Putney Debates, Henry Porter & Jack Straw

Call me Mary, but I'm an atheist who wakes early on Sunday mornings and often listens to Radio 4's Sunday programme. I find it highly educational. F'rinstance, on yesterday's edition I learned that Islam is significantly more permissive about birth control and abortion than the Christian pro-life set, and also that it was the 360th anniversary of the start of the Putney Debates. Held at St Mary's Church after the first English Civil War their protagonists were, on the one side, representatives of the New Model Army and, on the other, The Levellers (as others called them). These extraordinary occasions kicked off with five hours of praying followed by long and learned arguments about the Bible, the people and democracy.

The Sunday programme piece included Jack Straw marvelling at the "sophisticated political ideas" the debates dealt in. Justice Jack is, of course, the man Gord has put in charge of rustling up a UK bill of rights and duties. Henry Porter, The Observer's Mr Freedom, yesterday likened this to "turning over a campaign against prostitution to the head of an escort agency." Very droll. And probably very true. But the problem with Henry's brand of libertarianism is that it doesn't really respect why some people's freedom might be enhanced if that of everyone else is constrained in certain ways: the freedom to indulge in hate speech for example. There's been a fine old tiff about that running on Crooked Timber following Oliver Kamm attacking Steven Rose for his attack on James "DNA" Watson. My tuppence on Jimmy-boy is here. My take on hate-speech laws is that in theory I'd rather not have any, but that in reality - as Chris Bertram further argues at CT - there's a pro-freedom case for them that needs answering.

Does Henry Porter understand this case? Doing so requires an appreciation of power inequalities and how language can aid and abet the abuse of power, reducing the freedom of the less powerful. On the Sunday programme presenter Roger Bolton remarked that the Levellers insisted that all people are equal in God's eyes and therefore entitled to vote, but actually meant only male people - despite Biblical text to the contrary. In his latest piece Henry Porter attacks the government for undermining the principle "that a man cannot be punished without a court deciding the law has been broken." I'm sure he means "a woman" too, but this failure to use the language of sex equality suggests that much of the debate about freedom and fairness over the past forty years may have passed Henry by. He's made a good job of tracking Labour's dubious record on civil liberties, but his wider analysis has some important bits missing. In that respect he's not much better than Jack Straw.

Comments

[Tim Footman]

Hmmm... my immediate reaction when the Watson thing happened was that he ought to be hung out to dry, but now I'm not so sure. Looking back at the interview, the only truly inflammatory thing he said was that nasty, off-the-cuff remark about having to deal with black employees. Everything else was the logical conclusion of the orthodox view of IQ.
Now, whether you believe that orthodoxy or not (I don't) is another matter, and one that would have been thrashed out at the Science Museum, had Watson's invite not been withdrawn. But that's a matter of science and psychology, not of race and politics.

So we're left with a single remark. What do you do about it? Exclude him permanently from polite society? Suspend him for an arbitrary period? Make him donate the royalties from his latest book to an African charity? Bring criminal charges? Henry Porter's faux pas in apparently excluding women from the right to due process is clearly less dodgy, but at the root of it he's essentially guilty of the same discriminatory thought processes as Watson. A lesser punishment, surely. Maybe he should be forced to re-read de Beauvoir, or even Dworkin? And if I jest that the latter would be worse than a prison sentence, am I guilty of hate speech myself?

This is the problem with the notion of "hate speech" - I hope we can all agree in principle that it's a bad thing, that, as you say, there's a strong pro-freedom case for controlling it, that Something Ought To Be Done. But what should be our response, apart from forthright expressions of disapproval, which can often descend into equally nasty territory (many of Watson's detractors have been guilty of vicious ageism)? Who decides what's hate and what's, I don't know, extreme dislike? Comments like Watson's must not go unchallenged, but the challenge must be proportionate.

[DaveHill]

I started my CiF piece on the Watson affair by saying that it was typical of "race rows" in that the whole thing had got way out of control. A big part of the problem is, I think, that the media have decided that "race" controversies are "sexy", and what Watson said became "a story" accordingly.

The unfortunate thing was that because he's the DNA guru what he said was likely to give succour to race difference fetishists and crude prejudices in general, so others felt it necessary to respond. In that sense, yes, it all got out of hand. I certainly don't think Watson's comments should have made him subject to hate speech investigation. At the same time I don't buy the argument that he's been "silenced-by-political-correctness", blah-de-blah. He entered the public arena and others did the same in response. Watson lost the argument. Tough.

My problem with free-speech ultras is that they don't recognise - or don't want to recognise - how some free speech can curtail the freedom of others. They need to make the case that those who have concerns over this have more to gain from putting up with being badmouthed by bigots than they do from being able to "get the law on them" to shut them up. As far as I'm concerned, they haven't done it yet.

[Aaron Heath]

Thanks for this post. Not really read up on the Putney Debates before (although, obviously, I knew they happened) - I have now. Very interesting to a authority suspicious liberal like me.