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When we're afraid to trash a religion or three we're lost
The one thing that unites British society, or ought to unite it, or used to, is a love of freedom. It is a love of freedom that informs the best of British philosophy, political thought and social reform, as well as British inventiveness, eccentricity and comedy. It is also a love of freedom that has drawn foreigners to this country, in preference to other places.
People's deep respect for freedom here is something I've taken for granted, for as long as I can remember. Perhaps, however, I've been mistaken.
In retrospect it seems to me that many freedoms have been gradually eroded here - in particular, freedom of speech. It is not just that it has been curtailed in some ways, both by law and by the politically correct thought control that has overtaken public services and education.
Worse still, perhaps, the unthinking presumption in favour of free speech, the unexamined respect for it, has itself become weaker. The wish to silence people and a pusillanimous willingness to be silenced, both legally and socially, have been growing stronger.
Traditionally, the standard British form when anyone said anything monstrous was to mutter about defending to the death his right to say it. There are so many excellent reasons for taking this line that it is hard to know where to start. One is that if people freely say what they think, then you know them for what they are, and you can publicly denounce them and their views. But now, increasingly, when someone says something seriously offensive there are cries on all sides not only to bully him into silence, but to pass a law to make it illegal for anyone to say anything of the kind.
Last week Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, said some very offensive things about Islam and Muslims on television in an undercover documentary. For example, he described Islam as a "wicked and vicious faith" which teaches that Muslim men can have any infidel women they can take by force or by guile. In the programme he claimed, inaccurately, that he could go to jail for talking like that. In fact he was wrong.
Trashing a religion, or religious beliefs, or people who hold certain beliefs, is not against the law. Not yet. But sure enough, cries went up all round for there to be a law against it. To be more precise, there were calls for David Blunkett to hurry up and produce the legislation he has promised to make incitement to religious hatred illegal.
The Muslim Council of Britain said that the programme underlined the urgent need for the government to introduce legislation not only outlawing incitement to religious hatred but ensuring that it is unlawful to discriminate against anyone on religious grounds.
The same repressive cries went up when Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim cleric, came to London earlier this month as the guest of our preposterous mayor of London. Al-Qaradawi is said to hold views that are absolutely loathsome to most people here, including me. He is supposedly in favour of child suicide bombing, wife beating and executing homosexuals by burning or stoning to death, in the name of Islam. Public figures rose up, united in their indignant demands that he should be driven from the country. That was nonsense.
Unless he was planning, while he was here, to say something illegal, in contravention of British laws on incitement to violence or incitement to racial hatred, al-Qaradawi was entitled to the freedom to say whatever he liked. And as only he could know in advance precisely what he was going to say in his speeches here, it would have been quite impossible to arrest him in advance on the suspicion that he might say something unlawful. Hardly surprisingly, he did not.
By a ridiculous irony, if legislation were indeed passed in Britain that effectively prevented anyone from attacking religious beliefs, it would then be impossible to denounce those such as al-Qaradawi, whom the bien pensants were so anxious to silence, unless one took the view that by giving vent to such views he was, just by doing so, himself inadvertently exciting religious hatred against Muslims.
For there can be little doubt that there are some views held by some Muslims, even by an allegedly moderate scholar like him, that do indeed arouse hatred and contempt here among many in the non-Muslim majority.
It should have been axiomatic to everyone in this country that al-Qaradawi and Griffin must be free to say what they like about religion, however offensive anyone else might find it, and however ignorant and misguided they might be.
The idea of a law against free speech ought to be outrageous to us one and all, yet we have a home secretary who does not even appear to understand the problem. A law to curtail the freedom to criticise
religion, or a law with that effect if not precisely that intention, will be a social and political disaster.
I cannot count the distinguished British philosophers who have argued decisively that truth and understanding can only be approached by free and open argument.
Scientific knowledge can only develop by argument and counter argument; for centuries organised religion has opposed free argument, the Inquisition silenced Galileo, and all theocracies that suppressed free speech have kept their societies in poverty and ignorance. An ill-conceived respect for religion, for any religion, and a fear of offending should not be allowed to do that again in this country.
I have often wondered how and when it became true that there began to be "so many things one can't say". My readers' letters over many years have constantly made that complaint, and judging from them,
there seem to be a great many ordinary people who are deeply angry that they are somehow being silenced, written out of the national plot. Read Michael Collins's brilliant elegy to the white working
class of south London, The Likes of Us (see News Review, page 5). Read it and weep, as my colleague Bryan Appleyard says.
I suspect it began with Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech. Its inflammatory, exaggerated tone, and his manipulation of the press at the time, made it impossible thereafter to speak at all
of the enormous pressure put upon the white working classes by mass immigration suddenly imposed upon them.
Silencing people is not just wrong. It is not just a serious cultural error, with very negative cultural consequences. It is also dangerous.
It is now known that one of the greatest sources of stress and concomitant depression and anger is a lack of a sense of autonomy -feeling powerless, unable to get and stay in the driving seat of your own life.
It is most common, obviously enough, among the poorest. And the people who suffer most when free speech is taken away are the people with least autonomy -free speech is the last freedom of those who
have nothing else, no other power - neither status, nor wealth, nor education.
A law that takes yet more free speech from them, as from us all, will probably have the effect of driving yet more of the dispossessed straight into recruiting offices of the BNP. Let people speak freely; if they are wrong, they will soon condemn themselves.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 18, 2004 | Comments (1)
If we’re to buy into marriage we need prenuptial contracts
The story of Ray Parlour and Karen Bruce is a modern morality tale. She was a young Essex girl who grew up in a redbrick terraced house in Romford and became an optician’s assistant, and he was a teenage football player on an apprentice contract with Arsenal.
