01.08.2024

Vedder Highsmith ‘Corrupt legislation’ (1896)

Free speech, including for opponents

Labour has dumped Tory culture war ‘free speech’ legislation. Mike Macnair explains why any left promotion of speech control legitimises the imposition of speech controls by the right

On Friday July 26 the Labour government, in the person of higher education minister Bridget Phillipson, announced that it was annulling the commencement of the Tories’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act passed last year. The ‘official’ explanation offered is that

… there is widespread concern about the negative impact of the act from vulnerable groups. For example, there are fears that the legislation could protect those using hate speech on campuses, and that it could also push providers to overlook the safety and wellbeing of minority groups, including Jewish students.

There are also fears the act could expose higher education providers, like universities, to costly legal action that would impact teaching and learning.¹

‘Whitehall sources’ quoted by the press alleged that the act “would have opened the way for holocaust deniers to be allowed on campus, and was an ‘anti-Semite charter’” and that it “may have built a platform for people like Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, David Irving, a prominent holocaust denier, and Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch far-right Freedom Party, who was sworn into government earlier this month”.²

The decision was predictably welcomed by the ‘Russell Group’ of ‘elite’ universities, by the National Union of Students, by the Universities and Colleges Union - and by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Union of Jewish Students. It was, equally predictably, condemned by Tory spokespeople, the Tory press - notably a Times leader (July 29) - and by a variety of rightwing ‘free speech’ campaigners and groups.³

I put ‘free speech’ in scare-quotes here because, as I have argued before, the legislation was in fact carefully designed to protect conservative speech, while preserving cancellation and no-platforming for leftwing speech, anti-Zionist speech, and so on.⁴ Hence objections to it from the Board of Deputies and UJS have to be understood both as a silly failure to understand an act that was no more than a Tory culture-wars election scam, and as an objection to the principle of free speech on campus.

Board of Deputies

This Board of Deputies and UJS argument ought to be enough to prevent elements of the left arguing that the act should not have been dropped, because it “could protect those using hate speech on campuses” - that is, that it would block no-platforming initiatives against the far right, against ‘gender-critical feminists’, and so on.

‘Ought to be enough’, because it shows that the actual arguments are about opposing free speech as a principle, in order to maintain the government and mass media no-platforming campaign against anti-Zionists.

‘Ought to be’ rather than ‘is’, because the case of the Scottish ‘Hate crime and public order’ Act shows the Socialist Workers’ Party only three months ago playing the role of turkeys voting for an early Christmas on the question of free speech.⁵ It is perhaps noteworthy that the Morning Star has maintained a discreet silence on the decision to abandon commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, and the same seems at the time of writing to be true also of Socialist Worker.

It follows that the decision to abandon commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act should be welcomed - but not because we do not want to fight for freedom of speech or against ‘cancel culture’ or ‘no-platforming’.

Rather, it is to be welcomed because the HE(FS)A was like the Rwanda scheme: an entirely fraudulent waste of public money, for the benefit only of Conservative Party election campaigning through the support of the equally fraudulent Tory press. The impact assessment as of July 2022 costed the HE(FS)A at £45.4 million for introduction costs and £4.7 million a year running costs.⁶ This is a lot cheaper than the £700 million wasted on the Rwanda scheme,⁷ but the principle is identical: both schemes were public money wasted on Conservative Party spin operations, with context in both cases showing an absence of honest belief on the part of ministers in the schemes having real operational effects.

In the case of the Rwanda scheme, it purported to tackle public concern about immigration, while the Tory government was simultaneously intentionally (and massively) expanding net (legal) immigration - until 2024 on the explicit basis that, in ‘shortage occupations’, wage levels would be undercut.⁸

In the case of the HE(FS)A, the fact that the scheme would not actually protect free speech in universities can be demonstrated from the text of the act: in particular, that it protected only ‘lawful’ speech while leaving untouched the vastly over-broad definition of harassment under section 26 of the Equality Act 2010, which was and is the normal basis of ‘cancel culture’, and also subordinating the principle of free speech to the equally over-broad and indeterminate ‘Prevent duty’ to ‘prevent’ students being ‘drawn into extremism’ by subordinating speech at universities to the views of the security service about what counts as ‘extremism’.

