not only accessed the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a Surrey teenager who was kidnapped and murdered on her way home from school in 2002, but that the paper had also deleted ‘key messages’, thus giving the Dowlers ‘false hope’ that their missing daughter was still alive. This last allegation later turned out not to be true, but the damage was done. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp announced the closure of the News of the World, and prime minister David Cameron announced a major official inquiry to be headed by Lord Justice Leveson.
That was only the beginning, however. The indefensible hacking of Milly Dowler’s messages and other tabloid transgressions were seized upon as the pretext for a broader campaign to purge the tabloid newspapers. Those in UK politics and the liberal media who view the ‘popular’ in popular press as a dirty word sought to use the sympathetic victims of phone hacking as human shields behind which to advance their campaign to tame the despised, dirt-digging tabloids. The Leveson Inquiry was given the power not just to probe the hacking scandal, but to take apart the entire ‘culture, ethics and practice’ of the British media and propose a tough new system of regulation to help sanitise what many in high places looked down upon as the gutter press.
Lord Justice Leveson’s final report in late 2012 called for (alongside other punitive measures) a new regulator backed by law to police the press. Shortly afterwards the leaders of Britain’s major political parties stitched up a late-night deal over pizza with Hacked Off, the lobby group for state regulation fronted by celebrities such as Hugh Grant, to create a new system of press regulation. It would be underpinned by Royal Charter and overseen by Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, an ancient secretive group of senior politicians. This suitably medieval-sounding instrument was the first attempt at state-backed policing of press freedom in Britain since the Crown’s licensing of all publications lapsed in 1695. The twenty-first-century press, unsurprisingly, failed meekly to line up to receive a right royal thrashing.
Regardless of their feelings about phone-hacking or tabloid journalism, anybody with a liberal mindset or a liberty-loving bone in their bodies should surely have risen up against this attempt to police what can be published and read, and declared that the freedom of the press is the pulse of a free society. Or as that old freedom-lover Karl Marx put it more than 150 years earlier, that ‘The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself’.15 That was not quite what happened, however. Instead, many of the UK’s most prominent liberals took up the cudgels in support of the Royal Charter and against excessive press freedom. The leading figure in the UK civil liberties lobby, Shami Chakrabarti of the lobby group Liberty, had sat in judgement on the tabloid press and found it guilty, as a select member of Lord Justice Leveson’s panel at the inquiry that was effectively a show trial of tabloid journalism. Now the rest of the liberal elite demanded the sentence be carried out.
In the spring of 2014 Hacked Off issued a public demand for the press to bend the knee and submit to being regulated by Royal Charter. Rather more remarkably, Hacked Off was soon able to boast that this illiberal demand had been signed by more than 200 of the UK’s ‘leading cultural figures’.
The list of those 200-plus prominent signatories read like a who’s who of the supposedly enlightened world of arts and culture, science and literature, even including some prominent journalists. It was as if the liberal UK had signed its own death warrant.16
One group of signatories which caught my eye included all of the surviving members of Monty Python, then preparing for their big live comeback shows on the London stage. This was a surreal turnaround of the type which bores of a certain age (my age, sadly) might once have called ‘Pythonesque’.
Thirty-five years before, the Pythons had to resist a public crusade led by Mary Whitehouse – Britain’s most prominent 1970s prude – Christian bishops and Tory councillors to have their movie masterwork, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, banned from cinemas as blasphemous. Having seen off the old forces of censorship back then, the Pythons and their successors now appeared to have effectively switched sides and joined a secular crusade for less press freedom. The jokes and sketches in their revival show might have remained the same, but the world outside had clearly changed. The excoriatingly funny anti-censorship campaigners of yesteryear (and their younger duller imitators) have become the po-faced pro-regulation prigs of our times. It might seem reasonable to conclude that open-minded liberalism is a dead parrot – not just resting and definitely not ‘pinin’ for the fjords’, and that a new breed of ‘illiberal liberalism’ now rules the roost.
Shortly after this another symbolic nail was apparently hammered into the coffin of the liberal UK when the actor and former funnyman Steve Coogan – a leading light in the press-bashing Hacked Off lobby, who had declared that ‘press freedom is a lie’ – was announced as a new patron of the charity Index on Censorship. Since the dark days of the Cold War, Index had campaigned for freedom of speech around the world. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a leading Soviet-era dissident still campaigning for human rights in Russia at the age of eighty-six, reacted in horror to the news of Coogan’s sign-up: ‘Index on Censorship is a well-known organisation, and a very important one. There were just a few organisations in the Western world which supported us in Soviet times – and we appreciated it a lot. It is such a pity to hear what is going on with it now.’ She added: ‘Honestly, maybe I have been too idealistic about the situation with freedom of speech in Great Britain. I was always convinced that this was something immovable – and now we see that this is not so. If we do not have any freedom of speech here in Russia, we do want to see it solidly existing somewhere else in the world. And Britain has always been a citadel of media freedom.’17 One might wonder for how much longer, if the illiberal liberals have their way.
In the name of protecting people against offensive and allegedly harmful words and images, we are now witnessing attacks on free speech that reactionary politicians might have baulked at in the past. It is not just that people pretend to support free speech in principle while undermining it in practice. In a sign of how far the free-speech fraud has gone, it has now become acceptable for protesters to demand censorship – and yet claim they are fighting for freedom.
A funny thing happened on the way to the theatre in September 2014. Punters arrived at a south London arts venue, The Vaults, expecting to see a new exhibition about the horrors of colonialism and slavery staged by the prestigious Barbican theatre. Instead they witnessed an exhibition of the horror with which some now behold artistic freedom of expression.
Brett Bailey’s ‘Exhibit B’, based on the ‘human zoos’ that were popular in Europe and America in the age of empire, used black actors in cages to depict the dehumanising effects of racism. It had been exhibited in a dozen European cities before it came to London. But it was apparently deemed unfit to be seen by the public in Europe’s greatest and most diverse cultural capital.
An online petition and protests led by black activists accused Exhibit B of racism and ‘mental terrorism’. One organiser condemned it as ‘in very, very bad taste to our community’ and ‘offensive to the memory of our ancestors’. Barbican management caved in to their stated demand that ‘The Show Must Not Go On’, and cancelled the much-anticipated performance. The demise of ‘Exhibit B’ became Exhibit A in a public showcase of the dangers of a culture that says anybody should have the right to suppress whatever they find offensive.
There could have been several nominations for Most Shocking Performance in this shameful little melodrama. Bad enough was the performance by the self-righteous protesters who took it upon themselves to play the role that had been performed until the 1960s by Britain’s official censor, the Lord Chamberlain, and close a show that they decided, without bothering to see it, was ‘in very, very bad taste’.18
Worse still perhaps was the pathetic performance from the invertebrate theatre authorities (backed by those subtle arbiters of public taste the Metropolitan Police), who effectively hung the white flag from the stage door and allowed the intolerant mob to decide what could be staged in London.
But