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INDEX ON THATCHER
Index on Censorship is a serious maga- zine with a good purpose. Its job is to report censorship throughout the world, to comment on its effects and to print things which some countries censor. This it does thoroughly and, on the whole, impartially. The September issue of Index, however, is an innovation. For the first time, the magazine has devoted itself entirely to a Western democracy — Britain.
What is it about Britain at present 'Thatcher's Britain', as all the contributors to Index are preoccupied with it being which justifies this singling out? It is not, as Index admits, that conditions in Britain are comparable with those in Eastern Europe or even in South Africa. The actual inci- dents complained of are mostly trivial. For example, Index reprints, over a full page, a poster of Mrs Thatcher dressed as a sadistic madame. Those who stuck up the poster were arrested and charged under the 1986 Public Order .Act. The case was dismissed. The same article complains of a case in which a man who shouted obscenities and made 'V' signs at No. 10 Downing Street was convicted for insulting behaviour. One would have to use the demented house- master's 'thin-end-of-the-wedge' argument to claim that these cases were likely to lead to the Gulag.
No, the contributors to Index use another argument beloved of house- masters: it's not so much what has actually been done, it's a question of attitude. According to Professor Ronald Dworkin, whose article sets the keynote, the Govern- ment is not despotic but, 'It shows a more mundane but still corrupting insensitivity to liberty, a failure to grasp its force and place in modem democratic ideals'. What is under attack, Professor Dworkin thinks, is 'the culture of liberty'.
What Professor Dworkin seems to mean by the culture of liberty is the liberty of the cultured. He accepts that the 'process of balancing, in society 'requires government to impose constraints', but he believes that there are some areas where constraints must not be applied: 'we insist that certain matters are nevertheless in principle ex- empt from balancing and regulation in this way; that government may not censor the opinions or regulate the convictions or tastes of individuals, or what they say or hear or read or write'. Lord (Roy) Jenkins makes a similar point. He holds it almost as a truism that governments are right to restrict house-building but not to direct academic endeavour. All the contributors to the issue agree in this. Not only do they think that liberty of thought, speech and writing are vitally important: they seem not to conceive of liberty as being in any way wider than these things. One could say, unkindly, that they are concerned with anything which restricts what they thinkers, writers — do, and not with any other restrictions at all. In this view of things, the atrocities of the last nine years are questions like the Spycatcher case, Lord Rees-Mogg, and the attempt to sup- press Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin. There is something self-indulgent about their attitude, as there is about the very idea of devoting a whole issue of the magazine to Britain.
Not that the contributors' worries are unfounded. Although they overdramatise the actions of the Government and show no understanding whatever of the moral case on the other side over questions like Spycatcher, they do identify bad and grow- ing tendencies of Mrs Thatcher's adminis- tration. They are right in detecting a bossiness and an instinctive dislike of critical expression. They are right to fear a nasty populism which sneers at those who stand up for the rights of the unpopular and blackguards those who, on occasions like the shootings in Gibraltar, question the means used to attain an end of which most people approve. They are particularly justified in complaining that the Govern- ment has a crude idea of the nature of `He's sent me a love ax.' independent institutions and no under- standing of the nature or importance of academic freedom. They could, in fact, have said a good deal more, as Auberon Waugh has recently done, about Mrs Thatcher's growing tendency to invent new laws to 'ban' anything which she does not like.
All these are the right worries for a magazine concerned with censorship, but the contributors choose to go further and talk about liberty as a whole, and here they are unfair to the Government and terribly limited in their view of liberty. Freedoms connected with money, property and work form part of the robe which is seamless with freedom of speech and thought. So do freedoms of the family from state interfer- ence, to choose which school one wants for one's children, to choose between compet- ing medical services rather than to be forced to accept a single, monolithic one. This Government has increased most of these freedoms where most of its recent predecessors have diminished them. In providing liberty, all the actions and choices open to people matter, not only those, important though they are, which are chiefly open to writers and intellec- tuals.
There is another point to be made about the 'culture of liberty'. Although liberty involves the fierce criticism of power, it should not normally involve the suspension of all civility. Too often nowadays this has happened. If demonstrations are now more ruthlessly policed it is partly because too many demonstrators are bent on violence. If there is now more effort to censor television it is because so many more programmes which television shows are barbarously disgusting. If there are more ferocious attempts to prosecute those who leak, it is partly because the sense of honour which normally prevented leaking has diminished. In a series of recent speeches, Mr Douglas Hurd has pointed to these areas of decline and argued convin- cingly both how important they are and how little government can do about them unaided. Liberty is iconoclastic, but not only iconoclastic. If the chief concern of thinkers and writers is to epater les bourgeois, they cannot be surprised if the bourgeoisie turns nasty.
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