But, although we should welcome getting rid of this scam, unlike the Board of Deputies and UJS, or the Russell Group, the UCU and NUS we should not welcome the continuation of the existing regime of speech controls at universities and elsewhere. On the contrary, we should be fighting for real defence of free speech, as opposed to the Tories’ sham defence.

Restating the why

It is worth restating why communists, and the workers’ movement more generally, need to fight unambiguously for free speech, including free speech for our opponents.

In the first place, we urgently need to develop effective collective decision-making for collective action. The ‘we’ here is, on the largest possible scale, and at the largest end of the problem, humans as a species. On the smaller, immediate and more immediately ‘actionable’ end of the problem, ‘we’ is the working class as a class, the workers’ movement, and the left as a component of that movement.

That humanity as a species needs to develop effective collective decision-making for collective action flows from the present threats to the habitability of the planet: from human-induced global warming; and from the USA’s apparent strategy to deal with it, by deindustrialising the rest of the world by military force (starting with Russia; Russia is merely on the road to war with China, and after China, Europe) in order to preserve the carbon emissions-intensive ‘American way of life’. The US approach threatens to lead to a generalised nuclear exchange, leading to a ‘nuclear winter’; or at best (if it succeeds) the ‘Somalification’ of the whole world outside the US.

It is perfectly clear that these problems cannot be solved within the framework either of the existing global system of states, whose competing economic and geostrategic interests prevent effective action on climate; or within the framework of capitalism as such, which both requires the system of competing states, and also requires random ‘growth’ (which means assuming the absence of natural limits) as its underlying ground of legitimacy.⁹

Humanity therefore needs - globally, and soon - to develop effective forms of collective decision-making that can allow planning of our common productive activities in ways consistent with human needs and with the natural limits that have become obvious, thanks to human-induced global warming; in such a way that we can supersede or limit both capitalist markets and the regime of multiple competing bureaucratic-coercive states.

What the political class and the advertising-funded media currently call ‘democracy’ is neither the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s version (“a constitution in which the free-born and poor control the government - being at the same time a majority”¹⁰) nor that of Abraham Lincoln: “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It is a plutocratic oligarchy, in which “the people” have an occasional opportunity to vote between two gangs of bribe-takers or to register a protest by voting for outsiders. And even this is subject to veto powers in the control of agenda-setting speech by the press barons, in the sale of private access to ministers and elected representatives by lobbying firms, and in the sale of justice by the free market in legal services. This regime (and the capitalist class rule that it expresses) is responsible for the threats of global warming and, in the alternative, of global war.

Trying to restore the old Stalinist regime - or the social democratic forms that capital allowed to the frontline European states in the cold war in order to stave off Stalinism - is not a serious alternative. The memory of what these regimes were really like is lost to the younger generation, with the result that there is a degree of nostalgia around for them. Understandable, given the disasters that have followed 1989-91. But it is important to remember that the Soviet bureaucratic leadership itself decided to collapse the regime and to restore capitalism: and that its constitutional regime meant that neither the enserfed ‘eastern’ working class nor anyone else was able to resist this collapse.

It collapsed the regime because of the plain irrationalities of its own system, in which bans on parties and factions, and controls on speech and communication, meant that no-one could contradict the self-serving lies of the officials and the managers with a view to keeping their jobs. Hence ‘planning’ was dominated by ‘garbage in, garbage out’ decision-making, ending with the workers’ joke that ‘they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’.

‘Planning irrationalities’ of this sort, though in a less extreme form, can be found in every regime that gives managers levers to control flows of information, enabling them to cover their arses: there are plenty of examples in the British public sector, in which press-driven ‘target’ regimes and ‘league tables’, combined with ‘marketisation’ and ‘cost centres’, have produced combinations of market and planning irrationalities. Bureaucratic regimes in the workers’ movement, including its left, similarly produce planning irrationalities through the officials clinging to their jobs, and hence refusing to admit mistakes, leading to degraded decision-making and dumbing down the membership.

Neither rule-of-law constitutionalism (falsely called ‘democracy’) nor bureaucratic-managerialist regimes are practically useful to solve the problem of planning human beings’ common productive activities - which we urgently need because of the dynamics of the 21st century. The same is true with equal force of the problems of the workers’ movement and the left; and this is something on which the left as a whole could by voluntary choices make an immediate difference.

