Political Observer still has her copy of Jon Cruddas review of ‘The New Few’ from The Indpendent of April 26, 2012!
May 24, 2025
The Tongue Is a Fire
What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Fara Dabhoiwala.
Allen Lane, 472 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 34747 8
Editor: Should the Mount opening paragraph surprise any reader, who has experience of reading his mouldering prose, that pretends to wide learning and its collection of ‘bad political actors’ ?
It’s puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on the right: campaigners against immigration, Brexiters, the enemies of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that words, phrases and concepts thought to be their property … have been appropriated by the forces of neoconservatism. This is particularly true of the concept of free speech.’ Today, alleged infringements of free speech that would once have outraged Guardian readers are splashed all over the Daily Telegraph. As I write, the Telegraph front page leads on an apparent threat by the US State Department to scrap a trade deal with the UK, because it was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the UK’, in relation to criminal charges against a Christian anti-abortion campaigner in Bournemouth. This concern echoed a statement made by Vice President Vance the previous month that he feared free speech ‘in Britain and across Europe’ was ‘in retreat’. The other stand-out feature of the debate today, and something it is hard not to see as ominous, is the growing gap, in law and practice, between the United States and the rest of the world which calls itself free.
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Editor: Mr. Mount’s final paragraph abounds in his collection of evocative/decorative Names, and various ‘bad actors’.
But the case for some laws regulating libel, slander, hate speech, incitement to violence and verbal harassment of all sorts remains as strong as ever, though just as difficult to define and to police with any sort of fairness. So too, does the case for codes of conduct in public institutions, Parliament and the universities being only the most conspicuous examples. The lines are never easy to draw. At what point does ‘political correctness’ cease to be common civility and degenerate into censorship? When does ‘woke’ move from its original meaning of ‘alert to racism’ and turn into self-righteous hectoring? When should an anti-abortion campaigner be entitled to carry a placard outside an abortion clinic, or, come to that, when should a women’s-right-to-chooser be allowed to stake out the home of an anti-abortion campaigner? There is a right to demonstrate, yes, but there is also a right to some degree of personal tranquillity. ‘Watching and besetting’ is an ancient crime under English law, and to this day the courts are still defining its reach. As Dabhoiwala continually reminds us, context is everything, or almost everything. To warble on in an unfocused way about ‘cancel culture’ cannot conceal either the difficulties of the balancing act or its necessity for a flourishing society. The fabric of civility is as thin as gossamer and just as precious. Even John Stuart Mill might have had second thoughts about the innocuousness of speech if he had been shopping at the supermarket in Buffalo or El Paso. And that is even before we tiptoe into the wider political effects. Would the present incumbent of the White House have been able to swim along so effortlessly on his stream of lies and insults without the protection of the First Amendment? Doesn’t Donald Trump ultimately owe quite a lot to John Stuart Mill?
Editor: Should the carefully constructed persona of J.D. Vance, co-authored by Peter Thiel and his genuflection to Leo Strauss, and the others who acted as co-authores of Vance’s , what to name it? Raymond Chandler, in another but revelent context, named this ‘Hollywood Vomit’!
Editor: Reader aquaint yourself with Mr.Cruddas opening paragraphs:
Headline: The New Few, By Ferdinand Mount
Sub-headline: An intellectual father of the ‘Big Society’ flays the misdeeds of the oligarchy – then lets them off the hook.
Who invented the “Big Society”? I suggest Ferdinand Mount. While our MPs couldn’t be seen for dust, his 2004 book Mind the Gap reintroduced class as a political category. Ahead of its time, it confronted the benign take on globalisation dominant in Westminster. The book was a shout out against the “cold indifference” of contemporary capitalism; the disrespect afforded to those who fall on the wrong side of the new class divide. Its focus was on the economically and culturally dis-invented – “the tribes who live in the dark”. A brilliant book, it signalled a new readiness from the right to confront the realities of social rupture, well before the music stopped and Bear Stearns went to Chapter 11 insolvency.
Within the text we can identify the building-blocks for the “Red Tory” Phillip Blond, and the rise of the Cameroons. Mount argued we must “rebuild the little platoons”. The faith communities would be critical in delivering welfare; we need to see greater reciprocity and employee share ownership, localism and community control of the state. We should, in later parlance, “recapitalise the poor” through asset transfers – land and housing, school and health vouchers, in order to help the victims in the new “downer” class.
Here the causes of inequality lie at the feet of the welfare state. It crowds out working-class respect, fraternity and civics; community cohesion, duty and obligation. Ceteris paribus, we confront these inequalities once we reduce the power of the state.
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The New Few then races through some corrosive examples. The still-shocking £9bn HSBC takeover of sub-prime vultures Household, culminating in £53bn set-aside to sweep up this folly; the “festering morass of bad debts” that was HBOS; vainglorious Fred the Shred, and many more. The central concern is the arbitrary power of the CEO and decline of the active shareholder, interlocked with the rise of the fund manager with their top-slice off every transaction: a “croupier’s take”. In short, there was systemic collusion between the two dominant groups. “One set of oligarchs- the fund managers – approve the size of salaries, bonuses and pension pots for another set of oligarchs – the CEOs, board members and senior managers”.
Why so little appetite to confront these excesses? Mount identifies three basic reasons- or excuses, or illusions – that sustain the system. “The market is always right”; “big is beautiful”, and “complexity equals progress”: they echo the dominance of neo-liberalism, of a system too big to fail, due to the sheer complexity of financial products with no appreciation of moral hazard. A brief history of oligarchy follows, and the forces that shape it: war, technology, bureaucracy, forms of ideology – the links between money and power.
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Mount’s book is a brilliant attempt to import rigour and coherence; indeed, the case is better made than by anyone in the current administration. Yet can he really be suggesting across the City, within our hollowed-out party structures, across Whitehall and Westminster, that the Coalition is embarked on a systematic assault on power elites and oligarchy in defence of the little guy? It doesn’t look like that from my advice centre in East London.
The man behind the Big Society has attempted to write the Bible for the Coalition. It demands respect and has to be read. I strongly agree that there is “a sense that society has lost its recognisable moral shape, and with it, its legitimacy”. But it is because of this that people will demand more, so much more, than what is currently on offer.
Editor: ‘The West’ is collapsing from within! The Genocide perpetrated against a captive population in Gaza, and its ever widenning toxic peramiters by The Zinonist Faschest State, and its American and European suppliers of the weapons of Mass Murder. Mr. Mount never mentions this on going Crime, any surprise?
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