The cultural boycott of Russia
... and other stories
What follows is a summary of all the quirkier stories that appeared this week in relation to free speech, censorship, cancel culture, identity politics and other more general acts of hubris and folly, not just in Britain, but around the world. If this new venture goes well, I might do more of them...
The cultural boycott of Russia
As the civilian death toll mounts, and evidence of possible Russian war crimes starts to emerge, it’s entirely understandable that Western cultural institutions would want to show solidarity with Ukraine and its people. Perhaps that’s why an impromptu cultural boycott that began almost as soon as Russian tanks rolled into the country has gained such momentum. Coca-Cola and Starbucks have now joined McDonald’s in closing their Russian stores, ITV have pulled I’m a Celebrity… from Russian airwaves, Disney, Warner Bros and Sony have shelved all theatrical releases in the country, and EA sports are slowly airbrushing every Russian football team from FIFA videogames. Much more of this, we say to ourselves, and Russia will soon be one of the healthiest, happiest, most emotionally well-adjusted countries in the world.
But there’s an unpleasant undertone of McCarthyite paranoia to much of what’s happening beyond these headline grabbing corporate gestures.
Despite backing various online petitions against the invasion, for instance, Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov recently had his new film, No Looking Back, dropped by the Glasgow Film Festival. Why? Because he’d previously received funding from his government (show me a filmmaker anywhere in the world who hasn’t…). Elsewhere, the artistic director of the Vancouver Recital Society, Leila Getz, summarily cancelled a performance by Alexander Malofeev, a 20-year-old Russian pianist with no known links to the Russian state because she could not “in good conscience present a concert by any Russian artist at this moment in time unless they are prepared to speak out publicly against the war”. Are you now, or have you ever during kindergarten been, a member of Putin’s inner circle, young Alexander? The British-based Russian State Opera – whose name no doubt seemed rather a clever bit of branding once upon a time – has also suffered a string of cancelled performances across the UK
Can free speech flourish where societies are gripped by a vague sense that certain people are a bit too, well, “Russian-y”, to be allowed full access to public and cultural life? One suspects not. As Tom Slater reminds us over in Spiked (8 March), “Russian artists are not the enemy, just as Russian citizens are not the enemy. To hold them somehow responsible for the crimes of their government is ugly, discriminatory and wrong”.
The Online Clegg-ulatory system
Former Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Nick Clegg, has finally returned his parliamentary pass, a mere five years after having left Parliament, reports the Mail Online (6 March). Clegg was appointed Vice-President of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook (now Meta) in 2018, a year after losing his Sheffield Hallam seat at the 2017 general election. Last month, he was promoted to President of Global Affairs, a role with equivalent seniority to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg.
The Mail on Sunday first reported that Clegg retained a security pass back in April, 2021. Apparently, he only agreed to relinquish it after being contacted by the newspaper (although Parliament say it remained active as recently as December 2021). These passes give unfettered access to Parliament’s restaurants and bars, including MP-only areas. Category X pass holders, as they’re known, aren’t required to register their financial interests either.
The news comes as the Online Safety Bill – a piece of draft legislation that’s been designed to regulate social media companies precisely like Meta – is about to be presented to Parliament for its third reading. As both the Times and the Mail reported last month, Clegg is now at the centre of a Whitehall leak inquiry after Ministers raised concerns that he may have been receiving “secret information” about the specifics of governmental plans for regulating big-tech giants. It’s certainly true that Meta recently published an array of suspiciously specific sounding job openings for policy and legal experts to join the company’s lobbying team and work under… yep, that’s right – none other than Sir Nick himself. According to the Mail, however, a spokeperson for the Cleggulator said that he hadn’t used his pass while he had it. So that’s alright, then.
A penny for your thoughts…
Is the global financial system the latest battleground in the fight to defend freedom of speech? Sarah McLellan, writing in Spectator Australia, seems to think so (7 March). Citing Jesse Powell, Chief Executive of Kraken Bitcoin Exchange, she argues that “the traditional financial system has essentially been weaponised” and that when an individual is denied full access to that system on account of their political views it’s “tantamount to [a loss of] free speech”
It’s an interesting claim. As Ramesh Thakur points out in that same publication (Spectator Australia, 5 March), it’s certainly no longer unusual to see states attempting to curtail the liberty of particular “individuals of interest” through their country’s banking system: in 2019, for instance, the Russian government froze bank accounts linked to opposition politician Alexei Navalny; then, in February 2022, Canada froze the bank accounts of anti-vaccine mandate protestors, with Deputy Canadian PM Chrystia Freeland going on to make clear that banks would be asked to freeze the personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests, with no due process, no appeals process and no court order necessary.
The good news is that in order to do that sort of thing properly, governments would need to do away with cash and establish central banks capable of managing entirely digital currencies. The bad news is that China is leading the way in developing exactly that type of Central Bank Digital Currency (or CBDC); a currency that would enable governments to surveil the (im)morality of their citizens’ activities, and, where necessary – that is, where certain forms of “bad behaviour” were suspected – cut them off from their financial lifelines and supports. The really bad news, however, is that in 2020, the European Central Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the central banks of Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, got together and created a working group to study the CBDC, focusing on economic, technological, and architectural issues. Hmm.
