The Three Dimensions of Freedom

by Billy Bragg

  Safe spaces are deemed necessary because students are aware that certain social structures may serve to disadvantage particular groups. In seeking to address this problem, safe-space policy often calls for zero tolerance of harassment, abuse, discrimination and violence on campus. In this sense, it is similar in scope to the legislation that governs behaviour in the workplace.

  The aim of these guidelines is to establish mutual consent among speakers about the tone of any given debate. Rather than seeking to control what can and cannot be discussed, safe-space policy sets out to moderate the ambience of the debate, to ensure that all opinions are considered in an atmosphere of inclusivity. It is designed to bring the dimensions of equality and accountability into harmony with the liberty afforded by free speech.

  The need for safe spaces has arisen because, historically, the far right has often used provocation as a tactic against those it seeks to marginalise. Think of Oswald Mosley trying to march his British Union of Fascists through the Jewish neighbourhoods of London’s East End in the 1930s, or the neo-Nazi National Front holding their meetings in Southall, the centre of London’s Asian community, during the late 1970s.

  The desocialising nature of online discourse has allowed a new generation of would-be demagogues to find a following through social media. Under the guise of free speech campaigns, they have taken their angry rhetoric onto the streets, seeking to provoke confrontation.

  Portland, Oregon has recently become a magnet for far-right provocateurs in the US. A city known for its progressive culture, Portland has become a target for demonstrations by a group called Patriot Prayer, who claim to be defending the right to free speech. Despite their name, they appear to have no religious overtones nor any specific ideology. Their leader, Joey Gibson, has admitted that the idea that brings them together is nothing more than ‘hatred of the Left’. As such, they represent an angry online forum made flesh, driven by little more than an urge to offend.

  In June 2018, truthout.org, an independent non-profit news organisation covering social justice issues, carried a report of a Patriot Prayer demonstration in Portland. ‘Without a statement of purpose or any planned speeches, Gibson’s supporters … showed up ready to fight from the moment they entered the park. Their anger was pointed directly at the several hundred anti-fascist protesters quartered across the street at another length of the park … No politics were on the agenda that day, no talk of the issues Gibson had set his “campaign” on, nor what he insisted Patriot Prayer stood for. Instead, the event was centered entirely on a street brawl with the “left”.’

  This is the politics of presence: if your goal is nothing more than the domination of the public square, then violent disruption is as good a weapon as argument; better, perhaps, for it dispenses with the need for civility. Anyone who is familiar with the way anger can quickly boil over into abuse during an online debate will recognise this tactic. It presents a genuine challenge to those who believe in freedom of speech.

  How best to deal with the belligerent speaker who demands impunity for their views and a space in which to voice them? Freedom of speech does not guarantee you a platform from which to air your opinions. You may hold trenchant views on a number of subjects but the fact that The Times won’t print your ruminations doesn’t mean you are being oppressed.

  The tactic of no-platforming favoured by some social justice activists can be counterproductive, giving a provocative speaker the opportunity to portray themselves as a martyr to their followers. The task of revealing the true intent of those who mask their prejudices in rhetoric and performance requires that we give them space to air their offensive views.

  However, white, middle-aged men and women in the privileged position of not being the target of daily discrimination and abuse should not presume to tell the victims of such treatment that they must subject themselves to being lectured by their tormentors. There are situations where it is necessary to ask whether providing a platform may only serve to empower the forces of prejudice.

  If only for the fact that so much great culture has been made by those willing to break taboos, freedom of expression must uphold the right to offend, shock or disturb. However, it is a liberty that should be exercised with care: when vindictive, offence can easily mutate into abuse. Where that point occurs is a matter for debate. Because offence is subjective, each of us has our own sense of its limits, although the argument that offence ends and abuse begins where things get personal would appear to have broad support on social media.

  ‘If liberty means anything at all,’ wrote George Orwell in an essay intended as the preface to Animal Farm, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Penned in 1943, the essay offers a good definition of the freedom to dissent that is the fundamental principle of free speech. The patron saint of the dissenting tradition, Orwell’s defence of liberty was not, however, intended at some time in the future to provide justification to an angry mob of keyboard warriors determined to tell a woman that she deserved to be raped and killed because she spoke in defence of inclusivity in video games.

  ‘If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all,’ he wrote in the same essay, ‘it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.’

  When Orwell uses the word ‘provided’ in that sentence, he’s articulating the dividing line between dissent and abuse. While freedom of speech gives you the right to dissent and, yes, to offend, it does not give you the right to abuse. You may be very concerned about gender issues within video games, but if you’re unable to articulate those concerns without being abusive, then you must expect to be held to account for your behaviour.

