Freedom of speech is a foggy issue with no absolutes and that's sort of the point
HUGO RIFKIND 1 t is a weird business when stories combine, even if they only do so in the mind of the commentator. On our screens, Tony Blair is about to fret about Jesus, making him look like a loony again. In Oxford, David Irving and Nick Griffin are cast, preposterously, as defenders of free speech. And in Sudan, that poor schoolteacher is banged up for allowing toddlers to call a teddy bear 'Mohammed'. There is a link here, somewhere, although it's foggy, and it bothers me. Does freedom of speech entail the right to call a teddy bear 'Mohammed'? If not, do we have a problem?
Oxford first. Ridiculous situation. What little I really know of Nick Griffin — as a functioning human, as opposed to as a political entity — I know as a result of seeing him on Newsnight twice. Both times, he was interviewed by Gavin Esler. I'm told Paxman has had a crack at him, too, but I missed that one. Still, Esler did fine. First time around, he had him accusing the BBC of 'giving racism a bad name'. That came across well. Next time, he was defending Stuart Williams, a member of the BNP who told a BBC1 documentary that he wanted to 'shoot Pakis'. I actually found a transcript of this one. 'What he said he described as a dream,' protests Griffin Hmm, muses Esler, and calmly launches into the full quote: 'My dream is to have a transit van with a machine-gun in the back, with about a million bullets to fire on people coming out of the mosque on Friday.' Less Joseph, more Martin Luther King. In, you know, a way.
Give this man a platform, I'm thinking.
Invite him to the Oxford Union. Hell, give him a TV show. Build him his own plinth in Trafalgar Square. How much harm can it do? The more guff like this he spouts, the better. Only don't ask him to talk about free speech. Nor Irving, either. It has only become their area by accident. It shouldn't have. You might as well invite genuinely mad people. They're in the same boat. In fact, I would suggest that they even get on to Newsnight marginally less. Society has decided, for whatever reasons, that the things they want to say are better left unsaid.
Which brings us quite neatly to Tony Blair not doing God, as rehashed on BBC1's The Blair Years. Why doesn't Tony do God? As he'll be telling the disembodied voice of David Aaronovitch this coming Sunday, 'you talk about it in our system, and frankly, people do think you're a nutter'. He's not wrong, I'd say. In matters of conscience, there are those who think that God adds something to the argument, and those who find the very idea that he might rather offensive. Britain, or at least the particular bits of Britain most likely to preoccupy Tony Blair, tends to fall in the latter camp. So he thinks it, and quite passionately, but he doesn't have the guts to say it.
And on to poor Gillian Gibbons, in Sudan. She didn't think anything special. Her class of sixand seven-year-olds were naming a teddy bear, and she thought it was perfectly acceptable to allow them to name it Mohammed. I doubt she was passionate about it. It's not a big thought, not God or fascism. She thought something, and probably didn't even think about thinking it, and she's the one who ends up in the clink. When she gets out, I hope they invite her along to the Oxford Union to talk about free speech. I bet she's thinking now.
For a few months last year, I fell into correspondence with a young guy who was writing for a right-wing US website. I won't name him, because I didn't like him all that much and he'd Google himself and be thrilled. I'd stumbled across a column he'd written in which he'd stated that, in the UK, freedom of speech was a foreign concept. I thought this was a bit odd, and I was bored, so I emailed him to tell him so. He wrote back almost immediately, citing our race hatred laws, and sending me (to my firewall's dismay) a huge list of pornographic films banned in the UK. It made me think of one of those Louis Theroux documentaries, where he showed some Midwestern Nazi climbing on a stage and shouting 'nigger, nigger, nigger' just to celebrate the fact that he still could. My correspondent was right. A totally foreign concept over here. And this is a bad thing?
Look, I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. We talk about free speech, and we hunt for absolutes, and there aren't any. Obviously Gillian Gibbons shouldn't be in a cell. Tony Blair should have had the courage of his convictions, and been judged as a nutter if that's what he was. And if society simultaneously decides it doesn't want to listen to David Irving and Nick Griffin, well, that's fine by me. There's a link, but there isn't a rule. Like I said, it's foggy. That's sort of the point.
Now for a spot of brazen cowardice. I'm writing this on Tuesday morning, and tonight I'm going to the Literal), Review's Bad Sex Awards. So before I go, in a piece to be published after I've been, I'm going to slag them off.
Theoretically, this is a literary prize that aims to 'draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it'. It's a noble ambition, but it doesn't quite work like that. Trust me. I know. I was nominated last year (Overexposure, available on Amazon and at all slightly behind-thetimes bookshops) and I was thrilled. Another nominee had breathlessly informed me, beforehand, that we were both likely to be nominated. He was thrilled, too.
The big names, true enough, are probably less thrilled. Still, I doubt that Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson or Ali Smith really feel that their passages (all nominated this year) are crude, tasteless or redundant. They probably just feel that a bunch of middle-ranking London literary luwies are ganging up for a spot of easy, life-affirming jeering. Which they are. Really, if they actually want to improve the quality of sex in the modern British novel, they ought to have a Good Sex Award, too. Although I doubt I'd have even been in the running for that one.
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