They met in 1990 and by 1999 they had produced three children and he had become a football star. But meanwhile Ray had started drinking heavily, partying long and late and getting into quite a lot of laddish bother.
His cheekbone was fractured during a bit of a ruckus at Butlins in Bognor Regis. Then there was the night in the cells in Hong Kong. And although they lived in a mock Tudor home in Hornchurch, Essex, with six bedrooms, two garages, a swimming pool and electric gates, and although he was earning squillions, life for Ray and Karen was not all sweetness and light.
According to Tony Adams, the former England player and captain of Arsenal, “it became a long-standing joke between Ray Parlour and me that the birth of a baby was a good excuse for a bender”. But reader, she married him. In 1998. In 2001 he told her he did not love her any more and in 2002 they were divorced.
Now in 2004, Karen, 33, has made history. She was all over the front of the newspapers last week, smiling as radiantly as on her wedding day (also pictured), or possibly even more radiantly, after the Court of Appeal award. “Footballer’s ex-wife wins a third of his future income” according to one headline. This is on top of the 37% of the family assets that she already has, including two houses. So she will be receiving more than £440,000 a year of his future salary.
She says she’s “over the moon”. The public response was swift. “Fleeced” said The Sun. “Arsenal star taken to cleaners”. The message was clear: “Who dares weds”.
So this fairy story gone wrong has turned into a morality tale, or rather into a tale that very much needs but lacks a moral. Can it be right that an ordinary girl cleans up such immense sums on divorce, no matter how devoted she has been, no matter how much domestic work she has done with her own fair hand and no matter how hard she has struggled to keep her man off the bottle and fit enough to play the beautiful game?
Contrariwise, can it be right for a man to dump his teenage sweetheart, whom he married for richer and for poorer, without sharing his riches with her as well as his problems? But most of all, can it be right for the aforesaid teenage sweetheart, wronged though she may be, to lay claim to a man’s future earnings as well as to his substantial and unexpected earnings during the marriage?
What sort of precedent does this set and could even King Solomon himself judge such matters? This is all very tricky. In fact the Parlour case is very unusual. All is not what it seems.
For instance, these huge annual payments will be reviewed after four years; they were not intended to be riches for life and indeed the judge has instructed the former wife to save the greater part for the future, when her ex-husband may well be, in her QC’s cruel phrase, in a football “twilight”. And for all the uproar last week and talk of landmark decisions I don’t think there are any particular morals that can be extracted.
Modern divorce is a hopeless muddle, because modern marriage is a hopeless muddle based on all kinds of unexamined and conflicting ideas; the Parlours’ tale is merely an extreme reminder of that painful muddle.
In my view the worst confusion that bedevils both marriage and separation is the underlying one between romantic sexual love and contractual obligation — two notions about as opposed to each other as one could possibly imagine within normal human affairs, yet regularly yoked together, incompatible though they are, in the creaking harness of marriage.
On the one hand we imagine that we marry for love, but on the other we tacitly assume — according to the evidence and the decisions in the divorce courts — that we also marry for child rearing, security, granny care, domestic services and social cohesion, all of which are often the enemies of sex and romance: Eros is an anarchist and disappears at the first signs of repression or problems with the mortgage.
Despite all this we also somehow imagine that if love has drifted away we are quite justified in breaking that tacit contract. It has become more and more morally permissible. The idea of fault, or more precisely of fault affecting the financial settlements of a divorce, was abandoned long ago.
This has always seemed odd to me. It is often said that both parties in a divorce are equally to blame, but the repetition of a cliché doesn’t make it true. Quite often there is more blame on one side than the other. In any other contract than marriage that would certainly be taken into account in resolving a dispute.
Marriage is the most important contract, for ourselves and for the wider world, that most of us will make, yet men and women sign up to it daily on an erotic high without mentioning the terms of the contract, still less examining them.
In this country prenuptial contracts, made by the prudent few, are not recognised in law. We seem to suffer some sort of cultural squeamishness that prevents us recognising (as other cultures do and as Hollywood film stars tend to) the commercial nature of marriage.
Whatever the dreams of love, the marriage market or at least the mating market is a market like any other. We all have commodities to buy or sell, starting with youth, beauty, charm, earning power or wealth and going on to whatever qualities buyers in the market might want. Giving up any such commodity — say when a woman gives up her earning power to look after the children — is an opportunity cost and in a proper contract that ought to be recognised.
For people who are lucky, who continue to love each other and who stay married, it’s not necessary to think in these commercial terms. Their illusions can remain intact. They don’t have to wonder who contributed what or who never could have expected half as much on her own merits alone or was only after the money in the first place. For the rest, who divorce or separate, the contractual nature of their expectations becomes all too painfully apparent, but in retrospect.
Divorce will always be difficult. As Tolstoy said, all happy families are the same but all unhappy families are different, and it would be quite impossible to think of any principles in law that could be both universal and just. So the sensational and sensationally different cases that come before the courts tend to make the law look a bit of an ass.
That is why the time has come for prenuptial contracts — or perhaps pre-reproductive contracts for those couples who can’t face the actual word marriage. Prenuptial contracts could be designed by each couple as mutually agreed and detailed statements of intent, in all kinds of eventualities, so that each would know what to expect in the case of divorce.
Prenuptial contracts would, of course, mean much less work for lawyers, but that is another excellent reason for having them. I bet Parlour wishes he had had one.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, July 11, 2004 | Comments (0)