Movement

The recent strike wave in Britain clearly displays the potential of working class solidarity. But it started from a very low baseline and has remained mainly as protest strikes rather than any real threat to force concessions. To overcome this problem requires a higher level of mobilisation of members of the unions; and this, in turn, requires them developing in their localities a sense that the union is really ‘their’ organisation, whose decisions they own - one that they can use as a vehicle of their own creativity.

In politics, we saw in 2015‑19 a mass Corbynite movement (hundreds of thousands joining the Labour Party in the hope that it might offer an escape from the stifling embrace of ‘sensible’ centre-ground politics), which ran very rapidly into the sand. It did so because the mass of Corbynistas placed undue trust in their top-table leadership. And these leaders were determined to preserve an alliance with the Labour right (which had the knives out for the left throughout) and for that purpose crushed any prospect of broad self-organisation of the new members through, for example, bureaucratic control of Momentum.

Further left, the norm of top-table-dominated rallies, and the forms of bureaucratic controls of communication, and bureaucratic procedural manipulations learned in the student unions and trade unions, dominate the political practice of the far left both inside and outside the Labour Party. The effect is, as with bureaucratic control in the trade unions and the Labour Party itself, to demobilise and to diseducate the ranks. This result serves capital.

There is, then, a strong practical need for alternative decision procedures that can involve everyone and allow local and sectoral self-government - in contrast both to rule-of-law constitutionalism and to bureaucratic management.

Freedom of speech and communication is a fundamental element of overcoming the managerialist regime and developing alternative decision-making procedures. Regimes of speech and communication control can be seen from the experience of the Soviet regime, and of the labour movement since the 1980s, to be immensely destructive and demobilising. Every regime of speech control entails that there must be a policeman or judge to enforce it: and that policeman/judge acts in their own interest at the expense of those below. In the workers’ movement, the policeman/judge is the labour bureaucracy: visible, for example, in the 2009 ‘Unison monkey trial’, in which SPEW activists were accused of racism for the benefit of the Unison bureaucracy.¹¹

To this must be added that any left promotion of speech control regimes legitimises the imposition of such controls by the right. This is visible in Ron de Santis’s Florida attack on freedom of speech at universities.¹² Visible, equally, in the anti-Semitism smear campaign. The success of this campaign in capturing the German Die Linke and subsequently in ‘doing’ the Corbyn movement has led to its extension, both geographically, and in point of time, and towards smearing opposition to capitalism as such (not merely anti-Zionism or anti-imperialism) as anti-Semitic.¹³

This point, of course, brings us back to the Labour government’s reasons for rejecting the HE(FS)A - that is, to defend and maintain the government and mass media no-platforming campaign based on the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear.

The anti-Semitism smear campaign is presumably orchestrated by some part of the security service or related agencies (otherwise the mass media would not be quite as unanimous as they have been on it). But it is a campaign primarily run through the mass media. This illustrates a point that has been made by Slavko Splichal, and which I have also made myself: that is, that freedom of the press and freedom of speech are counterposed ideas.¹⁴ ‘Freedom of the press’ is the freedom of concrete concentrations of capital - newspapers, TV stations, social media sites and so on - over those below them. It is thus analogous to, in Magna Carta, the freedom of the English church in chapter 1, or the freedom of the barons from royal jurisdiction ‘taking away their courts’ in chapter 34: in both cases freedom to tyrannise over those below.

For example, trans rights activists no-platforming ‘gender-critical feminists’ are actually campaigns supported by quite small minorities. The same is, in reality, true of Zionist students’ complaints of ‘harassment’ by the existence of anti-Israel resolutions in student Labour Clubs (the February 2016 first step in the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign) or by Palestine protests. Why do university bureaucracies treat them seriously?

The answer is partly the impact of section 26 of the Equalities Act 2010, which defines ‘harassment’ in a way inconsistent with the continued existence of freedom of speech. But it is also because the impact of these minority actions is played up as a threat by the advertising-funded media in the interests of their funders and in the interests of the Conservative Party in its attempt to copy US Republicans’ culture-wars frauds. This media amplification then leads universities’ ‘image managers’ to try to make the adverse publicity go away.

