Taking Liberties

Snap

The Counter Terrorism Act (2008) passed into law this week, and to celebrate, 300 photographers gathered outside of Scotland Yard. In the National Union of Journalists' view, clause 76 of this act may make it a criminal offence to take a photograph of a police officer, if it is 'likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'. Taken along with section 44 of the Terrorism Act, the NUJ is worried that there are increasing threats to their right to report on the police. Dame Stella Rimington might agree (the Home Office doesn't).

Changing tack slightly, photography is one of those issues that divides people, not least because of the ease of digital dissemination I alluded to yesterday. It's one thing taking a snap of someone, or being snapped by them, and slowly turning yellow in an old photoalbum; it's another being plastered over somewhere like Flickr, and perhaps even being used in someone's marketing campaign. I took a photo of Regent's Canal on the weekend, and a couple were in the shot. The woman demanded to know where the picture was going (deleted, as it happens - and no, I'm not posting it here).

On the other hand, a fortnight ago, I walked by Primrose Hill in the snow with my camera, and happened to bump (almost literally) into the pop singer Lily Allen. I think she thought I was a paparazzo, and practically demanded that I take a photograph (I think she'd got to the top of the charts and was keen to milk the moment).

Some of this isn't as new as all that. Early photography was given an economic fillip by prints of the stars. And, centre stage in the exhibition section dealing with the Chartists, is a wonderful enlargement of the Great Chartist Demonstration of 1848. I think you can even spot a police officer.

Papers, please?

I popped down to the gallery this afternoon to check on something (it was packed, perhaps something to do with it being the last two weeks of the show?), and I was asked about the controversy surrounding a recent film and freedom of speech by a visitor.

I suspect that the balance between various freedoms is particularly actute at the moment at this point: privacy, public order, and the right to self-expression are often in conflict or a state of tension, and the spaces in which we can say things (and talk about saying things) are arguably freer, more democratic and more worrisome to various authorities than ever before. YouTube, the ever-expanding commentary sections of papers, blogs and even Twitter are vastly different spaces from the polite letters pages of the broadsheets (adieu, "Sir,", hello "WTF"). The traditional media is still there of course, as are the paparazzi, and the slogans and posters of the street protest (we've got at least three such posters in the show, from the Levellers' Petition, which may have been paraded through the streets of London, via a suffragette banner, to a recent gay rights poster). All of these can be magnified online, and disseminated in digital form as never before.

Perhaps it's no wonder that governments and Home Secretaries get a bit worried about such things. And the recent barring of a controversial Dutch MP made me think about how are borders are, and have been, policed, even as the internet seems to be breaking down borders. It's also instructive to walk around the exhibits, and realise how many of the authors of the items were forced into exile at one point or another, either fleeing Britain, or finding sanctuary here. Sun Yatsen, John Locke, Rousseau and Tom Paine are just some of those who had to make themselves scarce for one reason or another (although Paine could argue he was leaving Britain in 1792 to take up his seat in the French National Convention). There are no doubt others. One of the the cases that I wish we could have fitted in was to be of passports through the ages. Perhaps next time.

Sir John Mortimer: I rest my case

Sir John Mortimer, the barrister, writer and playwright, has died, at the age of 85.

It doesn’t seem that long since I saw him enjoying a drink in a north London pub after he had been performing ‘Mortimer’s Miscellany’. As well as creating the immortal ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, Sir John was a resolute campaigner for liberty, particularly against literary censorship.

Initially, however, his legal practice flourished on the back of his talent for winning divorce cases. But following divorce law reform, he reinvented himself as a criminal barrister, with a great ability to undermine ‘expert’ witnesses, particularly when it came to the macabre evidence of blood stains.

This could not have prepared him for the furore of the Oz trial in 1971. He defended the three editors of the satirical hippy magazine who had allowed a lewdly adulterated comic strip of Rupert Bear to appear in their pages. Recordings of the trial and campaign material are on display in the exhibition.

In this, and other cases, such as his defence of the Sex Pistols, he was a great defender of free speech, and of the idea that lawyers should act as guardians of freedom.

While being interviewed about ‘Mortimer’s Miscellany’, Sir John worried that our civil liberties had been ‘eroded to about 20 years before Magna Carta’. Again, something else that’s on display...

Blowing the trumpet for whistle-blowers

Deep Throat has died. Mark Felt, a former FBI official, ‘slipped away’ in his sleep last night. In 2005 he admitted that he was ‘the guy they used to call Deep Throat’: the man who gave reporters from the Washington Post the inside information about President Nixon’s abuse of presidential powers which led to his resignation in August 1974.

Mr Felt, it is reported, struggled for years with the feeling that he had betrayed the FBI with his leak, and was called a traitor by many for ‘betraying’ his Commander-in-Chief. For others, he was a hero, blowing the whistle on corruption at the highest level.

Leaks and whistle-blowing are not limited to the continental USA – and the English Civil War might be said to have begun because of an abuse of executive authority. The penultimate case in the exhibition – the section on Freedom of Speech and Belief – has several British 20th-century examples: Compton Mackenzie’s memories of the secret service during World War I, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (a Danish edition), and Spies for Peace’s uncovering of post-nuclear attack military government.

Freedom of Information and the Human Rights Act has changed the balance of power somewhat in the UK. But there are other ideas out there, some vastly more radical, some possibly unworkable. Open Source Government, for example, is based on the idea of radical transparency.

