsibility for himself and the safety of his sweetheart. Today’s knife carrying young men have returned to a form of carrying swords to defend themselves and their beloved’s honour because fist-fights cannot be guaranteed to be one-to-one.
Otter says that ‘people need to feel more confident about helping each other’ and here, I wholeheartedly agree. When I worked in the local NHS hospital I knew of several nurses who would not stop and attend a road traffic accident because of fears of litigation over any first aid mistakes, and this advice is always given in First Aid classes. We are taught how to help and then advised to do nothing until the paramedics arrive so are confused by the contradiction. My personal view is to take the risk and, at the very least, make the area safe, ie stop the traffic and ‘phone for help - but for a medically trained person to drive past without stopping seems to indicate they have surrendered any notion of responsibility in a paralysis of paranoia.
However, taking responsibility for our own security is common sense. Get yourself home safely or, if you can’t, stay overnight where you are and make sure you lock up your house. Otter closes by saying that it is important to ‘keep the spirit of debate open and honest as we are doing today.’ I am reminded that it possible to have laws repealed, that nothing is absolute unless we accept it is so, and that we have minds and voices so that we can use them to attempt to change those things with which we fundamentally disagree, and to come to the aid of others.
There is, however, a very disturbing increase in the officiousness of individuals, highlighted to me when I worked in a large regional theatre. A number of the voluntary stewards took great relish in admonishing and reporting ‘offenders’ for such minor offences as putting their feet on the seats, smoking in the external (semi-open) lobby, taking drinks outside in the street. Eyes glittering, and pulses racing, these semi-elderly women raced up the stairs in the auditorium to catch red-handed anyone taking a photograph of a performer - be very afraid of giving small people power. Kate Adie warns against a mistrust of each other and reminds us that Communist control works by ‘breaking trust within families and communities’ with peer reporting still practised in China. Control is a very psychological sensation, more than it is state directed. There is self-control, family expectation, and community standards which all come before the law and state intervention. In the UK, the loss of that powerful moderator, shame, has led to excesses of behaviour which would not have been so visible only ten years ago.
Yes, I got drunk and threw up in the street before I was twenty, who didn’t?, but the shameful part of that, the loss of self-control that is the leglessness and vomiting was neither routine nor public. That is to say I hoped no-one saw me, hoped anyone who did see wouldn’t remember (or tell my mum whose shame of me would have been deeper than my own), and always wished I hadn’t gone so far – even though I was always fully clothed, and generally jacketed and booted. Today, the fetishistic fleshy exposure of the female body, even in coldest winter, combined with either raucous yelling or it’s opposite, semi-consciousness, possibly preceded by vomiting and possibly followed by a good shag with someone forgettable and possibly Chlamydic, has become a regular Saturday night sight in most towns. The self-policing that is aspiration may be an alternative or would a night in the cells provoke the shame that is absent?
From the floor comes the question: Aren’t we responsible for keeping our own data safe? This has to be a no, because we cannot buy many things using cash therefore our credit card details, name address etc are stored every time we purchase anything online, ie airline tickets, clothes, books, subscriptions, any time we use a credit or debit card for cinema or theatre tickets, or when out shopping – almost everywhere. There are now moves to prevent the use of cheques within five years, making all transactions electronic, recordable and traceable. I recently tried to use cash to pay off my credit card, in my own bank, and was told this is no longer legal – the cash had to be paid into my current bank account and be transferred out to my credit card account (same bank). There is no other purpose to this other than to record customer transactions, perhaps for tax purposes – but the reason given is to prevent terrorism. I can absolutely understand the need to clarify that new bank accounts are opened to bona fide customers and not created for money laundering but, when a customer has had an account with the same bank for over ten years and chooses to make a cash transaction, where’s the terrorism threat?