Freedom of the press is not the same as freedom of speech. It is freedom to amplify speech - by way of the capital assets employed, of copyright, which was introduced in order to facilitate political control of the press, and of advertising revenue as subsidising the operation. It is thus freedom of the amplified speaker to drown out contrary points of view. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that MPs were allowed to bring public address systems into the parliament chamber, or lawyers to bring PA systems into court, to drown out their opponents. No real debate could take place. And, for instance, the USA has used amplification as a military weapon.¹⁵

This phenomenon of freedom of the press as the freedom to use amplification to drown opposing points of view is intimately linked with the phenomenon of political corruption. I made this point 18 years ago, in response to the ‘sleaze’ stories round the Blair government: as long as the capitalists control the large bulk of the media, politicians will be forced to take bribes and engage in dodgy dealings (to depend on capitalist donations) in order to get favourable media coverage.¹⁶ The destruction of the Corbyn movement and its replacement by the business-funded securocrat, Sir Keir Starmer, at the head of Labour is a symptom. Also a symptom is the inability even of the Starmer leadership to call out the Tories on their lies about taxes and so on until after Labour had won the election.

The advertising-funded media - as Karl Kautsky called it in 1905, the “käufliche Presse” (the ‘buyable press’) - is a pillar of the regime of political corruption, through which capital (in its money form as a necessary phase of the circuit M‑C‑P‑Cʹ‑Mʹ) rules. Not the only pillar: it stands alongside direct donations to politicians both before and (in Blair’s case) after office, the commercial lobbying industry, the sale and denial of justice through the free market in legal services, and so on.

What to do?

The CPGB’s Draft Programme in its 2023 version contains this subsection on these issues - 3.1.2. Freedom:

The interests of the working class require the open struggle of ideas and the ability to freely organise.

herefore communists demand:

Unrestricted freedom of speech, publication, conscience, association and assembly.

An end to state bans and censorship. No laws against ‘hate speech’, which will inevitably be turned against the workers’ movement and the left.

No bans on controversial organisations and individuals in civil society institutions, such as universities and student unions. Bigoted and reactionary viewpoints must be fought in the open, not via bureaucratic no-platform, safeguarding or safe spaces policies.

Oppose state secrets. Demand free access to all state files, cabinet papers, diplomatic agreements, etc.

Abolish copyright laws, patents and other so-called intellectual property rights.

Socialisation of internet service providers, public cloud infrastructure and other natural monopolies in communications. An end to the corruption of advertising-funded media.

It is worth repeating my argument in 2006 in support of the last of these points - “An end to the corruption of advertising-funded media”.

Capitalist control

The problem of capitalist control of the mass media was discussed widely in the Labour Party in the 1970s and 80s. These Labour left discussions generally pointed towards the sort of nationalist regulatory regimes of control of media ownership found in some continental countries. It should be clear enough that this leads only to a form of censorship and does not affect the underlying capitalist control of the press.

It is a widespread belief among people influenced by anarchism that the internet provides the solution, replacing centralised media by decentralised and ‘networked’ arrangements. But the web’s infrastructural core involves capital investment comparable to railways. The Chinese government has shown that considerable state control of internet content is possible; more generally, the web has moved towards full commercial control and towards censorship of content (with the US Democrats gung-ho advocates).

The democratic-republican solution to the problem of capitalist ownership is not media nationalisation. It is to eliminate capitalist subsidies to news media, both directly and in the form of commercial advertising. If the media were forced to rely on sales, subscriptions, individual donations and those subsidies that could be obtained from supporting political parties for the whole of its income, it might well be the case that there would still be a mass market for Tory media - even after the working class had taken power in the form of a democratic republic and the accompanying destruction of the deeper structures of the capitalists’ political power. There would certainly be a niche market for it. But this would not in itself be a form of capitalist political power, since it would not be political power created by the ownership of the means of production.

There is, of course, no immediate practical chance of obtaining legislation against subsidies from capitalist business and from commercial advertising in news media. But what certainly is possible, because it has been done before, is for the workers’ movement to break the capitalist monopoly of the means of information. To do so does not mean in the first place setting up a competing commercial national daily, run by the Labour or trade union bureaucracy or their nominees: this has been tried before and the result is utterly boring. The core of the answer is to revive democratic face-to-face and door-to-door politics at the base: the original basis of the workers’ movement and a practice still successfully exploited by the Lib Dems and the Greens.

