Weekly Worker 693 Thursday October 18 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Defend free speech

James Turley comments on the new legislation to outlaw incitement to hatred on the basis of sexuality

Justice secretary Jack Straw has announced new legislation to outlaw incitement to hatred on the basis of sexuality. The Guardian reports that the new law will “protect” gays and bisexuals, as well as heterosexuals. In response to concerns over free speech, a spokeswoman for the ministry of justice claimed “the new law would not prohibit criticism of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, but it would protect them from incitement to hatred against them because of their sexual orientation” (October 9).

This follows the passing last year of a similar bill outlawing religious hatred - scandalously supported by the Socialist Workers Party. The wording was kept deliberately vague, and despite similar assurances that it would not inhibit free speech, it is clear that one of its purposes was to give the British state another bargain-basement pretext for clamping down on dissidents - ironically islamists will be a primary target, not islamophobes, as the SWP naively claimed to believe. Obviously, at this early stage, it is not possible to dissect the wording of any new bill. However, there is no reason to suspect that things will be any different this time round.

Gay rights activist Peter Tatchell is distinctly ambivalent in his attitude to the proposed legislation on his Guardian blog¹ (it is “of doubtful value”, he says). Nevertheless many of the points he raises bear repeating. First and foremost, it should be noted that there are already sweeping laws to deal with incitement to homophobic violence, but these are rarely used. Tatchell cites the relative failure of his Stop Murder Music initiative, which aimed to get injunctions against musicians who promoted violence against gays and lesbians. That campaign had very limited success in its attempts to use the law against homophobic dancehall reggae artists, and fared far better in directly petitioning venues and promoters.

On the other hand, Tatchell writes: “An Oxford student was arrested and fined under the laws against public disorder for making a joke about a policeman’s horse being gay. The officers construed this joke as a homophobic remark and nailed the student under the already existing wide-sweep public order legislation which bans behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.” The law, while certainly stringent enough to cover flippant remarks about animals, simply was not employed in the case of rap artist Buju Banton’s infamous Boom-bye-bye, which calls repeatedly for bullets in the brain of the “batty-man”.

Tatchell’s article, however, does not criticise the existing laws in a fundamental way, despite his citation of the police horse fracas. This is, of course, perfectly consistent with his overall perspective, which is a sort of radical reformism - he has serious political reservations about the state, but not from any working class perspective.

For instance, it is now pretty well established that laws whose claimed purpose is to protect minorities frequently target those same minorities in practice. One example is the allegation that an alleged offence was ‘racially aggravated’. Eg, a black youth is involved in an argument with the police and they arrest him for, say, disorderly behaviour. If he is accused of calling the arresting officer a ‘white bastard’, his sentence can be considerably heavier.

Similarly it is not difficult to imagine the police using the proposed new legislation as a weapon against gays, since incitement to hatred against heterosexuality, as well as homosexuality, would be an offence. If a gay man charged with resisting arrest is accused of calling an officer a ‘macho pig’ or even ‘anti-queer’, that could be construed as a ‘sexually aggravated’ offence.

However, from the point of view of communists, while we defend all minorities and consistently uphold their democratic rights, it is important to recognise that this whole area of anti-hatred legislation is another potential weapon to be used against our class and its organisations.

Silence of the left

Perhaps the comrades are still preparing their response, but the SWP has not yet reported on Straw’s announcement. Socialist Worker (October 20) carries several pages on the postal strike, and several more pages on how important strikes are, but cannot find - even in its extended online edition - a single column-inch for this latest attack on free speech.

This could be because the SWP thinks a law to “protect” gays, whatever its inadequacies, is basically positive - that was the public position it adopted in relation to the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. It had no problem identifying the 2005 Terrorism Act as part of an assault on civil liberties, but, because some of the SWP’s muslim allies thought the religious hatred legislation was just the ticket, the organisation decided that this particular clampdown was somehow well meant.

However, another explanation for the SWP’s silence could be that it simply does not believe it warrants any attention. Economism, in other words. The Weekly Worker is well known for its critique of this failing - on the basis of a broader definition than the one typical on the left: ie, the left’s economism is marked by a failure to take the key issue of democracy seriously. What is deeply saddening is that, even by their own restricted definitions - variations on the prioritisation of trade union struggles³ - the various left groups are all guilty. The postal strike is a key dispute, but it is nevertheless true that, as soon as a number of workplaces go out, the revolutionary left invariably works itself up into such a fever of excitement that small matters such as the increasing ability of the state to lock up dissidents get almost completely overlooked.

In the case of this particular proposal, we on the left may appear less likely targets than, say, religious reactionaries given to homophobia. That is not to say, however, that we are immune.

Homophobia, after all, has been a pernicious influence on the left in the past. Maxim Gorky, in an essay Proletarian humanism, once claimed: “Exterminate homosexuals and fascism will disappear.”⁴ The Gerry Healy groups’ longstanding anti-gay stance led to several splits, notably Alan Thornett’s Workers Socialist League - the late and unlamented Royston Bull and his Economic and Philosophic Science Review was infamous for continuing in this vein long after his break with Healy and Trotskyism. The largest American Maoist party, the RCP, only abandoned in 2001 the position that male homosexuality was an attack on women.

So let us imagine, say, a sympathising group to the American RCP. They sell a book by their beloved cult leader, Bob Avakian, dating from, for instance, 1993 on their stand at a protest - along with various other observations, it includes throwaway comments about male homosexuality being patriarchal. It would under the proposed legislation, presumably, be possible for the comrades to be hauled before the courts. If it were only loopy American Maoists at risk, that would be one thing, but a great deal of the work in all traditions of Marxism has had unfortunate (and vulgarly economistic) homophobia bolted on crudely. This, then, is an issue of immediate concern for any group with a long cited heritage.

Against state repression

That is merely one issue, however. Communists are opposed to all acts of state censorship (of which, in the end, this is an example). We oppose the adoption of further powers to inhibit free speech and demand that its current armoury of bans be dismantled.

Capitalism lives and dies on divisions among the workers, and divisions between the workers and potential class allies against the system. It has a real, ‘rational’ interest in the existence of these divisions, and of the most irrational beliefs and prejudices. This is not a mere matter of certain bigoted capitalists - a conspiracy of Souter and Hoogstraten - but of a system which cannot but give life to these sorry phenomena.

This necessarily means that the state is unable to offer ‘prevention’ in any meaningful way, and must proceed directly to the ‘cure’ - ie, simple repression. As long as capitalism exists, every democratic right gained - including the rights of sexual, racial and other minorities - can never be considered secure. We will be forced, time and again, to defend what we have won and that fight has to be fought against the state.

Communists, as opposed to economists and opportunists, refuse to put these struggles at the bottom of our list of priorities. Not only are the proposed laws of direct significance in terms of possible repressive measures against our own working class movement: they are another token overture from British capitalism to the minorities whose active involvement in revolutionary politics would be a boon. We cannot abandon these layers to the right - this must necessarily be as much a part of ‘our turf’ as pay and conditions.

Notes

1. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2007/10/hate_speech_v_free_speech.html.

2. Jack Conrad has provided a brief taxonomy of such positions in this paper (November 30 2006).

3. See, for example, the American publication Workers World: www.workers.org/ww/2004/lgbtseries1007.php.

4. http://socialistworker.org.uk/art.php?id=13208.

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