Distress?
I listened to the replay of Iqbal Sacranie’s interview on PM yesterday, and it was just as silly and irritating as I expected. He so obviously had nothing relevant to say, he so obviously was simply expressing unthinking dislike, he so obviously was just floundering around looking for rationalizations, it was so obvious how empty they were. Er, they’re harmful, uh, stability, um, society, er, stable, you know, ooh, ah, um – they get diseases! That’s it. They get diseases – that’s scientific, that is. So you see what I mean. It’s obvious. But, er, we have to put up with it, because this is a democracy. But I sure don’t want to! And of course you can see why. It’s obvious. Stability. Harmful. Mutter mutter choke.’ Yes, all very elevating and enlightening.
But. I don’t think it’s a police matter. Sacranie is a damn fool with a narrow mind, but that’s not a police matter either. He ought to wake up and learn to think properly, but I hardly think the police are going to teach him to do that. Not their job, is it. No, that’s our job – his fellow citizens of the world.
His (veiled?) threats against Rushdie are another matter. But those are not why the police were called. But he didn’t utter any threats, not even veiled ones (he said the death penalty was too good for Rushdie, that’s what – not all that veiled). No, his potential crime may have been a violation of section 5 of the Public Order Act. I wasn’t really aware of this act before…it’s rather interesting…
Scotland Yard’s community safety unit, which investigates homophobia and hate crime, is considering whether Sir Iqbal has broken telecommunications laws or the 1986 Public Order Act, which forbids the use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress or thereby”.
You guys have an act that forbids the use of insulting words within the hearing of people likely to be caused distress thereby? Holy jumping Jesus! Are you crazy?! Were you all in a coma when that was passed, or what? Didn’t it cross anyone’s mind that those terms might be just ever so slightly broad and sweeping? That they might be just a tiny tiny tiny bit of an impediment to free speech? I mean – don’t you all use words every day, every hour, that are insulting (to something or someone somewhere) enough to cause someone somewhere possible potential distress? And who knows if she’s in earshot or not?! I know I do. I use words of that kind every hour, every moment – they are my life and breath and reason for existing. Imagine my surprise to find that they are illegal.
I must be missing something. There must be some reason this Act isn’t as ridiculous as it looks at first blush. I can’t think of what it is, but there must be. Either that or you were all on an outing to Preston that day, and missed it.
I think that bit is just an update of some common law tradition. I don’t think insulting behaviour is meant in quite the way it can (and apparently has) been intepreted.
Used primarily by police officers in my experience, (a) provoke punter, (b) punter swears at you, (c) down the station with you sonny.
Yep, that law is as bad as it sounds. Another reaon why UK (and Australia) needs a proper Bill of Rights.
Huh, how dare you question our unwritten (and thus unenforceable) constitution!
Bills of Rights have their problems. There’s the way the US First Amendment is used to protect commercial speech, for instance, and the way the 14th got hijacked by corporations (after corporations were defined as ‘persons’, which was not what the people who wrote the 14th amendment intended). But the lack of Bills of Rights is a problem too – to put it mildly.
Oh dear, I hope I didn’t distress anyone by saying that.
OB er, what PM said actually – to expand – it was loosely worded to allay the fears of Tory govt and middle Englanders generally about unionised or unemployed oiks becoming too uppity in public places, e.g on anti-nuke demos, stop-the-city marches, or further industrial action from unionised labour as seen in the miners strike and later on Wapping. A very dumb piece of ledge it was, but it was loosely worded (and dreamt up about the same time as the astonishing Special Powers Act) so that Thatcher’s boot boys (as we lovingly called the cops then) could bang up virtually anyone who publically organised in protest to Thatcher’s govt. They were in full throttle then, about to go into a third succesful, succesive General Election campaign. No we weren’t in a coma, nor even in Preston – some of us were on said demos, hated her enormously and felt the heat accordingly.
“Oh dear, I hope I didn’t distress anyone by saying that.”
No, OB, you didn’t, but you are wrong. Commercial speech deserves protection. If it is false and fraudulent (ie misleading for gain) it loses protection. Pretty simple, really.
“which was not what the people who wrote the 14th amendment intended”
if I did not know you better, I might take it that you believe the Bill of Rights should be interpreted exactly as the writers intended. Some do believe that but they also argue against Roe v Wade and most of the other advances in freedoms brought about by judges interpreting the Bill according to contemporary needs.
I wonder if this law would survive a challenge in the European Union’s court, which has overriding jurisdiction on many such issues.
There is an amusing article in today’s Times saying that this ridiculous piece of legislation had been used to arrest and charge an Oxford undergrad who, having imbibed a jar or two, approached a mounted policeman and said ‘Excuse me constable, I think your horse is gay’.
In an unusual triumph for common sense, the CPS dropped the case.
