Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Politics (Page 32 of 57)

Wrestling with Fighting Talk

30 August 2011 / / 4 Comments

Anti-fascist poster

Anti-fascist poster


My inaugral post on Labour List (cross-posted here) elicited a few responses which highlight some subtlties in the ongoing discussion around the limits of free speech – specifically, the point at which it is appropriate for the state to ban political demonstrations.
First, this from Ben Singleton:

I have no problem at all stopping the EDL marching. Ever heard of Cable Street? This is nothing new. When it comes to fascists the response has to be No Pasaran!
I do however agree that the argument about costs is a bad argument and leads us into dodgy territory. The EDL march should be stopped because they are a bunch of violent racists, not because policing is costly.

While this appears to be quite bolshy and uncompromising, it does draw an interesting distinction – between what it is appropriate for the police to do, and what it is appropriate for other citizens to do.  There is something about the fact that Cable Street was not an act of state censorship, but of citizens standing up to repell the fascists, that makes it feel somehow morally better, and I think this is the reason why it has become part of modern folklore.  However, this is purely an emotional feeling, and its a bad philosphical argument.  If we adopt Robert Peel’s idea that the police are in fact just a particular and peculiar type of citizen, then there seems to be very little distinction between the police stopping a march, and An Angry Mobb doing the same.  The question of “At what point do you step in to stop the march?” still remains, something I’ll return to in a moment.
The mention of Cable Street reminds us of Skokie, Illinois, site of a controversial march by American Nazis in 1977. A correspondent of mine e-mails to say:

[The EDL march] resembles the classic Skokie march in America. The issue there was whether or not the fascist marchers should be allowed to wear the swastika: did this constitute ‘fighting words’, which even the first amendment does not protect?
The politicians opposed to the march aren’t saying that the EDL should be banned, or prevented from meeting; they’re against a manifestation of its members beliefs which could constitute ‘fighting words’. It’s a really interesting area of first amendment law. Fighting words are different from incitement, because they are calculated to inspire a reaction, not an action.

I think this reveals my position in the Labour List article as being quite close to absolutist about Free Speech.  Could such a position work in the real world?  Well, with concepts such as Satyagraha and Christian non-violence (Luke 6:28, for example) in the mix, I do think it is possible to resist the urge to react to ‘fighting words’.
In suggesting this as a way out, there will be those who who accuse me of gross naiveity, but I think that just shows a lack of imagination and political ambition.  It expects very little of human beings.  For example, ‘A Cleo’ says:

Tower Hamlets is a complex and peaceful community with a lot of pride. If it is provoked by a bunch of thugs, it wont take it lying down. How can it?

This implies that the people of Tower Hamlets are no more than circus animals, incapable of not reacting when insulted.  But the easy or obvious response, the one that surrenders to base emotions, is never the only course of action.  Moreover, when a group reacts violently to ‘fighting words’, it always means they lose some of their moral high ground and offer a propaganda victory to the provocateurs.  By contrast, there is nothing more politically powerful than dignified non-violence.
George Orwell said:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist

I don’t think that refusing to react to ‘fighting words’ is the same as pacifism.  There is nothing in what I suggest to say that the EDL (or any other far-right group around now, or in history) should be just left to get on with it.  A counter-demonstration, a physical presence, is essential – it signals to the communities they seek to intimidate that their views are not shared by ordinary people.  And it breaks the ‘epistemic closure‘ suffered by the far-right themselves, offering an alternative viewpoint they cannot turn their eyes from.
Nor is there anything wrong with offering your fists, if and when your community is physically attacked.  But – and it is a big ‘But’ – you only retain the moral high ground and win public opinion if you do this after the other side have taken the step from ‘fighting words’, to actually ‘fighting’!
So what we are left with is a form of Brinkmanship, Chicken, Who Blinks First, Eschaton.  It is tense and it costs money to put the police in between the two sides, and we all wish we didn’t have to bother. But to my mind, it is essential to the political project of repelling the far-right, that they be given precisely the right amount of rope to expose themselves as the thugs they are.  Pre-empting this, however good and just it feels, will only be counter-productive.

