The writer is in Australia.
Remember this if you remember nothing else about the philosophical battle for free speech. More scope for speaking one’s mind helps the outsiders in society – those outside the so-called Overton Window’s allowed ambit of ‘acceptable speech’; the sceptics, apostates, iconoclasts, nonconformists and dissidents; basically those who differ from received opinion beyond what the powerful deem prudent. Limits on speech imposed by government will never affect those whose thinking is in line with that of the great and the good. They don’t need free speech protections. (Put on a personal level, no one ever demanded the suppression of speech about themselves that said ‘hey, buddy, you’re just a terrific, witty, insightful guy with George Clooney looks’.)
And so the benefits of a very wide scope for free speech are that it gets dissenting ideas out there and that it’s never wise to allow insiders to arbitrate what speech can be uttered. The two most powerful defences in favour of a wide-ranging scope for free speech (to my mind at any rate because, lacking the religious gene, I don’t buy the whole natural rights worldview) are these. Firstly, there’s the John Stuart Mill argument that as much speech as possible in the crucible of competing ideas moves society ever closer towards optimal choices, not just because nonconformist views are sometimes right (and we all know that’s true) but because even when the dissident is wrong his views force those with establishment views to better understand and fine-tune their own outlooks. Or secondly, the straight-out cost-benefit argument that the dangers and harms of too much speech are vastly outweighed by the dangers and over-reach of big government and the administrative state policing what speech is allowable, knowing what we do about human nature and the desire to suppress views one finds unpalatable. Notice that both those free speech defences are grounded in a simple, consequentialist cost-benefit calculation. Both, I think, are powerful, though I am somewhat in the minority in thinking the second of those is the strongest of the arguments for free speech.
Be that as it may, think now about Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. I’m going to be blunt and say straight out that I profoundly disagree with her censorious worldview and I simply cannot understand why Peter Dutton, the leader of a political party that professes itself to be committed to free speech principles, defends her. (Okay, having watched Scott Morrison’s even more enervated, enfeebled and factually wrong “free speech never created a single job” understanding of free speech at work, I can understand that this is no longer disqualifying to lead the party of Robert Menzies. So I understand it as a fact about today’s Australian political world. It just massively disappoints me.)
But leave politics out of it. Go back to Ms Grant, a.k.a. our ‘eSafety Overlord’ – though lord knows why this body or position even exists. Remember when she wanted to suppress a true online video of an Islamic extremist stabbing a Christian bishop? Let me ask you all this. If there were a video of an openly white supremacist walking into a Melbourne mosque and stabbing an Imam, do you think that Ms Grant, or anyone in the Australian government, would want to suppress that? Or would try to impose a worldwide ban on it? Yes, yes, yes it’s notoriously hard to prove a counterfactual scenario. But I’m about as certain of the answer to that hypothetical as I am about anything – namely, that ‘no, the eSafety Commission apparatus would not have tried in any way to suppress that sort of video where the white supremacist was the violent thug. Readers can decide what they think for themselves. For me, the crucial factor is often ‘how does this speech/video affect the insiders’ or government’s worldview?’ And anyway, surely in both cases it’s good for society to know the true facts, even if some harms follow?
Moreover, it’s pretty obvious to any thinking being that three or four decades of steroidal multiculturalism policies have brought with them quite a few downsides. (Don’t take it from me. Take the word of a host of Anglosphere politicians on this, including wokester former UK PM David Cameron.) Put more bluntly, significant social problems and downsides have been caused by decades and decades of large-scale mass immigration together with the gradual diminishing of assimilation policies and the now ubiquitous failure to teach youngsters the (to me quite obvious) true fact that Australia and the Anglosphere have produced amongst the best places to live in human history – heck, even just to teach them a soupçon of patriotism and love of country. And we have a generation of politicians across the political divide responsible for this mess. And they, and the insider class generally, do not want speech that shows the bad consequences of these past policies. (And by bad outcomes I mean more than just the rather significant economic costs of mass immigration of low skilled people from cultures quite distinct from ours that has seen Australia deliver what? Seven straight quarters of per capita GDP decline?)
