Not timely

[ritaxis]

So, Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out in her particles that the UC press is having a big sale. This is so wrong: this should have happened three months ago so my dad could have had fun with it (he was always a dangerous man in a bookstore).


But the thing that's been on my mind off and on today is Ken Livingston. The BBC World Service actually ran a tape of the conversation he's in trouble for, and you know what? It's outrageous to suspend a mayor for a month on the basis of the conversation. No, I wouldn't compare paparazzi to concentration camp guards, but the conversation is as he said it was, a complaint about reporters harrassing him and then saying "it's just my job." There's not a shred of anti-Semitism in it.

Politicians say really awful things all the time. If you can't lose your job for suggesting that the crime problem would be minimal if all the black mothers were forced to have abortions, you surely shouldn't be able to lose your job for saying that a reporter is like a war criminal. (different countries, but still -- lately I think the US has a worse record overall on free speech issues than the UK)

The thing is, I think the Ken Livingston thing is being used, consciously or not, to subvert the original intent of hate-speech rules. Hate speech is about espousing, inspiring, inciting, instigating, and organizing violence against targeted populations. Nowhere in Ken Livingston's conversation did he suggest that violence against reporters was in the least bit appropriate. He did suggest that the newspapers' behavior towards him was violent in some way (I'm not able to judge how accurate his complaints about the news media are, but the fact that the reporter pursued this case in this fashion sort of indicates a partisanship that I would think a newspaper would not like to be caught with). But the rather stiffer than necessary legislation that's been adopted for hate speech (I do listen to BBC World Service, so I have had at various times gotten fairly thorough descriptions of the law, though I couldn't repeat it here without looking it up, which I may do if I remember after this nightmare weekend is over) -- is being used, I think, to go after people who rock the boat, not people who threaten violence against minorities. And I think we'll see more of it, in the US and the UK. Just a few more boiling chips in the frog soup.

Comments

[carandol.livejournal.com]

I quite agree with you on Ken Livingstone's comments. But bear in mind this isn't British law he's been suspended by; it's the Adjudication Panel for England, which is more of an employers' tribunal for local government officials. I seem to remember there was an attempt to take him to court, but it was decided the case wasn't strong enough to merit it.
See here for who did the banning:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4748116.stm

Ken Livingstone has had endless hassle from the media, mainly because he's stuck to his (relatively) left wing principles as the Labour Party went more to the right, and seems to have a genuine interest for the welfare of everyone in London, rather than just the middle class. The London Evening Standard is a right-wing paper which has always had it in for him since the days of Thatcher, portraying him as some sort of ultra-left-wing lunatic.

Plus, he reads science fiction and keeps newts -- obvious evidence of his insanity.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

What Orwell said about the sanctions that can scare you and shut you up in Britain usually coming via work rather than the law is still true.

I've always been very fond of Ken Livingston, largely because he isn't diplomatic and never has been -- he's honest and says what he's thinking, which is occasionally stupid, but never insincere.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'm also a big Ken Livingstone fan, for just those reasons. And he stuck to his guns over the London congestion charge and civilisation as we know it has not fallen apart. In fact I believe it has had the exact effect he intended and reduced the congestion to a more bearable level.

His comments may have been ill-advised (though I have no doubt they were made under provocation), but I'm totally with Diane Abbotts (Black Labour MP) when she said on the radio that a democratically elected mayor should not be removed in this way, even temporarily.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

What Livingston is being admonished for is less the comment than his refusal to apologise. If he had said 'It was an inappropriate comparison' nothing would have come of it.

That he's suspended is another, hotly debated matter, and stuff might happen yet on that account because various people are Not Happy with the tribunal's decisions. Nor am I. I think that he's right to be publicly called over those remarks, that they should not be buried as 'oh, it didn't matter.' (Incidentally, I don't think that the target of the remark happens to be Jewish, which I would not expect Livingston to have known; comparing *anyone* with concentration camp guards in a trivial fashion is the issue for me.