The Corrupt Corporate Culture At the Heart of #Hackgate (Part I)

20 July 2011 / / 1 Comment

News International's Rebekah Brooks Under Fire, by ssoosay on Flickr

'News International's Rebekah Brooks Under Fire' by ssoosay on Flickr


There are three recent articles that have stuck with me over the course of this scandal, and they’re all about the wider pheonmenon, the corrupt culture that allows all these power abuses to take place.  At Labour Uncut, Anthony Painter calls News Corporation a ‘monster’:

It is nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch as businessman or as an individual or about his politics. It’s about the over-weaning power of a media empire that seems willing to flex its muscles to infect politics, public discourse, and law enforcement agencies. The point is not to join all the dots painstakingly one by one. It is to say: this media empire is too powerful; it is time to take action.
…
The difference in the case of News International is that having committed wrong, it was then able to use its power to protect itself. It drew critical public institutions into its web of power in the process

Second, Nick Cohen filed a really interesting column last week on the culture of fear.  Few people, says Cohen, are brave enough to be whistleblowers:

I know good journalists at News International, but not one of them challenged a management that was presiding over a criminal conspiracy. If they had spoken plainly, their editors would have fired them and in all likelihood they would never have worked in the media again, because no other manager would want them to do to him what they had done to his predecessors.In their complicity with their superiors, they aped the workers in the City and on Wall Street, who knew that asking awkward questions would ruin their careers.

And finally, the indispensable Jay Rosen delves into the warped corporate culture that prevailed at News Corporation, which allowed hacking to become routine.  He brands News Corp as a company primarily interested in weilding influence, with its newspapers and channels as a lobbying tool for that primary purpose.  The refusal of the journalists at NI papers to acknowledge this is, says Rosen, the big lie that sows the rest of the deceit.
A corrupt culture, a generic malaise (in which the public is also implicated, by the way) is a much more ephemeral target for those of us who are angry at the power abuses that are now being uncovered.  Unfortunately, the slow realisation that our collective psychology has been so abused does not provide the same catharsis of a good political lynching.  So we concentrate on the humbling of bêtes noires like Rebekah Brooks and Ruper Murdoch instead.

Double Standards on Phone Hacking

7 July 2011 / / 7 Comments

A few quick comments on the unfolding phone hacking scandal, and what it says about the double-standards of our society and politics.
First, let us note that the images featured on the front pages of many newspapers yesterday were those of the most iconic cases of recent years. Sarah Payne, hollyandjessica, Millie Dowler, Madeline McCann: the news-stands appeared to be some macabre Abduction Hall of Fame. This is actually a dream come true for rivals of News of the World. It is the invasion of privacy of these families that the rival newspapers are keen to report, because they too know that it is images of these children that sell. And by pasting the famous images onto Page 1, I would say that they too are stepping, once more, into the grief of these families.
Meanwhile, black men and boys (the victims of inner-city stabbings that are far more common than the abduction of white school-girls) don’t seem to be mentioned in the reports. Is this because Glen Mulcaire and his News of the World handlers did not think the stories were sufficiently interesting? Or that today’s politicians and editors judge that an invasion of the privacy of (say) Damilola Taylor’s family would not sufficiently motivate the public, in a way that the Soham murders apparently do? Whichever explanation is closer to the truth, it says something unpleasant about our society and our media. It is ironic that, in expressing outrage at the practices of the tabloids, we fall back on the precisely those assumptions and values that we otherwise claim to despise.
A final note, also related to public opinion. In the chamber of the House of Commons yesterday, the Prime Minister made some throwaway comment about how the phone-hacking scandal was no longer “just about celebrities and politicians”. It is sometimes difficult to remember that both those groups are humans beings too! They deserve precisely the same protection from the law as the families of murdered schoolgirls. The Rule of Law is the Rule of Law. When it is broken, the Prime Minister’s outrage should not be contingent on who the victim is.