So speech and videos – even true videos of actual facts – that undercut the establishment’s rosy ‘multiculturalism has been an undiluted good’ message are deeply disliked. (See Britain and Southport and the whole Rotherham grooming gang disgrace for more evidence of this.) Governments and their administrative state actors want that sort of talk – true talk – diminished, downplayed, suppressed and if possible cancelled. It makes them look bad. But if some true event supports the authorised, rosy picture, something like the view that the bad guys here are white working class Neanderthals, well the desire to suppress that really doesn’t exist.
Or put differently yet again, governments find it near impossible to be ‘content neutral’ as the American First Amendment jurisprudence helpfully articulates the matter. And so too, generally, do the tribunals and commissioners these governments – across the political divide – put in place. If you didn’t realise this during the two and half years of Covid lockdown governmental thuggery (and by governmental I include the police, the public health caste supremos, the editors of top medical journals, the upper echelons of the universities, the list goes on) then nothing will open your eyes. Again, notice how much the sceptics, iconoclasts and dissidents got right about the wrongs of lockdowns and how much governments got wrong – to the point that Mr Trump’s Cabinet nominee Dr Jay Bhattacharya to this day rightly notes that the biggest source of mis- and dis- information about Covid came from government. But it was the views of sceptics that the government establishment tried its hardest (sometimes successfully) to silence.
So Mill was right. The cost-benefit calculation shows that giving government agencies the power to suppress speech is pretty much always a greater long-term evil than suffering any short-term harms of allowing the speech. Our eSafety Commissioner is woefully wrong-headed. In Australia and Britain and Canada we have a huge problem with politicians not understanding or caring about free speech. There is this irony however, one that will drive the bien pensants to distraction – the politician in today’s world with the greatest commitment to free speech is one Donald J. Trump. And it’s not even close.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia. Next Wednesday, February 12th, in London and online, Prof Allan is defending the motion ‘A UK Bill of Rights Would Not Protect Free Speech’. For more info and to sign up go here.
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I think this article is called damming with faint praise.
The praise seems to me real, and to have admiration in it. If anything, I felt it was the criticism that failed to go home
The British constitution will not matter a jot because Britain will cease to exist once white British people are in a minority.
But would it matter if changes to it had helped to make that possible?
Yes, that’s a good point.
I am not sure when the rot really set in.
My impression is that people in former times were generally happy to make observations about race that would now be considered “racist”. At some point that started to change and now people are afraid, even to admit to themselves, that they might hold “racist” views. Certainly since non-white immigration into the UK started in earnest, “anti-racism” has been drummed into us. Maybe it started with the drive to abolish the slave trade. I am not saying that the slave trade was right or that we should not have abolished it or that we should go back to it – but we seem to confuse quite rightly not treating people as property with the perfectly natural preference for your own tribe.
Yes, terrible confusion,
Both the author and David Starkey seem to take the view that the post-Restoration constitutional settlement was a universally good thing, only to be broken later by the likes of Blair and co.
This is a fairly conventional view, and carries with it a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that the political evolution of this country has been one of progress whereby power has been gradually transferred from an abolutist monarchy to our present representative democracy.
If only.
This view also informs much of what’s taught in schools as history, from what I can gather.
It was only when I read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) that I started to see things a bit differently.
Although it’s a novel rather than a political tract, it does mark the origin of One Nation Conservatism, which is still a view much in play even today.
Put simply, Disraeli’s view was that the post-Restoration political settlement had put too much power in the hands of Parliament, and by sidelining the role of the monarch, had left no voice to defend the interests of the common people of this country.
Then as now, Parliament was stuffed with vested interests.
