Freedom of speech

Sorry, but internet trolling will be with us forever

This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know, but this is not to be another one. I promise. Time was, though, it was actually quite hard to find out what people thought, if they weren’t you. I mean, you could go out and ask them, but the process always ended with you being in a supermarket car park, and them being mental and not knowing what the Working Time Directive even was anyway. Twitter is a pipe of views coming straight to your screen. So explicitly not writing about it can feel like going out into the world

Can we trust the state to censor porn?

The most sweeping censorship is always the most objectionable. In principle, however, there is nothing wrong with David Cameron’s sweeping proposal that the customers of internet service providers must prove that they are 18 or over before they can watch online pornography. The rule for liberal democracies is (or ought to be) that consenting adults are free to watch, read and listen to what they want. It stops child pornography – because by definition children are not consenting adults – and it could stop children accessing pornographic sites. Children are no more able to give informed consent to watching pornography than they are to appearing in it – if ‘appear’

Cant phrase of the moment: community cohesion

Ever since the Woolwich murder I’ve noticed an upsurge in the use of what is now my least favourite cant phrase – ‘community cohesion’. Political cant proliferates when theory fails to match reality, and today we have a diverse and vibrant array of words and phrases that mean two contradictory things at once, and also nothing. It’s important to talk about community cohesion because diversity is our strength, and also our weakness, and should be celebrated, and policed. Community cohesion also has a darker Singaporean edge. In Singapore, the world’s first truly multicultural modern state, speeches and broadcasts can be arbitrarily shut down if community leaders believe them to be

Douglas Murray

Keith Vaz and Salman Rushdie

As an addendum to yesterday’s post I thought I might remind readers of something about Keith Vaz. The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee has of course just applauded the banning of two American authors from Britain because of their criticism of Islam. So I turn to Joseph Anton – the illuminating fatwa-memoir released last year by Salman Rushdie. It contains a remarkable anecdote of the moment immediately after the news arrives of Ayatollah Khomeini’s order of murder. Rushdie (incidentally writing of himself in the third person) describes walking into his literary agent’s office in London. His agent gives him an astonished look. ‘He was on the phone with

In defence of paranoid hysteria

Compare a democracy to a dictatorship and world-weary chuckles follow. The last thing a citizen can do in true tyrannies is call them tyrannies. He or she has to pretend that the glorious socialist motherland or virtuous Islamic republic is not only as free as democracies but has a level of freedom that those who rely on universal suffrage and human rights cannot attain. If you are free to call your country a tyranny, then it is almost certainly is not. In the United States, the politically sophisticated are enjoying themselves immensely as they tear into leftish claims that America is now George Orwell’s all-seeing totalitarian state. To their way

How social media helps authoritarians

Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about? I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the lobby filled me in on a story which had been doing the rounds for months. I even know which law stopped the Mail on Sunday  following the basics of journalism and giving its readers the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. (Although with most affairs the ‘whys’ are self-evident. It is the ‘whos’ and, for

Is it time to aid Turkey’s protestors?

Is it now time for William Hague to send money, and possibly arms, to the rebels now participating in what we might call a Turkish Spring? There have been violent demonstrations, clashes with police, petrol bombs thrown and the like. The protestors are largely from Turkey’s most secular cities and regions and include gay rights supporters, students, professionals, football supporters (?), women’s groups, journalists and the like. Their objection, principally, is the growing Islamification of what was, until comparatively recently, a proudly secular and fairly modern state. They complain too that the state’s medieval leader, Recep Erdogan, is a ‘dictator’ who has brutally suppressed freedom of speech in a country

Julie Bailey: Enemy of the People

They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother’s grave have become too much. Stafford’s upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and looking for a better place. ‘People come up to me in the street and just start bawling,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go out by myself. I always need someone with me’” Bailey had been the public face of the campaign to highlight the conditions inside Stafford Hospital. She showed that nurses left food and

Chan Koon Chung – banned in China

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy. Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China. It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has

Sally Bercow libelled Lord McAlpine, High Court rules

Welcome, Sally Bercow, to the naughtiest club in town: the Libel Club. The colourful Mrs Bercow has often got it in the neck from the press; what with her demimondaine ways and penchant for wearing bed clothes. But few things can endear one more to Grub Street than being found guilty of libel. Sally is covered in ordure at present, while weathering some dismal ‘innocent face’ banter from all and sundry. But, once the schadenfreude has abated and the damages paid, Fleet Street’s libel reformers may adopt her case for their cause. Stranger things have happened. Indeed, there is already rumbling on the wires. In the meantime, vindicated Lord McAlpine’s solicitor sounds a clear and concise note: ‘Mr Tugendhat’s judgment is one