The “your horse is gay” story can be seen on the BBC website.
Seems to me there would be an interesting debate to be had about the contrasting virtues of a country where public speech was seemingly limited, and yet the most outrageous things were said every day, and one where speech was constitutionally protected, and yet individuals could be vilified for affronting a majority view….
Of course, I don’t know two countries like that…
The most amusing thing about all this is the ability of the British police to suddenly become rampant homophobe-hunters, when within living memory of even a young chap like me, they were regularly running ‘honey-traps’ for cottagers… Hell, they may still be doing so, just a bit more quietly… Oh well, beats arresting Black people just for fun, one of their main occupations in the 70s… Anyone remember the Not the Nine O’clock News sketch about ‘driving in a loud shirt’ [sic?]?
It’s all a little ironic since Mr Sacranie wants to protect religion from ridicule by having a law against expression of “hatred” of religion.
>You guys have an act that forbids the use of insulting words within the hearing of people likely to be caused distress thereby?< I’m not clear when it was amended so as to cover homophobia, but the context is that part of the 1986 Public Order Act referring to stirring up racial hatred. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1682018,00.html
Have you mixed up Iqbal Sacranie and Abu Hamza?
And if so, what sort of concoction did you get as a result?
al-Qaradawi?
>Have you mixed up Iqbal Sacranie and Abu Hamza?< You were supposed to read the second paragraph referring to the 1986 public order act!
P.S. To clarify:
The original quote in Ophelia’s piece was
>…the 1986 Public Order Act, which forbids the use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress or thereby”.<
Oh, ok, but I don’t see your point. It was never about racial hatred or homophobia:
“5 Harassment, alarm or distress
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.”
Allen, I don’t know, myself – I was just quoting what the Indy said. It quoted the section of the Public Order act that I quoted (that’s where I got it). I can see having a law against stirring up racial hatred (however tricky such a law may be); it’s the law against causing possible distress that seems a tad…broad.
Ophelia: The fault lies in the (not untypical) loose way the journalist wrote the sentence in question, without specifying the context in the 1986 Public Order Act. If there were such a wide-ranging law as the sentence suggests Muslim organisations would have taken advantage of it hundreds of times!
“Commercial speech deserves protection.”
Does it? Can speech ‘deserve’ anything? And that aside, why does it?
“If it is false and fraudulent (ie misleading for gain) it loses protection. Pretty simple, really.”
Very simple, but not necessarily true. There’s tobacco, for instance. It’s not self-evident that commercial speech that promotes tobacco ‘deserves’ protection.
“if I did not know you better, I might take it that you believe the Bill of Rights should be interpreted exactly as the writers intended.”
No, I don’t believe that, but I also don’t think the intentions of the writers of the amendments are necessarily and always irrelevant. The 14th amendment was hijacked very soon after it was written, not two hundred years later – to note just one difference.
Ah – thanks, Allen. That’s part of what I was wondering! At that rate surely the entire population of the UK would be locked up!
You are a very distressing, rude, insulting crowd, you know.
[collapses in mirth]
“Does it? Can speech ‘deserve’ anything? And that aside, why does it?”
To me, all speech (including writing, of course) should be free – ie unpenalized – unless there are good reasons why not. Limiting commercial speech, simply because it is commercial is in a similar category to limiting anti-religious speech. All speech has a motive – usually to persuade – money making is not a disqualifying motive.
And yes, I agree that tobacco advertising and such should be banned. There is clear evidence of harm.
“The 14th amendment was hijacked very soon after it was written, not two hundred years later – to note just one difference.”
Let’s use a neutral term: “interpreted” rather than “hijacked”. To me, the question is whether the 14th Amendment is a living document. I am comfortable with pretty well all the decisions on it since Brown v Board of Education. And I believe the US is a much better nation because of it and the way it has been interpreted. And I think Australia should have something similar.
So there….
Ah, but I’m talking about the decisions long before Brown. The 19th century decisions, starting with the Slaughterhouse decision, only five years after the Amendment was ratified. And the ‘interpretations’ were very strained indeed, and required ignoring the record of what Congress had intended. The Fourteenth Amendment may be a living document, but the people who wrote it were also alive (and still in Congress) at the time the strained interpretation got going. That process put an end to Reconstruction and abandoned Southern blacks to their terrible fate for a century. Not a result to be comfortable with, in my view.
So there yourself.
Yes, courts sometimes go wrong. Still, I would back the record of the US Supreme Court on issues that are important to me – primarily basic civil liberties – over Congress and government.
It is interesting to watch the Supremes reel in the government over Guantanamo Bay. They don’t act quickly – and probably should not – but they get to the right position eventually. And I’ll bet no US government will try the same thing again. And so progress happens if you have a source of power outside the government.
