Share access to the microphone

Playwright David Edgar argues that pressure groups should push for more space on podiums rather than banning others from speaking

MANY POLITICAL MOVEMENTS start by calling for things to be banned. The British women’s liberation movement began with a protest intended to stop the 1970 Miss World contest. In the late 1970s, I was involved in the Anti-Nazi League campaign to deny the National Front the right to speak to the nation on television through a party political broadcast. In 2004, Birmingham Sikhs picketed – and a small number physically attacked – a production of a play by a Sikh woman about sexual abuse in a gurdwara.

And, of course, 15 years earlier, Bradford Muslims burnt copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and, in February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa.

Later that year, demonstrations by hitherto silenced citizens across eastern Europe brought down six dictatorships, and demonstrated that – while not the only liberty – freedom of speech is a necessary precondition of all the others. Many young radicals, including Muslims, came later to that view. In 2007, former Muslim student activist Inayat Bunglawala, who had found the anti-Rushdie campaign emancipating and liberating, admitted that he had been wrong to call for the book to be banned.

It is, of course, this lesson which the Parisian killers refused to learn, understand or emulate when they attacked the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. There are many lessons to be drawn from the January events. It is possible to oppose Charlie Hebdo (or even call for it to be censored) and at the same time to protest wholeheartedly against mowing down its employees. But the main lesson is that, for those who believe in it, free speech is indivisible.

Censorship by public pressure has increased hugely, turning the free speech argument from a debate about state power to one about consumer rights

It is a particular irony, then, that some of the government leaders who marched through Paris in January immediately demonstrated a distinctly partial commitment to the principles of free speech. Within a week of the killings, the French police had arrested 54 people for “defending or glorifying terrorism”. Such glorification has been a crime in Britain since Labour passed legislation that would – in theory – scoop up anyone lauding the Boston Tea Party, the Irgun or the ANC. Within days of the Paris killings, British Home Secretary Theresa May issued a code of practice that would authorise the police to access journalists’ phone and email records. Last autumn, she announced plans to ban extremists from spreading, inciting or justifying hatred (and to prevent those who did so from accessing the airwaves).

Thus far, then, goes the commitment of the state to free speech. But the fight is complicated by the change in the character of censorship. Since the 1960s, state censorship of the traditional kind – laws protecting a vulnerable populace from things they might like but would be bad for them – has been largely dismantled: the blasphemy law in England and Wales (though not Northern Ireland or Scotland) was finally repealed in 2008. At the same time censorship by public pressure or even intimidation from groups offended by various forms of speech has increased hugely, turning the free speech argument from a debate about state power to one about consumer rights.

In the United States, where the state was, and is, constrained by the first amendment, the power of groups to silence dissent was seen most clearly in the early 1950s, when an unholy alliance of the Catholic League of Decency and the American Legion (and many other bodies) seriously constrained filmmakers from making pictures that offended prevailing (or even unprevailing) norms on the portrayal of sexuality and the presentation of political opinion. Here in the UK, some newspapers that proudly stand against press censorship have in the past called for the proscription of plays, films and artworks that represent IRA leaders or certain types of criminal. (In 2004, the Daily Mail sacked a journalist who – in her spare time – had painted an image of Myra Hindley.)

Around the world, free speech campaigners are pitted not against the police but communities, from Hindus protesting at the depiction of their Gods in art, to US Christians mounting boycott campaigns against supposedly anti-family television shows. These communities include ones that feel themselves – and are – ignored, excluded and demonised. But the way to empower the silenced is not for them to silence others, but to spread access to the microphone.

The massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo is a bitter instance of the truth that it is the outsider and the dissident who suffers first when the principle of free speech is undermined. As Inayat Bungawala argued, on 27 June 2007 in a Guardian blog, that “the same laws that allowed Rushdie to have written the Satanic Verses are the ones that protect the right of Muslim authors … to vocally oppose the government’s calamitous participation in the invasion of Iraq”.