Another voice
Dare to be free
Auberon Waugh
I was not there at the time and so don't know how many Lords remained awake to hear Lord Wells-Pestell, the sixtyeight-year-old Home Office spokesman, announce -the Government's decision against allowing a free radio band for Citizens to converse with each other and give their opinions on current affairs. When Lord Tanlaw, a Liberal peer, asked why Britain was one of the few countries outside the Communist bloc which had not allocated a frequency for members of the public to communicate freely with each other, Lord Wells-Pestell replied that these Citizens' Band frequencies had been much abused abroad. Quoting from an Australian magazine, he claimed that in many Australian large cities where Citizens' Bands operated it was possible to hear 'everything from school kids swapping dirty yarns to gangs planning escapades and prostitutes touting for business'.
On balance, the Government had concluded that the disadvantages more than outweighed the advantages, he said. Nobody expressed much surprise, although a young Conservative peer, Lord Trefgame, ventured that the Government's reply would disappoint many people. Conservatives are always polite about freedom of speech, just as they are sometimes polite about material equality and other noxious, bloodstained doctrines of that sort, regretting only that they are impracticable at the present time. On the Labour side, it is true, one sometimes comes up against something that looks like a principled objection. Freedom of speech is all very well for fancy young people from the universities, they mutter darkly, but workers are more interested in other, more important freedoms — freedom from 'oonger, freedom from unemployment, exploitation, racism . . . all culminating in the greatest of all human freedoms, freedom from ignorance of historical movements and freedom from error in interpreting them.
But as these ghastly phone-in radio shows demonstrate, many members of the lower classes wish to have their say, too. What they have to say is seldom very wellinformed or logical, and never, in my experience, original or even remotely interesting, but the desire to say it appears to be fairly strong.
If these people could be trusted to behave as the working classes are expected to behave and use this new freedom to denounce fascism in Ulster, Chile and on the Wandsworth Council's Bus Shelters sub-committee, few people would object. We Tories would rather they didn't, of course, but there are too many things hap pening in the world today which we would rather not happen for us to worry about this one.
But it appears that in their confused and under-informed state the workers can't be trusted to behave in this way. Some of them might use this new 'freedom' to express views which are inadequately thought out with regard to the total situation at this moment in time, basically, might they not, comrade?
So even the small impetus towards greater freedom of communication which might come from the revolutionary left is stifled. Political dissent can only be permitted along rigidly approved lines, preferably after debate by the appropriate policy sub-committee and referral back. Other uses of free speech — gossip, fantasy, selfpromotion, malicious personal invective, uninformed speculation by people who haven't checked their 'facts', the inventing and spreading of rumour, sexual insults and wild accusations — are regarded with an abhorrence which verges on hysteria.
In point of fact, practically nobody in this country believes in free speech at all. My own attitude — that people should be allowed to say and print what they like So long as anyone attacked has the right of reply and counter-attack — is so rare as generally to be considered perverse. What about those who can't reply, owing to some speech deformity or other injury? Well yes, special provision will have to be made for patients in iron lungs who are maliciously defamed. What about those honourable and universally esteemed public figures — Reginald Maudling, Princess Elizabeth of Toro, Harold Wilson — whose behaviour or absence of behaviour seems to attract widespread misinterpretation? Surely they cannot be expected to answer every such charge personally rather than through their lawyers? Perhaps not, but my point is that under conditions of freedom, people learn how much importance to attach to information according to its source just as they do in private conversations. The suggestion that remedy should lie in the cumbersome processes of law, with damages for injury to an abstract property called reputation —
rather than in a quick repartee — has alwaYs struck me as preposterous. But I havet°, accept that my views are not widely share° or even considered, and those few peoPle prepared to consider them usually decide they are absurd.
On the other hand, I do not think that
they are quite as absurd as those of Mr!, Gwynneth Dunwoody, oho has announce' her intention to extend this proPertY dead people, encashable within a fiftY-Year, period by their children. Mrs DunwoodY, understand, is already involved in libel pr°' ceedings on her own behalf against the Daily Mail over allegations about the Fl° Production Association of Great Britain' of which she was once a director. But she also feels she should be able to receive money for attacks made on the reputation of her father, the late Morgan Phillips, and this strikes me as pushing her luck. In ordel to accommodate her whim, it will be nece" ary to overturn the whole idea of reputation as a personal property and treat it as ani assignable one, assessable under capita transfer tax or estate duty, as the case rnaY be, and also, I should have thought, liable to capital gains tax on realisation. There are many precedents for this in taxation Pile, tice. When an author dies, the theoretical value of film rights in his published work ihs assessed for estate duty even Ito" nobody has expressed the slightest interest or intention of making a film, and eve° though there may be no money in the kittY to pay duty. But I do not think thatourf magnificent libel laws would last long If every estate had to include an assessment° defameability. Alternatively, Mrs Dunwoody may se.„eic to revolutionise libel law by turning et.; ages into a solatium for hurt feelings, as Alan Watkins suggests in this wee' Observer. By coincidence, the same nev;is; paper carries a book review by Mr Maurncti, Richardson in which the reviewer refers — my late father as a 'shit'. Am I hurt? It occurs to me that I may already have a remedy in criminal libel. Richardson is older and frailer man than I am, and I Co well be tempted to punch him on the when next I see him skulking about 111," business in Soho. Such an expression is eal culated to provoke a breach of the Peat' under the circumstances. It is even ill°75 tern pting to consider sending the Observer. small but attractive editor, Donald Trey ford, to cool his heels in prison for a vlitl!,e. For all I know, he might welcome a respi" from the young schoolteacher with wh°1° he recently absconded. But I don't see why I should save 'Ire LC from the consequences of his choice. Vt. ; am dead. That is what children are T°r. .ne. him stay at liberty and contemplate perils of freedom. As for Richardson, Id: him keep his solatium, and! hope he SP he it all on whisky. It can't be long before "2; meets my father face to face. I am conficleuof that my children will find other means, is reprisal than blubbing to a judge if anY°411; so bold as to disparage my memorY !De
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