Tonight the BBC's flagship programme of political debate, Question Time will welcome onto its panel the leader of the British National Party, an as yet small but growing party of white supremicists who recently won two seats in the European parliament. Should he be allowed to appear or shouldn't he? Do overt authoritarian racists have the right to a platform or don't they? Is that the issue here, or is this debate a clever ploy to fool us all into believing that we in Europe live in societies where anyone really can express themselves freely? Have we really created a civilisation that is so comfortable with itself that it is not threatened in any way by individuals saying exactly what they think and having access to the means of spreading those beliefs?
To those whose vested interests lie in the maintenance of the liberal capitalist status quo, debating the question of free speech is an exercise in linguistic gymnastics. A couple of centuries of political liberalisation, driven principally by under-represented and disenfranchised groups, have created a loose concensus in favour of everyone having the right to express themselves, free from state control.
This concensus is not just a feature of western civilisation either. You can see evidence of this assumption of free speech as a basic right amongst large sections of every society, whether or not the powers controlling that society allow dissenting voices to be heard. Witness Tiananmen Square 20 years ago; or the anti-electoral fraud movement in Iran; or the opposition to the Chavez take-over of all mass media in Venezuela. That these three countries have severe state limitations on the exercise of popular opinion highlights that a strong belief in unfettered expression does indeed exist amongst large sections of their populations.
In societies where state control of media and political gatherings are most extreme it is in fact quite easy to see the issue. The forces seeking to control what people hear, see and read and what they say, write and show are unsophisticated and often brutal and violent. The battleground is clear and obvious. It's like looking at those diagrams in military history books where opposing forces are represented by variously coloured rectangles with arrows showing how the massed regiments are deployed, contronting one another across No Man's Land. Here are the state-controlled media, the army and the judiciary (with religious authorities/party ideologues in reserve) and confronting them are the numerically inferior, less drilled battalions of pioneers, opposition organisations and "subversive" artists and intellectuals. The World looks on, ostensibly cheering on the plucky Carthaginians but secretly admiring the majesty of the organised Roman legions.
Things become much less clear in ostensibly liberal societies where the responsibility for controlling the behaviour of the citizen has been partially privatised. This privatisation has happened because, in the globalised economy, it is not "The State" that is being defended but the supra-national entities on which the national economies depend. It is thirty years now since the British political establishment decided to base the national economy not on industry or manufacturing but on the service sector, specifically the financial service sector. Since that sector is neither nationally based nor British owned it ceases to depend on the British state to protect its activities, it merely requires that the organs of state regulation get out of its global face. It requires that capital can flow freely between whichever markets show best returns regardless of the social and economic impact of the insertion and withdrawal of that capital in the various markets it uses. Insertion and withdrawal, insertion and withdrawal. What does that suggest about what the corporations are doing to national economies?
Britain is far from alone in suffering at the hands of global capital. Every national economy can and does get f***ed it's just that Britain, having seen its future as the hoe of the financial markets, gets f***ed far more often and far more willingly.
Now, before I'm accused of deviating from the theme of freedom of speech, let's introduce the forces that the supra-national state employs to control dissent. Supra-national organisation clearly requires supra-national means to protect itself. It requires control over expression, the ability to suborn local and regional judiciaries, and the ability to requisition military assistance if and when necessary. I'll leave the latter two for future posts but deal with the former as it is THE way in which the modern, supra-national establishment maintains its claim to legitimacy in the popular mind; it's the way it ensures that the natives don't become restive. It's the way in which it is possible to twist the public debate away from corporate fraud and money-laundering that costs the British economy £39 billion a year and towards a drive to eliminate benefit fraud that costs (at worst estimate) £3.5 billion.
I don't think I need to make much of an argument to claim that most media in western societies (and plenty of non-western and developing societies too) is owned by multi-national corporations. And not that many of them. Here's an example, all Australian national newspapers and every daily newspaper in each of it's seven state or territorial capitals are owned by just two corporations, News International and Fairfax Holdings, one is based in Australia, the other in Delaware, USA.
The big difference between ownership of the means of communication by the state or by global corporation is in constituency. For whom does the media work? Globally-owned media commentators would have us believe that state-owned media is always bad and that state-owned is effectively synonymous with state-controlled. Give 'em their dues, it often is, but not always. They would also have us believe that privately-owned media, by its very nature, ensures plurality of opinion. Well, tell that to the Australian newspaper-buying public. Tell it to those who, in the aftermath of the financial meltdown last year looked in vain for anyone proposing a new economic system not based on unregulated financial markets and the free flow of global capital.
Privately-owned media in developed countries works on behalf of those who own it and will work to maintain the system on which it depends for its profit. State-owned media works on behalf of the state and that state may be authoritarian and undemocratic, or it may be pluralistic and accountable to its electorate. The latter case may have its faults and idiosyncrasies but it does have a basis in the assumption of democratic accountability. Neither privately-owned nor authoritarian state-controlled media make that assumption, whatever they might try to argue.
So, getting back to the BNP. If you agree with me that freedom of expression is as tightly-controlled by private corporations as it is by dictatorial state machines, you might agree with me that the mark of an accountable and pluralistic media is the ability to permit the expression of views that not only go against the majority concensus, but which might actually challenge the very assumption of that plurality and accountability.
We can allow discussion and even the propounding of the ideas of implementing Sharia law; repatriating immigrants; imposing military rule or the overthrow of the monarchy because we can have confidence in the inferiority of the arguments. We should put trust in the fundamental commitment of the majority, freely permitted and able to understand and digest the basic issues, to a lightly governed, pluralistic democracy. We might fear the manipulation of public opinion by religious leaders, authoritarian ideologues and potty demagogues but our only protection from the most extreme views is to fight to free up the access to the means of communication to more plural views. At the same time, surely someone is prepared to stick their head over the parapet, challenge the control of media outlets by commercial vested interests, and supply some much-needed reserve forces to the beleaguered Carthaginians.