The results at the time had become very evident. The common people, pushed off the land by parliamentary acts of enclosure, had in many cases become desperate wage slaves often living in shockingly bad conditions.
Disraeli correctly identified this, and tried to re-invent the Conservatives into the party which would balance the interests of the common people and the capitalists who had brought about such material and technological progress, thereby assuming the role which in previous times had been enshrined in the monarch.
With the rise of the Labour movement to power or a share of it in the early 20th century, maybe it was considered that Parliament had finally reached a balanced and fair representation of interests, and that at last the common people had proper advocacy in the seat of power.
In retrospect, we can now see that this was probably a high point and that things have gone downhill very badly since, with vested interests very much back in charge.
The Labour Party has morphed into a bizarre embodiment of bad ideas who only cultivate their client class of state functionaries and poorly-educated graduates. They certainly don’t represent what we might call the traditional Working Class. The Conservatives reject any kind of ideology so just go along with the drift, becoming the Socialism Lite party, continuation One-Nationers, whose aspirations never rise above a bit of managerialist tinkering.
Once again, the interests of the common people have been sidelined.
This vacuum is what has allowed our rulers to impose mass immigration on our society, something that the people were never consulted on and which had damaged and undermined our shared cultural identity.
We know who the beneficiaries of this are, and it’s not the common people.
The summer riots were a manifestation of this. Others may follow.
To counterbalance parliament as representation of the factional interest of society, something representing its shared interests is needed. This used to be (at least in Germany) a monarchial government existing above and besides parliamentary strife of the parties. This suggests that the problem we’re facing is how to strip parliament of its status as dictatorial institution of power with no regard for anything but itself to put it back into its bottle, force it to accept the existence of legitimate, extraparliamentrial institution of power it didn’t create itself, ie, not His Most Toniest Blairness’ quango straightjacket supposed to guarantee New Labour government even in absence of a New Labour government.
Even the US model of an elected head of government with real power who’s not part of the parliamentary machinery might be suitable for that. OTOH, the traditional model worked fine. It took the parliamentarists to major European landwars to abolish it.
Maybe the only answer is Swiss-style direct government through regular referenda.
Whether that would work in the UK is moot, given that we’re a bigger and more diverse country with a very different history.
It would also require a vigorous and free press and media, something under continual attack.
This essay is puzzling. Professor Alexander very obviously admires Starkey; his essay is full of praise of him. But the title promises, also, to tell us where he is wrong. As someone who also admires Starkey, I was keen to learn where he is wrong but, search as I may, I can’t find it, not much anyway, and nothing developed. It might be expected to follow the heading, “Now for the criticisms”. But it doesn’t, not distinctly.
To begin with, it contains more praise: “[I am] someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history … Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union … About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive … a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history … to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present … almost no sound voices from history [apart from his] … the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.”
Alexander is plainly struggling to find anything much wrong. He begins by lighting a damp squib: “His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is [not wrong but] badly formulated” and not all that badly either evidently, for, although “most historical comparisons are naive. In fact Starkey mostly avoids this naive sort of comparison … What he does instead is something subtler … to use the past to explain the present (not to explain what to do in the present, but to explain how we got where we are.”)
He does go on, “But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history.” But he has already admitted that Starkey doesn’t offer to use history to explain what to do in the present only to explain how we got where we are. So Alexander not only has not yet shown anything wrong, he hasn’t even shown us what the ‘problem’ is in what Starkey has to say.
There is, in fact, only one place where Alexander finds something wrong with Starkey that he doesn’t qualify out of existence and, even then, he introduces and closes it in a muted sort of a way: “Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion.”
And then this: “I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. … [The former] appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. … It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance.” And, even that he sums up as, “The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.”
I don’t think Alexander has himself got a story about Starkey. Except for Starkey’s blankness about religion (which, filled up, might show an unintelligent hostility), Alexander is (not unreasonably) a straightforward admirer. And the title of his essay is seriously misleading.