Abstract
When I started out in the freedom of expression business in 2008, running Index on Censorship, I had a sneaking fear that it was a little tangential, the preserve of the obsessive. It didn't take long to disabuse me. From Russell Brand to Julian Assange, from tweets about Robin Hood Airport to Kate Middleton's boobs, from Mohammed videos to Pussy Riot, the issue now finds itself in the mainstream of politics, culture and diplomacy.
What it often lacks, however, is perspective. Brian Winston's A Right To Offend provides two important contributions to this fraught and often under-researched debate. He brings a welcome international scope of his inquiry, guiding the reader through the differing legal systems of, say, France and the U.S. But it is his frequent recourse to history that is most instructive.
The technologies may change, the social mores vary from generation to generation, but the instinct of the powerful to prevent publication is as embedded now as it has ever been. Indeed one could argue – the author does, as do I – that our present times are among the most censorious.
In modern Britain, theatres are prevented from putting on plays for fear of alienating minorities and stoking possible violence. Television documentaries are taken off air for the same toxic combination of reasons. So it was of old: under the Tudors, plays could only be publically performed “with the allowance of the Master of the Revells”.
As for the cinema, the author notes: “Wherever there were screens, there were censors.” The Cinematographic Act of 1909 empowered Watch Committees to license premises for the screening of films. The same applied in France, where all films required a visa. Yet the motivation was somewhat different: “Banning here was less driven by the sexual fixations of censors – that was an Anglophone activity – than by political sensitivity.”
Winston has certainly done his research. My favourite anecdote down the censor's memory lane is a guidance note from the BBC's thought police in 1949. This prohibited, inter alia, “jokes about – lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive references to honeymoon couples and chambermaids, prostitution and ladies’ underwear”.
It tends to be forgotten that blasphemy was removed from the English common law, staggeringly, only in 2008. Conversely, in the far more God-fearing U.S., First Amendment principles have always taken precedence. The author cites a number of legal judgments over the eras that have taken their cue from Jeffersonian liberalism. For example, this one, from 1952, is refreshingly clear: “It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches or motion pictures.”
In Britain, however, where Christianity was held to be, in the words of the Lord Chief Justice, “parcel of the laws”, the law has rarely been as indulgent of free speech. The author runs through a series of cases such as that of John Gott, an atheist provocateur, who in 1921 published a pamphlet in which Christ was characterised as a circus clown because he rode into Jerusalem on two donkeys at the same time. He was sentenced to nine months of hard labour. Winston's tour of British sensibility takes in Mary Whitehouse versus Gay News and the banning of Monty Python's Life of Brian.
I am less convinced by the contemporary analysis. The author ticks the various policy boxes, taking in the threat to copyright posed by search engines such as Google, to the perpetuity of data storage. Yet, in my view, he underplays the massive change that the internet has brought.
He is possibly right to come down on the side of writers such as Evgeny Morozov and Rebecca MacKinnon who, in their different ways, have warned against cyber utopianism. Platforms are just platforms. They influence behaviour, but they do not, on their own, change societies. Self evidently, revolutions and social movements took place before Facebook and Twitter.
There is much more to be said about the positive and negative effect of reductive and immediate channels of communication, such as the 140-character Twitter, not just on social interaction but on the provision of information. One of the greatest present threats to free societies (and free expression, one of their components) comes from the decline in investment in journalism. We can comment as much as we like, but if we fail to eke out information, then power structures will enjoy ever-greater impunity. That is what the Leveson Inquiry, important though it is, consistently has failed to understand.
Still, this is a highly readable and informative compendium on freedom of expression. It ends, in keeping with its narrative, with the following warning: “The right to speak is more fragile than is usually supposed and the law, which is its best guarantor, is ailing and unequal to the task of defence.”