From Denis Cooper, commenting on the article below
1. ” The response of the Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart - someone whose job I thought was to defend free speech - was deeply depressing. She refused to defend either the theatre or the playwright and insisted on the moral equivalence of the writer and her violent assailants. The mob of stone-throwing protesters, she said, were merely exercising their free speech, which “is as important as the free speech of the artist”. ”
2. “I support wholeheartedly the existing race hate laws, and of their use to squash racist abuse.”
Maybe he deserves to lose his right to free speech, as he’s so ready to deny that right to others. However as I keep saying, ad nauseam, “hatred” of any kind not a crime, yet*, and therefore incitement to hatred should not be a crime. As opposed to violence (eg throwing stones) which is a crime, and so logically incitement to violence should also be a crime. But to admit that is to admit that “the existing race hate laws” should never have been passed, and should be repealed.
* Except under the old law of sedition, if that still stands. If so, that should also be repealed.
Telegraph
I’m proud of this play we’re planning - but I’m not prepared to do seven years in jail for it
By Nicholas Hytner
(Filed: 26/06/2005)
In the autumn, the National Theatre will mount a production of a major new play by Howard Brenton about St Paul. Or at least, we will if people who haven’t read it, but think they might be offended by it, do not succeed in persuading the Government that it falls foul of the new Bill on religious hatred. That Bill, which passed its second reading last week in the Commons, will make “incitement to religious hatred” an offence punishable by up to seven years in prison. Paul, although written from a secular point of view, is a serious (if irreverent) exploration of religious faith. I will be very proud to put it on - but I am not sure I am prepared to do seven years inside for it.
I have already received a sizeable mailbag of letters from people who know nothing about Paul, but think it ought to be banned. Some of them think I should be sent down for even contemplating producing it, though their preferred destination is Hell rather than Pentonville. A lot of them think that the play will incite “hatred of Christianity” and of Christians. They are wrong: the play takes as its starting point the inspirational beauty of much of St Paul’s teaching. But the Sikhs who protested outside the Birmingham Rep Theatre last December were also wrong: they thought that Behzti was an attack on Sikhism. Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, the author (she is herself a Sikh) emphatically insists it is not. Ignorance, however, did not stop Behzti’s opponents from persuading the Birmingham Rep to abandon it, nor did it prevent them from forcing its author into hiding.
The response of the Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart - someone whose job I thought was to defend free speech - was deeply depressing. She refused to defend either the theatre or the playwright and insisted on the moral equivalence of the writer and her violent assailants. The mob of stone-throwing protesters, she said, were merely exercising their free speech, which “is as important as the free speech of the artist”.
If the “protesters” had merely wanted to argue about the play, or to express their opposition to it, however vehemently, I would agree with the minister entirely. But that’s not what they wanted to do. They wanted the play banned - and they threatened to kill the author and burn down the theatre unless it was. Does anyone in the Government really think that threatening to kill writers and burn down theatres should be accorded the same rights under law as putting on plays in the first place? If so, there will soon be no drama at all in Britain. I might as well pack up and go home - because half the repertoire of the National Theatre would go to the wall.
One of our jobs in the theatre is to put on shows that will provoke, ridicule and offend. Some plays do that in a more extreme way than others: Schiller’s Don Carlos, recently a huge success in the West End, is at least partly designed to generate hatred of the Catholic Church. Under the new legislation, someone who launched a prosecution against a producer who put on Don Carlos on the grounds that it “incites religious hatred” would have an unanswerable case. The Prime Minister has insisted this is hysterical scare-mongering. He has promised that there will never be a prosecution against anyone for artistic expression. But the wording of the legislation is unequivocal. It makes incitement to religious hatred a punishable offence. It means the only force blocking prosecutions of plays and films which people find deeply offensive, and which they believe incite religious hatred, is the good sense of the Attorney General.
I do not doubt Lord Goldsmith’s sanity, but it’s no excuse for a bad law. There is a new climate of religious intolerance in Britain. Whatever the Government says, this new Bill is pandering to that intolerance. It will lead to an unstoppable flood of demands from religious leaders for prosecutions of their critics. It has massively raised expectations among the Muslim community, many of whom think it provides them with a blasphemy law. There will be only anger and disappointment when prosecutions do not occur, and who is to know how long it will be before the political pressure on some future attorney general to prosecute a provocative work of art becomes intolerable?
There is no doubt that some communities are suffering poisonous attacks from racists and bigots seeking to hide behind religious language to incite race hate, but there are better ways of tackling this very serious problem than by undermining our essential civil liberties. I support wholeheartedly the existing race hate laws, and of their use to squash racist abuse. They should be extended to cover the use of religious words as a proxy to cover racial hatred; and in fact the Liberal Democrat peer Anthony Lester has proposed an amendment that would achieve just that.
What I deplore is the new legislation, which could easily be used to squash the legitimate questioning and probing of religious ideas. It is as all-encompassing as it is imprecise, and would stifle those who would otherwise produce, publish or fund a provocative work but may perfectly properly not want to risk prosecution for so doing.
Meanwhile, the Home Office minister Paul Goggins has confirmed that all religious groups will be protected under the Act, including, he says, Satanists. For myself, I have always had a soft spot for the old Greek gods. Were I to advocate human sacrifice as a way of appeasing them, I presume I could look to the new law to protect me from those who would incite hatred against beliefs that were shared by some of the founding spirits of Western Civilisation.
Surreally, one consequence of the Bill might be that any faux-religious freak will be able to claim its protection for the proselytising of all sorts of disgusting nonsense. You could be prosecuted as easily for inciting hatred of Satanists as for publishing the works of Martin Luther.
So why has so manifestly dodgy a solution been proposed for a genuine problem? Cynics might claim that the Government, having offended and alienated much of the Muslim community by its conduct over the war in Iraq, is trying to win it back again by passing a totally unnecessary law. Before the election, Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, wrote a letter to Muslim groups in which he apologised for his failure to get the Bill through Parliament. He blamed the opposition parties for delaying it, and insisted it would not happen again once the Government was re-elected. Many Muslims, including Dr Saddiqui of the Muslim Parliament, nevertheless oppose the Bill.
The extremist end of Islam - the fanatics who wanted Salman Rushdie killed, and who, like my hellfire-breathing Christian correspondents want their beliefs to be immune from criticism of any sort - will not be appeased by it. They will simply see it as a staging post for a more extreme law: one which will extend blasphemy legislation to cover all religions.
The Government, it seems, is willing to help them. In its present form, this unnecessary law will represent the most serious threat to freedom of speech since the old Lord Chamberlain’s office, when plays were censored or banned because they didn’t fit in with the Lord Chamberlain’s view of what was “decent” or conducive to public morals. But more than that, it will mark an attack on the values of the freedom of thought and religious tolerance that are the heritage of the Enlightenment. All of us who are not religious fanatics want a free and tolerant society. The history of the last 500 years shows that we cannot achieve a free and tolerant society by ceding ground to religious extremists.
