The other day I gave a presentation and ran a mini-workshop on social justice and community development for the Policy Forum at CILIP (formerly the Library Association). One illustration of community development I referred to was the recent television series about the 'Unsung Town', which describes some of the process of using singing to stimulate connections, collective involvement and a sense of achievement in South Oxhey, an area I know well.
We know that what happenened there is community development because a committee for the choir has been formed and last week appears to have taken an independent political decision: it was offered a £1,000 grant by a county councillor and declined it:
“We’ve worked really hard as a group to be inclusive of everybody and promote an ethnically diverse choir. We don’t feel the BNP shares those values so, as a group, we decided to turn the money down.”
It's an example of the leaky lamplight of community development falling for a moment on big shadowy issues of social justice. For a new and probably inexperienced group it may well have been a challenge and they dealt with it, and will be the stronger.
All round the country today there will have been people in homes, workplaces, colleges, online and elsewhere, discussing the appearance of the leader of the British National Party on BBC television last night.
That discussion will be based around the man's tawdry opinions of other members of the species, and people will be airing thoughts on spikey political issues of racism, homophobia and blunt prejudice, which politics generally discourages them from exploring. So perhaps that's a good thing. Sound points about the representativeness of the audience from Philip Norton here.
The event has reminded us that we have a version of public service broadcasting which is intimately related to open democracy (even if it doesn't always do it very well).
It's been surprising the number of commentators who seem ready to overlook the inconvenience of the formal elected status of BNP representatives (including in South Oxhey). This is only good insofar as it highlights how unsatisfactory the electoral system is to more and more people. I suppose it also illustrates how we still struggle with the tension between the right to freedom of speech - for a party with a given level of representation, in public debate - and the right to be protected from racism and homophobia.
We still get confusions, like the hapless example of Yale University Press, who decided to cut the images when publishing Jytte Klausen's book on those Danish cartoons. But hey, what are centuries of debate and insight into the nature of democracy and freedom of speech to a committee at a university press? (Among the various explorations, see eg here).
Many years ago I wrote an essay on 'Freedom of access to information' (published in this volume: can't find electronic version) in which I made a point about how freedom of speech does not necessarily trump other freedoms or rights, such as the right to be protected from racist material. Or as Klausen herself puts it in an interview for Islam Online,
'Free speech does not give license to say racist things about other people or to incite violence.'
But. What interests me about discussion around last night's Question Time appearance is that so much of it still implies that one right demonstrably always trumps the other. I'm not implying that the example of Yale is directly comparable - I'm not saying that those who sought to stop the broadcast were comparable to the YUP committee. But democracy is surely going to be better when the source of dispute is there for all to see and the views expressed for all to hear, and when we feel empowered by the system to develop and discuss our own views.
For myself, I'm far less comfortable with the idea that the BBC might have denied voice to elected representatives, distasteful as their views may be, than I am with the prospect of lots of people hearing the threadbare BNP views widely broadcast and vigorously challenged, with the likelihood that more people will think more deeply about them. The latter is a much-needed if faint sign of democratic robustness.
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