Monday, September 2, 2013

Britain’s Retreat from Free Speech

By Naomi Wolf

The ordeal of David Miranda – the partner of Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald detained at London’s Heathrow Airport, interrogated for nine hours, and forced to surrender his electronic devices (some of which allegedly contained documents leaked to Greenwald by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden)– is a shocking demonstration of the changed climate surrounding the press. So is the fact that state officials threatened Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger with criminal charges and forced Guardian employees to destroy computer equipment at the newspaper’s offices. But what is most shocking is that all of this happened in the United Kingdom.


As the head of the government that carried out these acts, British Prime Minister David Cameron has betrayed his country’s most noble cultural legacy. Indeed, Britain essentially invented and gave the rest of the world the idea of free speech.

As far back as the seventeenth century, whenever monarchs or parliamentarians would try to control Britain’s press, British pamphleteers and polemicists would fight back – and often win. In the face of anti-monarchist revolutionary fervor, Parliament – as Cameron should recall – passed the Licensing Order of 1643, which imposed pre-publication censorship on the British press. Booksellers protested, and the following year John Milton published “Areopagitica,” a foundational statement of our modern philosophy of the right to free expression. Returning to British first principles, the House of Commons rescinded legislation suppressing press freedom in 1776.

After that return to sanity, it was hard to convict someone for political speech or writing in Britain. No law specifically censored political speech, leaving only the much higher legal threshold of “disturbing the King’s peace.” Despite a flood of Jacobin propaganda from revolutionary France, British parliamentarians remained committed to the idea that freedom of speech and the exposure of ideas to open debate would serve Britain best. Efforts in 1823 and 1856 to pass laws constraining free speech were shouted down by members of Parliament using very modern-sounding objections: any curtailment of press freedom constituted a “slippery slope,” while one man’s sedition or blasphemy was another man’s common-sense opinion.

CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphBritish citizens, too, routinely rose up against efforts to curtail press freedom. Indeed, when the rising power of groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice began to initiate prosecutions of publishers and booksellers, MPs attacked this behavior for its anti-British nature.

Of course, it is precisely this tradition of free speech and debate that has so often led the British press to “go too far” for the comfort of state officials and citizens alike. Parliamentarians were offended by press coverage of Queen Caroline’s divorce in 1820, and by newspapers’ mockery of King George IV. In the 1860’s and 1870’s, they were appalled at how publishers boosted newspaper circulation by reporting on divorce courts (and the scandalous behavior of individual politicians). Political elites called again and again for curtailment of press freedom. But Parliament and courts always returned over time to the core British value of free speech and expression.

Will today’s constrictions on journalism in the UK be similarly transient? In the wake of the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Parliament pressured the British press into agreeing to a terrifying system of fines of up to a £1 million ($1.6 million) for news “errors.” The same system (recently put in place in Australia as well) has often been used by less democratically inclined governments to suppress independent, vigorous journalism; in Ecuador, for example, newspapers are regularly fined large sums for criticizing the government.

The establishment of “national security” and “fighting terrorism” as stalking horses for intimidation of journalists who are doing their jobs – exposing government abuses to the light of day – gives the state an even more effective tool to suppress investigative reporting. Dictators everywhere silence journalists in the name of “national security” by charging those who would investigate their regimes with treason, subversion, or espionage.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. If in the past, Great Britain can use the sword to capture so many nations why wouldn't she eventually use it on her own citizenry? You live by the empire's sword; you die by the empire's sword.

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