But to do this requires breaking with the control of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in local party politics and in the unions themselves. And it requires abandoning the illusion that it is possible to get a democratic and pro-worker government through playing the game dictated by the capitalist-controlled media.

More than anything else, it requires the struggle for a workers’ party which is able to openly identify the capitalist character of the media and the extent to which this corrupts political life in general. That in turn implies a party that is willing to be anti-constitutional and to stand openly for the working class to take political power. In other words, a Communist Party.

I noted earlier the silence of both the Morning Star and Socialist Worker on the suspension of the HE(FS)A.¹⁷ This embarrassed silence reflects the managerialist character of both organisations. Hence their failure to grasp that both proposing a serious alternative to capitalism and overcoming the decline and demoralisation of the workers’ movement require open campaigning for freedom of speech and against managerialist and bureaucratic speech controls.

And the first step to any serious struggle is to make the far left Marxist and communist in its real aims, not just in names or pretensions.

. educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/07/26/free-speech-act-what-you-need-to-know. See also the Office for Students press release at www.gov.uk/government/news/government-watchdog-to-help-stabilise-university-finances.↩︎
. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv2gj1x11nmo; www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/26/education-secretary-shelves-university-free-speech-law.↩︎
. See the articles cited above in note 2 – and, in addition: www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jul/26/labour-halts-tory-law-freedom-of-speech-universities-education; and news.sky.com/story/controversial-free-speech-law-delayed-over-anti-semitism-fears-13185403; and afcomm.org.uk/2024/07/27/freedom-of-speech-act-suspended (the ‘Campaign for Academic Freedom’ of Nigel Biggar et al); and www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/26/labour-has-just-betrayed-a-generation-of-young-people (Tory peer Claire Fox - formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party and Spiked).↩︎
. ‘No-platforming fraud’ Weekly Worker June 24 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1353/no-platforming-fraud); ‘Knavery and folly’ June 8 2023 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1446/knavery-and-folly).↩︎
. ‘Further criminalising speech’ Weekly Worker April 18 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1487/further-criminalising-speech).↩︎
. ‘Updated impact assessment’ June 14 2022, at bills.parliament.uk/bills/2862/publications.↩︎
. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1rw47l2xxgo.↩︎
. www.gov.uk/government/publications/statement-of-changes-to-the-immigration-rules-hc-1160-9-march-2023/immigration-rules-salary-changes-impact-assessment-accessible; www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67623131 (December 5 2023).↩︎
. See, for example, Michael Roberts, ‘Capitalism is the cause of, not the solution to, runaway climate change’ Weekly Worker October 18 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1223/capitalism-is-the-cause-of-not-the-solution-to-run); J Conrad, ‘Climate change and system change’, September 5 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1265/climate-change-and-system-change); and numerous other articles in this paper, as well as a mass of literature elsewhere. On the narrower point that capitalism “requires the system of competing states”, see my series of supplements entitled ‘Imperialism and the state’ Weekly Worker March 17, 24, April 7, 14, 2022; from a pro-capitalist point of view, the point that capitalism needs multiple competing states is argued by W Scheidel in Escape from Rome: the failure of empire and the road to prosperity Princeton 2019.↩︎
. E Barker (trans) Politics 1290b, Oxford 1948, p193.↩︎
. ‘The Unison monkey trial’ Weekly Worker September 10 2009 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/784/the-unison-monkey-trial).↩︎
. C Mudde, ‘What is behind Ron DeSantis’s Stop-Woke Act?’ The Guardian February 6.↩︎
. Googling ‘anti-capitalism anti-Semitism’ produces 776,000 hits. On one ‘left’ version of the theoretical claims underlying this smear, see M Sommer Anti-Postone Cosmonaut Press 2022.↩︎
. S Splichal Principles of publicity and press freedom Lanham MD 2002; M Macnair, ‘Marxism and freedom of communication’ Critique No37 (2009), pp565-77.↩︎
. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-40090809.↩︎
. ‘Sleaze is back’ Weekly Worker July 20 2006 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/634/sleaze-is-back).↩︎
. ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’ is also, so far, silent; The Socialist and the AWL’s Western Solidarity are currently on their summer holidays.↩︎