  Orwell’s ‘provided’ also illuminates the crucial difference between the manner in which the Intellectual Dark Web and the safe-space movement approach the issue of freedom of speech. Eric Weinstein makes clear in his comments to Rebel Wisdom that dissent is not to be tolerated at the high table that he and his colleagues have created. By contrast, the rules of the safe-space movement accommodate dissent, but are designed to ensure that there is no tolerance for abusive speech or behaviour.

  In his refusal to recognise the reciprocal nature of freedom – that you must respect in others the rights that you claim for yourself – Weinstein reveals the Intellectual Dark Web to be party to the strain of irate exceptionalism that runs through the new generation of free speech warriors.

  Obsessed with hierarchy and their position in it, they will brook no questioning of their privilege and prejudices. For them, freedom is a one-dimensional construct that stands or falls on their right to express an opinion. Demanding to be heard, yet refusing to listen, it’s not free speech that they want, it’s free rein – to say whatever they wish without challenge or consequence.

  To counter the pernicious idea that freedom means being free from restraint requires that we confer on equality and accountability the same high regard we currently give to free speech. In this manner, we can maintain the balance necessary for all voices to be heard and respected, and thus restore the inclusivity that true freedom demands.

  3. ACCOUNTABILITY

  What’s happened to that twat David Cameron who called it on? How comes he can scuttle off? … Where is the geezer? I think he should be held to account for it.

  —Danny Dyer

  When he quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’, Ronald Reagan was endorsing Friedrich Hayek’s one-dimensional notion of liberty as freedom from restraint. While it is true that the rules and regulations that governments introduce do create more bureaucracy, their aim is to ensure that business is conducted in an environment that is both safe for employees and customers and transparent in its practices.

  In the unequal struggle between the r
ights of the citizen and those of corporations, the paperwork follows the power. Red tape is agency made flesh, which is why it is so often the target of neoliberal ire. From Reagan onwards, successive American presidents have dismantled legislation enacted by Franklin Roosevelt that aimed to bring greater transparency to the financial sector following the Wall Street Crash.

  Roosevelt’s tight fiscal policies created the stability that led to post-war prosperity, yet by the 1990s, corporate capture of the democratic process had seen them steadily watered down. Financial transactions became opaque just as trading moved online, making it even more difficult for anyone – regulators, bankers or investors – to know what was really going on beneath the surface. As a result of deregulation, banks took on greater risks until, in 2008, the neoliberal reliance on cheap credit rather than higher wages to stimulate growth came home to roost.

  The realisation that many low-income homeowners in the US were never going to repay their mortgages created a crisis in the global banking system. The ensuing chaos was so great that the Queen was moved to ask a gathering of academics at the London School of Economics why none of them had seen the crash coming. They shrugged and told her that, at every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing. Or, to put it another way: ‘I’m from the free market and I’m not here to help.’

  The 2008 crash was a crisis of accountability, not capitalism. The problems caused by the free market are systemic in nature, the result of choices that have been made. Given the right tools, we can work together to make better choices, ones that benefit the whole of society and not just those whose lofty position in the power structure is based on their immense wealth. In terms of its relationship to human agency, capitalism is like fire: keep it under control and it will give you heat and light; leave it untended and it will consume everything in its path.

  Throughout history, crises of accountability have been the catalysts for advances in individual agency. The Magna Carta, drawn up in thirteenth-century England as a counter to the absolute power of the monarchy, evolved over several decades into a bill of rights that went on to shape law on both sides of the Atlantic. The decision of Henry VIII to break with Rome in the 1530s was a response to the unaccountable power of the papacy, and it led to a flowering of religious dissent in England.

  In the seventeenth century, the insistence of Charles I on the Divine Right of Kings to rule without consulting parliament led to civil war. The conflict raged across England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, only ending with an act of accountability in extremis: the beheading of a king. While it was not uncommon for monarchs to be killed in combat, murdered in secret or dispatched by summary execution, in 1649, for the first time in English history, a monarch was put to death in accordance with the law.

  In their determination to hold Charles to account – and to be accountable themselves – parliament put the king on trial for treason. This was an unprecedented step. Previously, treason had been defined as an act against the crown. In a direct challenge to the absolute power of the executive, parliament redefined treason as an act against the state.

  The execution of Charles I had been forced upon the parliamentarians. They had not taken up arms against the king to depose him but rather to assert their right to rule by consent. His intransigence, even in captivity, was the reason for his trial and execution, and the result was a de facto republic that no one had planned for. From the start there were problems, not least because the republic was embodied in the power of one man, Oliver Cromwell, whose abuse of parliament was almost as bad as that of Charles before him.

  Yet the lack of a republican tradition in England was also a factor. A century and a half would pass before Thomas Paine published The Rights of Man. Had Cromwell’s New Model Army been carrying that incendiary pamphlet in their knapsacks at Naseby, the English republic may well have flourished.