“I would back the record of the US Supreme Court on issues that are important to me – primarily basic civil liberties – over Congress and government.”
Really. Dred Scott? Plessy v Ferguson? Civil Rights Cases (1883)?
The fact is that Radical Republicans managed to pass strong ‘basic civil liberties’ legislation and ratify three Constitutional amendments intended to guarantee basic civil rights, and the Supreme Court gutted all of it, leaving Jim Crow and a rule of terror in place for a century. It’s all very well to say they get to the right position eventually, but for one thing, when is eventually? For black people in Mississippi or Alabama born in, say, 1866, there was no ‘eventually’. For another thing, one can just as well say they get to the wrong position eventually. Beware presentism – assuming that the present moment is what history is aiming for and has triumphantly managed to arrive at.
“And yes, I agree that tobacco advertising and such should be banned. There is clear evidence of harm.”.
I think advertisements for back-yard swimming pools should be banned. There is clear evidence of harm: according to the book Freakonomics (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006073132X/sr=1-1/qid=1137345949/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-5461489-1517658?%5Fencoding=UTF8), these holes of death kill far more American children than having a gun in the house. Why can’t we think of the children?
(This is not an attempt to make fun of anyone, please believe me).
Being serious: so what if harm is done? Adults are supposed to be able to make decisions on what risks to take for themselves. If someone wants to risk harming himself, that’s his choice.
Ophelia, I think we may be losing the plot here.
I believe we would agree that a Bill of Rights and an independent court system is a valuable thing in a democracy. We might also agree that they are one of the main reasons why the US has done a better job of protecting freedoms that most (perhaps all) other liberal democracies.
The US Supreme Court has a remarkable record over the past 50 years ie I agree with just about all its decisions. This, despite the fact that many of the judges have been appointed by conservatives. I am not worried about a “Bush Court”. It may become less activist but will get the big decisions right.
But like all human institutions, it is flawed. You don’t have to be a Christian to believe that. And it will make mistakes again.
The main limit of its power is the fact that it cannot get too far ahead of public opinion. It has tried to abolish capital punishment but so long as a significant majority of the populace want it, the Court it unlikely to ban it outright.
I eshew presentism completely. But I do believe we are living in one of the best of times.
“Being serious: so what if harm is done? Adults are supposed to be able to make decisions on what risks to take for themselves. If someone wants to risk harming himself, that’s his choice.”
This is a matter on which good people can disagree.
What makes smoking different, to me, is its addictive nature, added to the overwhelming evidence that it is harmful.
Similarly, I belive seat belts in cars sholud be compulusory and that bike riders should wear helmets.
I respect those who disagree. They are close calls in a free society.
Ken, frankly, I think you’re the one losing the plot. You took issue with what I said about the 14th Amendment, and when I replied, talked about agreeing with what the Supreme Court has done since Brown. I talk again about Reconstruction, and you reply again that you agree with what the Supreme Court has done in the past fifty years. For the third time: the example I cited was the 14th Amendment and Supreme Court interpretations of it during the 19th century. It’s not relevant to keep replying with citations of the past fifty years.
You mentioned Brown. You do realize that Brown overturned Plessy v Ferguson, don’t you?
Ophelia
I suggested we were both losing the plot. If you haven’t, then it’s just me.
Let us agree:
1.”the lack of Bills of Rights is a problem too – to put it mildly.”
2. “Bills of Rights have their problems. “
I prefer the statements in that order.
I am more interested in the recent past and the present than in the Reconstruction, which is why I was (impolitely, I now realize) changing the ground of the discussion.
I withdraw, politely.
PS, Oh, yes, I know abour Plessy. And wasn’t it a great thing that Brown overturned it and Brown itself has not been overturned? Sometimes things get better.
Bye.
Hell, yes, it was a great thing that Brown overturned Plessy; yes indeed, sometimes things get better. But it would have been even better if Plessy had been decided very differently; and sometimes things get worse. But I’m not therefore saying Bills of Rights are a bad thing; on the contrary. Just for a start, if we had no Bill of Rights, I’d be seriously, imminently afraid of a theocracy here. I was just saying it hasn’t always worked.
(My interest in Reconstruction was renewed by hearing Eric Foner on Fresh Air a few days ago. He always does renew my interest. He does great radio.)
See you around. (I assume ‘bye’ refers only to this thread.)
Ken Nielsen wrote: “What makes smoking different, to me, is its addictive nature.. “.
That’s a lot better than using its harmfulness as a criterion for banning advertising. But while a good argument in theory, I do not see that addiction to nicotine as overpowering the faculty of reason, unlike addiction to alcohol and hard drugs . So I would still permit the advertising of tobacco products. There is also the problem that even with alcohol, relatively few become so addicted their life is taken over.