Update

They’re discussing similar issues in the USA too.

Update II

Now cross-posted with comments at LiberalConspiracy.org

Corrupt Politicians and the Culture that Enables Them

17 May 2011 / / 11 Comments

Dominique Strauss-Khan

There are two items in the news today that demonstrate the way in which power corrupts.  The first is that of Dominique Strauss-Khan, chair of the IMF, charged with attempting to rape a chamber-maid.  It is one of those stories which, if true, show how those at the zenith of power come to believe that the normal rules of behaviour no longer apply to them.
The other story is of course the emerging scandal of UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne, alleged to have persuaded someone to take his speeding penalty points.  A pathetic affair that, I think, falls into the category of The Cover Up Is Worse Than The Cock-up. A six month driving ban for speeding (not drink-driving or dangerous driving) would not harm a person’s electoral chances in the way that perverting the course of justice surely must.
Both cases are as yet unresolved, but if and when the accusations prove accurate, then the two men must of course shoulder the blame and take their punishment as appropriate.  However, we should also pause to consider how such men are enabled in their corruption by those around them.  In the case of Huhne, it looks like some star-struck aides agreed to go along with something they knew was wrong, in order to curry favour with a politician on the rise.  In the much more serious case of DSK, it appears that the entire French political establishment chose to ignore this man’s appalling behaviour over many years.
This enabling is exactly what Dr Ricardo Blaug has been writing about in a pamphlet How Does Power Corrupt?, published last week by if:book and The Roundhouse Journal.  Discussing elites and the citizens that they rule over, Blaug says:

Elites act with impunity; we work in hierarchic organisations and mostly do what we are told. If leaders are corrupted into tyrants, citizens are corrupted into blind obediance.  It is therefore woth remembering – when we are ‘just doing our job’ or ignoring what elected leaders do in our name – that the most serious wrongs most of us ever commit are seemingly minor ‘crimes of obediance’.  It is in this sense that we are all, and regularly, corrupted by power, either as power-holders or as subordinates, often as both, switch effortlessly between them as we turn from one person to another.

This reminds me of something that Lydia Cacho, the Mexican investigative journalist, said at the PEN Literary Cafe a couple of years ago:

A corrupt political system is only sustained by a corrupt and complicit culture.

Blaug, in his pamplet, discusses the need for citizens who are active in watching their leaders and calling them to account.  “Once you have citizens, you have all you need” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said.  I see NGOs and single-issue pressure groups, such as one one I work for, as fulfilling this role on behalf of citizens.  Its our remit to watch the politicians closely and stir-up a fuss whenever there is any hint that our elites might be straying from societies ideals (although that also leads to arguments over what those ideals actually are, but I think in the UK there is broad consensus, even if we differ in the details).  In this sense we are a sort of professional ‘awkward squad’ that keeps politicians as honest as they can be.  The more usual term for this is ‘civil society’.
However, civil society only flourishes when the citizens have time and money to devote to it.  The same NGOs only survive because of donations from individuals.  This can be sustained in the UK, because we are an affluent society compared to the rest of the world.  We have a cognitive surplus, as Clay Shirky calls it, available to allocate to this civic task.  Corruption is quicker and more egregious in societies with little material wealth, because they cannot finance the civil society institutions required to scrutinise their elites, and ensure that any corruption is caught early and often. Continue reading

Obama at Tucson

13 January 2011 / / 1 Comment

Here’s Obama’s speech at Tucson:

The wild applause of the crowd seems slightly odd at times, though that is the case with a lot of political speeches. A full throated approval in the auditorium sounds tinny and inappropriate. Or perhaps it is the presence of younger people in the audience, more comfortable with vocal expression than with the simple clapping of hands.
But the speech is fantastic – an affirmation of free speech and democracy.

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