  Instead, it barely outlived Cromwell. The monarchy was restored in 1660, but the idea that had inspired the Roundheads to take up arms was not forgotten. When they later raised toasts to what they called the ‘Good Old Cause’, it was the struggle to hold absolute power to account that they were keeping faith with, not republicanism. That faith was called into action again in 1688, when the behaviour of another English king led once again to a crisis of accountability.

  Like his father, James II wanted to be an absolute monarch. Modelling his reign on that of his contemporary, Louis XIV of France, the all-powerful ‘Sun King’, he sought to rule by decree. James’s absolutism and his promotion of the Catholic nobility led to his downfall in 1688, when parliament invited William of Orange, a Dutch Protestant who was married to James’s daughter Mary, to invade England and depose the king.

  After a few skirmishes, James fled. Many members of parliament had been young men during the civil war and had witnessed that time of chaos and carnage at first hand. By contrast, the bloodshed that accompanied the parliamentary coup d’état of 1688 was minor, leading contemporary historians to christen it the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

  Before William and Mary took the throne, they were required to sign a bill of rights protecting parliament from absolutism. This guaranteed regular parliaments, free and fair elections and freedom of speech in parliament. The 1689 Bill of Rights was the first document of its kind to be ratified by a monarch, creating a framework of accountability around the use of executive power. It influenced the US Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

  However, unlike those later documents guaranteeing the liberties of citizens, the English Bill of Rights was an agreement between the crown and parliament. Some rights were granted to all Englishmen, but most of the provisions applied only to members of parliament. Despite its limitations, the Bill of Rights was the realisation of the ‘Good Old Cause’, providing the basis for rule by consent.

  While the constitutional monarchy created by the settlement of 1689 laid the foundations of the modern British state, it was the last time that parliament sought to codify the relationship between the rulers and the ruled.

  The British constitution is said to be ‘unwritten’, in the sense that the fundamental rights of the individual are not gathered together in a single charter to which all citizens can refer. There is no document that begins ‘We, the People …’ Instead, individual rights are contained in laws, practices and legal conventions, some of which date back to the Magna Carta.

  The strength of this uncodified arrangement is that the constitution can easily be updated if circumstances necessitate it. Unfortunately, that is also its weakness. A constitution is a set of rules by which citizens consent to be governed. If those rules can be changed by a simple majority vote in parliament, then the immutable nature of individual rights is compromised.

  In 1950, the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental organisation founded to uphold human rights, the rule of law and democracy in the wake of World War II, produced the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which was ratified by all of the member states, including the UK.

  Following a 1966 act of parliament with which the UK government granted them the ability to take court cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, British citizens were able to access the rights enshrined in the ECHR. However, rights are meaningless if you cannot enforce them, and the expense of taking a case all the way to the European Court was prohibitive.

  In 1998, the ECHR was incorporated into UK law by the Labour government of Tony Blair, making a remedy for breach of the convention available in British courts. While believing that they should be inalienable and available to all citizens, Blair viewed the granting of rights as a transactional exchange. Where Thatcher had declared that there was no such thing as society and post-war Labour had provided welfare for all, he sought a third way.

  Writing in the Guardian in 2002, the then prime minister explained his thinking: ‘As the 1980s had progressed I sensed increasingly that the task for the centre-Left was not to replace cr
ude individualism with an overbearing paternalistic state. It was to rebuild a strong civic society where rights and duties go hand in hand.’

  Blair understood that rights grant the power of accountability to the individual. In return for that concession, he sought to place a duty upon the citizen to moderate their behaviour. By making such a demand, he inadvertently drew attention to the crucial difference between responsibility and accountability.

  When we talk of ‘taking responsibility’, the use of the transitive verb ‘to take’ reveals responsibility to be the possession of the individual. Conversely, when we speak of ‘holding to account’, the implication of being held is that an external force acts upon us. It’s a small but important distinction. Responsibility requires that we maintain authority over our own behaviour; accountability gives us a degree of authority over the behaviour of others.

  This explains why the incorporation of the ECHR was not welcomed by all sections of society. This significant enhancement of individual agency challenged the convention of Britain’s uncodified constitution. By gathering citizens’ fundamental rights together in a single document, it seriously narrowed the wriggle room that the British establishment had exploited for centuries.

  Opposition to the ECHR took the form of outrage at what was perceived to be the licence for political correctness inherent in its application. During the 2005 general election, Conservative Party leader Michael Howard promised to remove the convention from British law. He was reported to have warned that the politically correct regime ushered in by Labour’s enthusiastic adoption of human rights legislation had turned the age-old principle of fairness on its head.