Some anti-fascists are very fascistic

Nigel Farage has just met one of the most fascinating aspects of modern politics. He was surrounded in Edinburgh by left-wing ‘anti-fascists’ shouting ‘Racist scum. Go back to England’. The same mob also screamed ‘scum’ repeatedly at the top of their voice until they made him leave. This is probably the best demonstration so far of something which has gone un-remarked upon for too long. Among the closest thing we have to fascists in modern Britain are people who call themselves ‘anti-fascists’. Not all people who call themselves ‘anti-fascist’, thank goodness. But a sizable portion.  If you ever see these people in action you will notice that they behave in

Vladimir Putin meets the Munchkins

Late on Friday my editor at the Observer called and asked me to dash off a few words on what was wrong with the Mail and some Conservative MPs demanding that the BBC ban ‘Ding, dong the witch is dead’, a Munchkin chorus, from The Wizard of Oz. I was stuck on a train to Glasgow, but how could I resist? The partially successful attempt to stop the BBC playing a clip from a 1939 children’s film is one of the most surreal cases of censorship I have seen. Right wingers were not demanding that the BBC blacklist the song because it was pornographic or libellous. The lyrics the merry

Bassem Youssef’s arrest is just one example of the attack on free speech in Egypt

Bassem Youssef is better known as ‘Egypt’s John Stewart’. He is a 39 year old cardiologist who made his name with an online comedy programme styled along the lines of The Daily Show. Ever since Egypt’s revolution in 2011 Youssef has attracted a large following in the Middle East, making fun of religious and political figures. With both of those features merged somewhat toxically in the country’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood, there was almost a sense of inevitability about Youssef’s arrest last week on charges of insulting Islam and the President. Youssef’s case has generated a lot of international attention but there are scores of arrests like his. Consider Ali Qandil,

Julie Burchill, trannies and the free press

If anybody doubts that free speech would be in danger after Leveson it is worth remembering what it is already like in this country. A couple of months back Julie Burchill wrote a column in the Observer about transsexuals. It was a response to complaints by transsexuals about a piece by a friend of Burchill’s, Suzanne Moore. In a glorious broadside of a column Burchill referred to the complainants as, among much else, ‘dicks in chicks’ clothing’ and ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’. The results were endless further complaints and a junior government minister – Lynne Featherstone – calling publicly for Burchill and the editor of the Observer

Jim Sheridan MP and those “parasites” in parliament

Labour MP Jim Sheridan covered himself in glory this morning by asking why the ‘parasitical press’ is ‘even allowed to come into’ parliament. Westminster watchers will remember the eloquent and thoughtful Mr Sheridan’s contribution to the expenses crisis when he described the soon to be disgraced Speaker, Michael Martin, as a man of the ‘highest integrity’. Now, a reader has regaled me with a tale that makes you wonder how Mr Sheridan reached the giddy heights of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee: ‘At a day at the races some years ago my girlfriend was making small talk with him and he must have been the Labour Convenor for

It’s not a press regulator, it’s a web regulator.

Since the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of words have been produced about the Web. Enthusiasts have told us that it is the greatest communications revolution since Guttenberg invented movable type, and they are probably right. Utopian fantasists have imagined that cyberspace would be beyond the reach of governments – those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, as one particularly giddy theorist put it – and they were certainly wrong. Their libertarian dreams, as we can see tonight, were an illusion. Those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’ are tougher than they look. They are more than capable of using the new technologies to their own advantage, while censoring what

An interview with Lars Hedegaard

A couple of days ago I managed to interview Lars Hedegaard – the Danish journalist currently at an undisclosed location under police protection after an assassination attempt at his home in Copenhagen. The results are in this week’s magazine. Lars was his usual calm, eloquent and forthright self. If anybody thought they could silence him, they’ve got another thing coming.

The cowardly and hypocritical media abandons Lars Hedegaard

It is now three days since a European journalist was visited at his door by an assassin. For three days I have waited for any response to this. The BBC reported the story in brief, as did the Mail and the Guardian posted the Associated Press story. But where are all the free-speech defenders? Where are all those brave blogs, papers and journals who like to talk about press freedom, human rights, freedom of expression, anti-extremism and so on? Where are all the campaigners? I have been scouring the internet and apart from Mark Steyn at National Review and Bruce Bawer at Frontpage, and a few other US conservative blogs,

An assassination attempt on Lars Hedegaard

It has just been announced that my friend Lars Hedegaard, a Danish journalist and frequent critic of Islamic fundamentalism, has narrowly survived an assassination attempt at his home in Denmark. The BBC is reporting: ‘Police said a gunman in his 20s rang the doorbell at Mr Hedegaard’s Copenhagen home pretending to deliver a package and then fired a shot to the head which missed. TV2 News reported that the gun then jammed, there was a scuffle and the attacker ran off.’ Thankfully Lars has not been hurt in the attack. The Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has condemned the attack, saying: ‘It is even worse if the attack is rooted