Writing in the current issue of Prospect, the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Frank Furedi, paints an alarming picture of activist students on both sides of the Atlantic who are engaged in campaigns that raise questions about our ability to tolerate divergent opinions and uncomfortable historical realities. He argued: ‘The values of experimentation, risk-taking and openness to new ideas promoted in the 1960s and 1970s have given way to a climate of moral regulation and conformism’.
A related example of this activist spirit is the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at the University of Oxford which secured the removal of a plaque dedicated to the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. A survey conducted by the independent student newspaper the Cherwell found 37% of students now favour the removal of a statue of Rhodes from Oriel College. Motivated by the understandable disapproval of the contribution he made to racial segregation in South Africa, supporters of the campaign must have concluded that the 83 scholarships a year bearing his name are insufficient redress for historical wrongs.
Would it be worth scanning all public places in order to establish if other historical figures being commemorated meet contemporary moral standards? Should this exercise be carried out every few years to make sure the built environment adequately reflects the feelings of those individuals or groups most inclined to demand acknowledgement?
There are certain commonly agreed restrictions on free speech, notably laws against defamation and incitement to physical harm. In most other cases, arguing that spoken or written words should incur restrictions on important rights would once have been seen as evidence of incipient anti-democratic tendencies: to give someone the right to say something but with strings attached is to come close to denying them the right to say it at all. The move from largely objective and legally sanctioned restrictions to a culture where subjective measurements like offensiveness assume great importance is not a development to be welcomed. Indeed, the understanding of the word ‘offensive’ seems to have evolved to the point where some believe reparation should naturally follow any affront to their own beliefs or feelings.
It is not only on university campuses where attempts are being made to draw in the frontiers of free expression. The House of Commons was recently the scene of a three-hour debate on the question of banning Donald Trump from entering the UK. Trump, arguably a modern Cecil Rhodes with yuppie sensibilities, had attracted considerable criticism for controversial views about Mexicans and Muslims. But how did parliament come to be debating an issue over which it ultimately had no control? Because 577,000 people signed a petition in favour of banning Trump. The threshold for securing a parliamentary debate on a petition is 100,000 signatures.
This particular petition was created by Suzanne Kelly, a campaigner from Aberdeen who moved from investigating Trump’s activities in the north-east of Scotland to calling for him to be banned from the UK altogether. Speaking last year, she said the petition ‘gives all those people who agree with me a platform to say we also disagree with hate speech’. But wasn’t this going further than disagreeing with objectionable things said by an objectionable man?
When Donald Trump argued Mexico was sending rapists and drug dealers to the United States I thought he was either ignorant or a liar. When Donald Trump argued Muslims should be banned from the United States I thought he had the political intelligence of a teenage boy trying to impress his friends by saying something that would be considered shocking by the standards of acceptable opinion. But I also believed that hearing such opinions was the occasional price to be paid for the reciprocal freedom to register my objections. Silencing opinions is not the same as changing them just as attempting to erase the past wrongs from the public record is not the same as stopping them in the first place. Both can have unintended consequences.
Reports suggested that the parliamentary debate failed to rise above its unpromising origins. Even some of the majority who opposed the proposition missed the fundamental issues at stake by focusing on the possibility of Trump becoming a martyr. Trump’s former friend Alex Salmond, who is currently making the transition from first minister to radio phone-in shock-jock, believed a ban would do him some good. Salmond remarked: ‘He wants to ban all Muslims from the US. I want to ban all Donald Trumps from Scotland’. Thus were any number of important issues sacrificed on the altar of soundbite gimmickry. He later branded Trump a chicken on radio and pledged he and his listeners would ‘kick some ass’ if the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination had time to shoot the breeze with a man he had branded a has-been. Salmond’s SNP colleague Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was also prominent among those supporting a ban.
A geographic analysis of the petition’s signatories carried out by The Atlantic magazine found Scotland had ‘some of the highest signature rates in the entire country’. Glasgow, or Freedom City as it has sometimes been dubbed following the referendum, exhibited a particular enthusiasm for banning an individual from entering the country on the basis of something he had said. Presumably a fair number of the signatories would also have been of the opinion that MPs do little or nothing of value but considered a debate on this subject to be an improvement. A Survation poll found support for banning Trump was more common among SNP members (48.3% for, 42.2% against) than members of other parties. Similarly, 49.8% of those who voted Yes in the independence referendum thought the UK government should ban him but that opinion was shared by only 33.1% of those who voted No. Overall, 47% of those surveyed believed Trump should not be banned and 40% were in favour.
One other category of data is worthy of comment. Survation found that among participants who were in the 18-34 age group, 49.9% declared themselves to be in favour of a ban. This dropped to 37.1% and 35.5% in the 35-54 and 55+ groups, respectively. It is my fellow millennials and members of Generation Y, in short, who are most likely to be on auto-gasp. What happened to the primary school wisdom of sticks and stones and broken bones? An image begins to form of an individual whose daily existence is an emotional rollercoaster dictated by social media updates. The same individual quite possibly conflates political activism with the parading of their own offended feelings. There are suggestions that the younger generation is viewed as Scottish nationalism’s vehicle of deliverance in the way the industrial proletariat was for Marxism. Not so much shock troops as shocked troops: in one hand holding the future of the nation and in the other an iPhone.
The former editor of the New Republic, Michael Kinsley, recently lamented what he viewed as the erosion of informal cultural protections for freedom of expression in the UK. Writing in Vanity Fair he said: ‘I would have said that the British toleration of – indeed, delight in – eccentricity and outspokenness of all sorts was an under-appreciated asset when comparing freedom of expression in different countries’. This, he worried, was no longer the case and Scotland arguably exhibits its own peculiar symptoms of this wider malaise. The Scottish Government and the Scottish Professional Football League, for example, have reportedly been in talks about funding of up to £4m for facial recognition technology to tackle offensive behaviour, including the singing of songs, by football fans. The same fans, meanwhile, have been encouraged by Assistant Chief Constable Bernard Higgins to report ‘anything which makes them feel uncomfortable’. Presumably this will not extend to being monitored while eating their half-time pie.
Scotland continues to discuss far-reaching constitutional change and the boundless possibilities that might come with the creation of a new state. But it is far from clear to what extent these discussions are anchored in the need to safeguard the necessities of democratic liberty during a period of far-reaching change. Just as others endlessly project about the nature of an independent Scotland, so do we who nurse wariness about the British tide receding. What might be the temper of the new state? How might it address itself to questions of basic democratic principles? If anything, such questions would likely grow in importance as the warm feelings of the post-independence peace and reconciliation period cools. To give the point the most solemn possible emphasis: we don’t feel good about the direction of travel.
By Alasdair McKillop | 27 January 2016