---

Freedom of Speech

My Lords, barely 48 hours ago I arrived back from India where, incidentally, for part of the time my wife and I were guests of a Muslim family with whom we have been friends for almost 50 years; so not until yesterday did I realise that this debate was taking place today. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, not only on her speech but on her immaculate timing. The Motion speaks of the recent developments affecting freedom of speech. I shall confine my remarks, given the time constraints, to the spoken word. It is true that matters have grown much worse recently under this Government. However, it must be said that the rot started to set in over four decades ago. I was lucky enough to grow up in an era when traditional British freedom of speech was by and large a reality. The same applies to my contemporary, the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, who is not in his place at the moment; although he may interpret matters differently—we shall soon know. Of course, that was offset by tighter restrictions on other forms of expression: the theatre was still under the absurd and anachronistic thumb of the Lord Chamberlain; films were more heavily censored than today, albeit largely in line with public opinion at that time; and books were sometimes censored, notably Lady Chatterley’s Lover, although in practice it was not difficult to find ways and means of getting around the bans. Provided that they did not shout obscenities in public or encourage others to cause physical harm to persons or property, people could say pretty much what they liked in private homes, pubs, clubs, the workplace or on a soapbox. During my teens, my parents lived not far from Marble Arch, and I used to enjoy going to Speaker’s Corner. One heard every sort of rant: communist, Trotskyite, Mosleyite and religious zealotry of every hue. There was plenty of heckling, both witty—the most effective kind—and angry, but no one tried to stop the other person saying his piece. People argued and argued fiercely with their opponents, but they did not try to gag them; and rightly the police stayed well away. Even during the understandable mass demonstrations over the Suez misadventure, neither demonstrators nor counter-demonstrators tried to silence the other. Then came the 1960s. By that, I do not mean the physical decade starting on 1 January 1960 but the cultural and sociological phenomenon that ran from mid-1962, I would say, until the end of 1974—although Philip Larkin famously put the start date six months later. Ostensibly, it was a time of glorious liberation, and in some respects that was true. However, unfortunately, nonconformity soon became the new conformity, as far as the younger generation was concerned. Opponents of the Zeitgeist were barely tolerated. Above all, political opponents were no longer to be engaged in intelligent argument but to be silenced altogether, in true Maoist style. It first became apparent during the demonstrations over the Cuban missile crisis and reached its peak during the Vietnam war. ““Uncle”” Ho Chi Min was virtually worshipped by most students and by what we now call the chattering classes. Of the well known commentators, only Bernard Levin and Kingsley Amis had the courage to stick up for the South Vietnamese anti-communists, many of whom were later to become the boat people. When the anti-communists booked Kensington town hall to put their case—calmly, to an invited audience—they were besieged by a mob of screaming fanatics and forced to flee. Next came the Californian eccentricity of political correctness, which, before long, spread throughout the English speaking world—including Australia, of all unlikely places—and which further constrained free speech. So far, the Government cannot be directly blamed for all this, except perhaps for enthusiastically endorsing excesses of political correctness. However, recently we have seen some extraordinary developments—for example, as has been mentioned, the law that severely restricts protests within one kilometre of Parliament, despite the fact that no corresponding restrictions apply to protests outside the White House in Washington, as I have observed. This law caught a woman who was doing nothing worse than reciting the names of the war dead. Next, the Prime Minister himself, no less, was investigated by the police for remarking, in private, that the Welsh were a pain in the backside. Actually, he used much stronger language that cannot be repeated in the House. The police were similarly diverted from their rightful tasks of chasing burglars and car thieves into investigating, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said, moderate criticisms of homosexual practices made by, among others, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, the author Lynette Burrows and Dr Iqbal Sacranie , a prominent Muslim—even though the comments were entirely legal. One cannot help suspecting that senior police officers fear that their chances of appointment and promotion will be lessened unless they pursue new Labour’s PC agenda with the utmost zeal, whether or not the law actually dictates it. That is an unsatisfactory, and even dangerous, state of affairs.