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.
Just before 7.00 this morning, something weird happened to me. I was below stairs (so to speak) in my temporary kitchen, thinking about the multiculti builders arriving, contemplating last night's washing up and wondering how I was going to get anything done today with my five year-old off school, when the Today programme announced that it's the birthday of the Prince of Wales. And suddenly the national anthem was playing (this wasn't happening on Five Live, by the way - I checked). What did I think? That I should stand up immediately? No, I was doing that already. That I hate the bloody royals, string them up? Not exactly. Instead I thought what a surreally variegated nation I live in and how I quite like that, actually. Must be old age. 
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