Private school downgraded by Ofsted for being too woke
According to Ofsted’s own statistics, one in every three of the schools it rates as “requires improvement” finds it impossible to improve to “good” or “outstanding” in the near-term – in fact, 6% actually end up declining still further, eventually reaching the level of “inadequate” … all of which is probably bad news if you’re the parent of a child at the £32,600-a-year American School in London.
“Britain’s most expensive school” – as the Mail Online seems to take great delight in calling it – has just been told by Ofcom that it “requires improvement”. In part, that rating is the result of the school’s “woke” agenda. Ofsted’s damning report found, for instance, that “teaching places… more weight on the school’s approach to social justice than on learning subject-specific knowledge”, that “not everyone felt they are able to express their views freely in class” and that “alternative opinions are not felt welcome”. This, by the way, is exactly why the Free Speech Union successfully campaigned for stronger rules against classroom indoctrination.
Thankfully, Robin Appleby, the £400k-a-year former head who introduced much of the school’s woke agenda, resigned last November citing a need to “focus on her own wellbeing”. We wish her a speedy recovery from her white fragility.
Sceptical SAGE member told to “correct his comments”
Remember that now notorious – “next slide, please” – 10 Downing Street coronavirus press conference of 21 September 2020 in which – “next slide, please” – the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, Sir Patrick Vallance, said – “next slide, please” – that, “we think that the epidemic is doubling roughly every seven days"? Those of us who subscribe to Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic site could scarcely have missed it. It turns out, though, that Toby wasn’t the only person looking askance at his television screen whilst Sir Vallance and his glamorous assistant, Sir Chris Whitty, presented their “graph of doom”.
Professor Woolhouse is a senior epidemiologist with over 25 years’ worth of experience advising the government about infectious diseases. He felt “there was a lot wrong” with the projection. “If this projection had been extended for another week,” he explained to Sky News (7 March), “we would [have been] talking about one hundred thousand cases per day. Another month would have given us close to half a million. Per day. An exponential projection”, he added, “will give you any number you like if you run it for long enough”.
Quite so.
In his new book, The Year the World Went Mad, he goes on to make the claim that his subsequent “objections did not go down well” and that, after a flurry of emails between him and his colleagues, “[he] was invited to 'correct' [his] comments”.
It’s true, of course, that Professor Woolhouse has a book to promote – or “flog” as we professionals like to say – which means there’s a risk he’s putting a little bit too much top-spin on this backhand in order to try and force a dramatic, down-the-line winner. Frankly, I find the claim that the invitation for him to “correct his views” was passed on by a “messenger” and that, as a result, he “cannot [now] be sure precisely where in the system it originated” a little hard to believe.
That said, the book will be rather gratifying for lockdown sceptics. It makes all the points that we were making two years ago, but now, all of a sudden, with the publication of this book, they’re being made by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about – well, by a member of SAGE’s epidemiological modelling team, at any rate. There’s also much about his account that simply “feels right” given what we already know about the ways in which scientists who refused to accept the “established facts” or – even more nebulously – the “settled science”, had their views stifled or suppressed during the pandemic.
Stop press: The Daily Sceptic have just published a review of the book by long time contributor, Guy de la Bédoyère. He thinks it’s worth reading, but then he would, wouldn’t he? He’s been making many of the same points for the past two years.
The politics of censorship
Former Judge of the High Court and Court of Appeal, Stephen Sedley, has a wonderful review of Christopher Hilliard’s A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England in the latest issue of the London Review of Books (10 March). Hilliard is principally concerned with the centuries long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality, although Sedley’s review is full of fascinating and timely insights for anyone who’s interested in defending online free speech.
According to Sedley, a “gradual loosening of censorial restrictions” in this country was brought about not by lawmakers and judges, but by individuals who were prepared to risk their liberty on behalf of creative freedom. Maybe so, but he does rather undermine that claim by proceeding to fill us in on all the backroom, judicial gossip from the trial of the editors of the notorious 1970 “School Kids Issue” of Oz. Although the jury in the first trial convicted, the editors were subsequently acquitted on appeal, and Sedley speculates that their success may well have owed less to the apparently brilliant advocacy of their QC, John Mortimer, than to what happened whilst the three appeal judges were deliberating in private. Mr Justice James apparently remarked that far worse “stuff” could be freely bought half a mile away in Soho, and when the other two appeal judges, Lord Chief Justice Widgery and Mr Justice Bridge, expressed credulity, he sent his clerk off with £20 to see what could be found. The clerk returned an hour later with an armful of hard porn, and, as Sedley puts it, “the case was over”.
In any case, is the “gradual loosening of censorial restrictions” to which he refers guaranteed to continue indefinitely? As government pressure on major online-tech companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for “content moderation solutions” to the problems of what, in old Hilliard money, we might describe as the “obscenity” generated by users of platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Will the content moderation solutions they come up with be capable of making truly objective, unbiased, politically impartial decisions as to what to ban, block or shadow-ban? Again, Sedley offers a timely reminder as to the human fallibility baked into any and all systems of censorship. During the 1950s and 60s, a QC by the name of Mervyn Griffiths-Jones regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on possible obscenity cases. One day a colleague asked him how he decided what advice to give. “I don’t know anything about literary merit”, he shot back. “I just read what the director sends me, and if I get an erection we prosecute”.
More, please.
With the Covid baloney starting to abate (globally, that is, less so in Aus), time to turn our attention back to the other lunacies out there. You'll be doing this for the rest of your life, I fear.