Henry Porter agrees with Otter that ‘there is a fundamental need to control technology’ but I would argue that there is a deeper need to control the legislators. I grew up through the 1960s and 1970s with the daily, and very real, terror of the IRA atrocities – not only car bombs, hotel bombs but the more personal tarring and feathering, and kneecapping – punishments meted out on a too frequent basis, a terror with me for most of the twenty years it went on. Now, the terrorist threat is less real, more abstract and more random. Because attacks are carried out by single suicide bombers we can only be afraid of a belief system, and of the brainwashing that creates it, the very opposite of the reasons that we are here today – to talk frankly and openly, to debate, to disagree if we choose, to express our own beliefs and accept those of others with what tolerance we can – but not to attack those whose beliefs oppose our own. We cannot legislate against the ephemeral but we can educate, communicate, and lead by example. Children brought up to discuss, question, and challenge ideas will develop confidence in their own powers of reason.
A question from the floor: Apparently, the US teaches Civics and Democracy so why not in the UK? This teaching doesn’t make all Americans open minded and worldly but it may help them understand how their own system works. In the UK we would benefit from debating societies (which many apathetic students will avoid so perhaps formalise to one a term) and less curriculum interference. Teachers don’t have the freedom to let a topic go where it will in a classroom, because of time and curriculum restraints, so perhaps they should be the first to rebel and allow the students to pick up a subject that really interest them and run with it for a while? It’s great learning not tick-box learning.
One participant mentions the phenomenon of the web and mobile ‘phones giving us a perception of being in constant contact with each other. It’s a myth. Although there is now ‘no concept of solitude’ (Henry Porter I think) there is also an enormous sense of social isolation. You could sit alone at home, cruising the web, maybe sending messages but face it – you’re sitting at home alone. Likewise mobile ‘phones – you can send as many messages as you like, you may not get many. The ‘phone acts as a personal EPIRB, a position finding device so you can feel secure (or threatened) that your whereabouts are known as long as you have that ‘phone on you. It is also a prop which prevents the anxiety of abandonment so, the moment a sense of aloneness creeps in, send a text or phone a friend. We are tribal people and a sense of belonging and connectedness is essential to our mental well-being but we need to take care that the use of social networks are for our own amusement and not covert surveillance. There is no need to retain electronic data for years, even when deleted by the users, and the Data Protection Act clearly states that personal data should only be used and kept for the purposes for which it was set up - and destroyed when it is no longer needed. Logically then, once you’ve bought that theatre ticket or the new clothes, and enjoyed the show in your new threads, the electronic transaction and all records relating to you, name and phone number etc, should be destroyed.
Going back to the notion of shame, or embarrassment, Katharine Whitehorn raises her conviction that ‘there are certain things that you don’t do and certain things that you do do.’ This reminds me of the old concept of duty when you followed this notion because of a sense of duty, to husband, to children, to wider family, to society. Duty and allegiance call for some sacrifice as well as providing a notion of pride and belonging. There are codes of honour that have become ritualised in institutions with negative connotations such as the Mafia or the Triads so perhaps an ideal code of honour is self-negotiated and, if you are asked or expected to do something immoral, you find the strength not to do it, even if it makes you a martyr and you get whacked.
A strong warning against complacency comes from historian Frederick Taylor, reminding us of Germany’s decline, using the law, into civic control, and environmental campaigner Oliver Baines advocates we ‘be careful [that] in asserting our freedoms we must safeguard the freedom of others.’ If I am free to drive too fast through villages then you are not free to walk safely along the street. I really must stop doing that.
We know about rendition, we know that the UK has been complicit in the torture of suspected offenders, and we know that anti-protest laws have curtailed our civil liberties, so what do we do to reverse this stealthy State control?
We can write to our Members of Parliament and ask them for some responses:
What is your attitude to the repeal of the Anti-Terror laws?
What is your attitude to ID cards?
How do you feel about trials without jury?
We can also encourage debating societies in schools (and, importantly, at home over the dinner table).
The rights of British people have developed organically over centuries. This needs explanation and understanding. How did we get here? Some of the answers will be painful, including the massacre of protesters and the deportation of thousands. Some of the answers will be inspiring but we learn from our mistakes as well as our successes. The Anti-Terror laws are a mistake, an infringement on the liberties of innocent civilians, and it is time to raise awareness of the erosion of those liberties and take responsibility for our personal behaviour.
It is perhaps now the time to publicly discuss whether we need to enshrine those accumulated rights, and to protect those rights for the benefit of future generations who do not yet know what has been lost.
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