In the current absence of such neo-liberal, technocratic utopias, we can thank people like Mr Felt – and wonder if, locally, we are lacking the same responsible, but acutely scrutinising Fourth Estate that broke the Watergate scandal.

John who?

Today is a birthday: John Milton, the poet and polemicist, is 400.

Milton railed against the tyranny of the rhyme and the tyranny of wicked kings and, in Paradise Lost, created perhaps the supreme poetical achievement in the English language.

Today, his anniversary has been marked not so much by celebration as a series of questions about why he has rather dropped off the cultural map in modern Britain. Is his poetry too hard, was he too much of a grim misogynist, did TS Eliot and FR Leavis see him off, or was he simply on the wrong side of the Civil War?

When I showed the MP David Heath around the exhibition last week, his eyes were drawn to Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), the supreme and original defence of the freedom of the press and cradle of liberal thought. A copy, he remarked, had been passed from one Liberal leader to the next. This may explain why there were early calls for this to be in the exhibition at the LibDem conference.

There are other contemporary Miltonian influences, some of them rather indirect. We may have the poet to thank for brilliantly foul-mouthed political satire The Thick of It, since the writer Armando Iannucci’s post-graduate study of Paradise Lost drove him to a career in comedy. And there would be no His Dark Materials series without the poet.

Finally, those with an interest in psychogeography can visit the Taking Liberties web editor's excellent Google ‘Milton Map’.

On your bike, law lords tell Met

When is a protest not a protest? The answer, according a recent judgement by the law lords, is whether it is ‘commonly or customarily held’. At least this is the case for the Critical Mass bike ride, which twelve times a year slowly rolls from London’s South Bank on the last Friday of the month, cheering cyclists, annoying some drivers, and bemusing tourists.

The ride is, as Lord Phillips stated in a ruling yesterday, a ‘customary procession’ and is exempt from the notification requirements of the Public Order Act 1986. Since the ride has no organiser, leader or preordained route, there was no need to notify the Met. The evidence also showed that the Met have been able to police the ride without difficulty. At the last ride I went on, there weren’t even any uniformed police present, and apart from a minicab of city boys annoyed that they were being delayed getting to their strip club for a bachelor party. There wasn’t much sympathy in the group I was with.

Lord Phillips also made the point that the Public Order Act was never intended to undermine the right to hold processions and protests. As an earlier blog entry suggested, laws can be applied in ways that Parliament never originally intended, particularly in terms of the right to protest and free speech. This ruling may set a precedent against such restrictions by stealth.

Of course, the ride may not even be a protest, but just a chance to ride with friends through the centre of London. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

You have a right to privacy. Unless it sells papers

I’m not sure where I stand on the balance between the right to privacy and freedom of speech; my instinct veers towards the freedom of speech – after all, I do post to a blog.

But on the other hand, it’s unlikely that anyone will be rifling through my dustbin or hunkered down outside my widow with a telephoto lens. The clause in the Human Rights Act dealing with privacy is also hard to argue with: ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’.

In his recent speech Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, spoke in favour of the press’s ability to expose the failings of ‘crooks, the liars, the cheats, the rich and the corrupt’. He worries that the Human Rights and the Scottish Acts, which implement the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, have introduced ‘a privacy law by the back door’.

There is a lot to debate in all of this: the balance between competing rights; the role of the judiciary and parliament; the powers of the High Court, the HRA and the common law; the politics of the HRA; whether the law should be concerned with public or private morality (a point addressed in the Wolfenden Report)... these are just some of the issues.

Many of them are helpfully investigated in Eric Barendt, Freedom of Speech, 2nd ed (Oxford, 2005; BL shelfmark YC.2007.a.10292). These matters are the meat and potatoes, I’m sure, of law and journalism courses across the land, as well as discussion in Westminster.

This balance between the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression is examined in greater detail in the Taking Liberties exhibition's interactive, online as well as at St Pancras. There is also the chance to see texts and manuscripts from the battle to report on parliament during the 18th century.

What struck me as interesting in the speech was Dacre’s warning that if the press could not rummage around in the gutter in search of scandal, then newspaper circulations would fall, undermining their ability to play a role in the democratic and political process. It raises the question about the costs – or financing – of democracy. He offered France as a comparison, where the print media is subsidised and doesn’t have the same predominance in the public sphere.

It is a revealing, and somewhat obvious target. And one that may not hit the mark with much force, given the cultural importance placed on familial privacy in France, the importance of regional papers, the excellence of Le Monde, the importance of the sports papers, and, crucially, the cost of print and distribution. The latter may be more of a factor in the weakness of the French press than reluctance to snoop around the Élysée Palace.

A more interesting comparison may have been Japan, which can boast the largest circulation of quality newspapers in the world. The Yomiuri Shimbun, the pre-eminent centre-right daily, for example, has a circulation of 14 million. In a country where papers tend to be delivered to the door, rather than sold by newsagents, most people surveyed consider newspapers to be a ‘necessary’ and ‘reliable’ source of information. That said, there have been recent moves to introduce privacy laws; foreign journalists are often denied access to official ‘kinsha’ press clubs; many people admit to buying papers for just the sport and TV pages; and several big stories have been broken by the racier magazines rather than the dailies (which are often closely linked to big business or politics). The Japanese papers' Canon of Journalism (2000) is worth a read, not least the section about freedom and responsibility.