British Depocrisy and Freedom of Speech

By David Ferguson

I wrote an article recently about the Hong Kong Occupy demonstrations and the coverage they had received in the western media. I concluded my article: Whereas if tens of thousands of Hong Kong Occupy protestors had been out with their barricades on the streets of London, they would have been dispersed within days and many of them would now be in prison...

The British government could hardly wait to prove me right. Their own home-grown Occupy Protest was taking place in Parliament Square in London right at that very time, and it lasted precisely three days before the few hundred demonstrators were swept from the streets by the police. I looked in vain for any news of the events in my standard sources: the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph. Nothing. Plenty about Hong Kong, nothing about London.

Eventually I found a report on the Independent Television network website. It transpired that fifteen of the demonstrators had been arrested over the three days that the protest had lasted, and that one hardy soul had fought it out to the last, climbing onto the statue of Winston Churchill and staying there, alone, for 24 hours until he too was hauled off. In the great British traditions of free speech and liberty he has been charged with criminal damage, public order offences, theft, and offences under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 – presumably this last charge involves possession of a statue with intent to use it for the purposes of sleeping.

I was given further cause to reflect on the issue of freedom of speech in the west by a completely different set of events that have unfolded in Britain over the past couple of weeks.

I have been reading the account of Deng Xiaoping’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, written by his daughter Deng Rong. It is a personal account of events, and because she was a child at the time, and because for much of the time she was held in confinement, Deng Rong was distanced from many of the worst physical atrocities that were carried out.

Even so, it was horrifying to read how, to punish him for his father’s ‘rightist tendencies’, her older brother Dong Pufang was imprisoned, tortured, and abused so badly by his classmates that he eventually tried to commit suicide by jumping from an upper floor window of the Physics Block at Peking University where he was being held prisoner. He failed in the attempt, broke his back, and has remained a paraplegic to this day.

Few westerners realise that the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution was not formed by time-served extremists in the Communist Party, workers, peasants, or soldiers, but by China’s students. They were the ones at the forefront of the ‘Red Guard’. Although relatively few in number they were loud of voice, and as is always the case with a mob, whoever holds the megaphone holds the whip hand.

Equally disturbing, on a different level, were Deng Rong’s unemotional accounts of the ‘denunciations’. Those which she witnessed were largely those of senior politicians who had fallen foul of the revolution. Elderly, battle-hardened veterans of the anti-Japanese War and the Civil War were forced to publicly debase and humble themselves before howling mobs of students who were not much more than children, struggling to invent imaginary crimes to which they could confess in order to appease their accusers.

It might seem odd if I say that what brought these historical events from 1960s China into such sharp focus concerned a rape case in Britain, so I should probably explain.

In April 2012 Ched Evans, a relatively prominent footballer with the English club Sheffield United, was convicted of rape. A fellow footballer, Clayton McDonald, was charged with the same offence under the same set of circumstances, but acquitted. Evans served 30 months in prison, and was released on October 17. Evans has maintained his innocence from the outset, and continues to campaign vigorously to have his conviction overturned. Further details of the case can be found on his website.

Part of Evans’ argument lies in the pernicious nature of the law. According to English rape law it is now the case that a woman who has got herself so drunk that she does not know what she is doing is held to be incapable of giving valid consent, and therefore any man who has sex with a woman in such a condition is guilty of rape and has no defence. The drunken woman has no responsibility for her actions; it is no defence for the man to claim that he was also too drunk to know what he was doing.

The pernicious effect of this law is that a group of people, selected at random from the general public, can be required to decide precisely how drunk a complete stranger was, at a very distant place and time, and on this decison and this alone a man's whole life stands or falls. One is entitled to ask on what conceivable basis - other than some totally arbitrary criteria - any normal person could make such a decision.

This is precisely what happened in the Evans case. The jury was obliged to make its ruling based solely on an asssessment of precisely how drunk the alleged victim had been, in a hotel room, a year previously. The pernicious nature of the law is thrown into sharp relief by the perverse nature of their judgement – of the two accused in the case; they found one guilty and one innocent.

This means very explicitly that they came to the absurd conclusion that the same woman, in the same place, was at one and the same time too drunk to give her consent, and not too drunk to give her consent.

Without even considering some of the worrying facts involved, which can be found in the court papers and on Evans’ website, one might think that the problematic legal circumstances of his conviction would incline any reasonable person to give his protestations of innocence some kind of fair hearing. In fact, the opposite has been the case.

Evans has been widely condemned for his ‘arrogance’ in refusing to express contrition for a crime which he maintains he did not convict. A mob of pitchfork-wielding progressives has determined that they will have their pound of flesh. Departing from their normal principle that every criminal is a victim of society who needs a maximum of understanding and a minimum of punishment, a raft of celebrities have trumpeted the view that Evans’ crime places him beyond redemption, and in particular that he should be prevented from ever playing football again. These include Nick Clegg, the Lib-Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, plus a gaggle of journalists from the ‘liberal’ end of the political spectrum.

Behind them is a much bigger, much uglier mob from the general public. Led by the opinion-formers, and largely ignorant of most of the salient facts and of the legal nuances of the case, they have taken advantage of the ‘freedom of speech’ offered by Britain’s media - and in particular its comment forums - to howl for blood.

So far, so much to be expected. What has become more disturbing is the treatment meted out to those very few public figures who have dared to offer any alternative viewpoint. Among these are two television personalities, Judy Finnigan and Michael Buerk, television presenters on ITV and the BBC respectively.

No sooner had Finnigan and Buerk spoken out, than they found that they, too, were being hounded by the progressive mob. The focus shifted ever so slightly from ‘Evans the rapist’ to ‘Evans and his friends the rape apologists’. In order to spare themselves and save their careers, both Finnigan and Buerk were forced into humiliating acts of public apology, where they confessed to their ‘wrong-thinking’, issued the proper ritual condemnations of Evans, and begged to be pardoned. This is what brought to my mind the link with Deng Rong’s book.

There is an obvious lesson here about how quickly calls for ‘freedom of speech’ can be transformed into calls for ‘freedom of speech for those who agree with me’. Would I dare to write this article if I was a journalist working in Britain? Would any mainstream media outlet publish it? They are happy to talk at great length about events in Hong Kong; events in Parliament Square are swept discreetly under the carpet. ‘Freedom of speech’ is a right that requires careful management by those who control the megaphone.

The Guardian newspaper went out of its way to prove the truth of this aphorism. On Sunday 16th one of its journalists, Barbara Ellen, visited the Evans story for the second time in its ‘public discussion’ section, titled “Comment is Free – but Facts are Sacred!” I attempted to post a comment on the article. The full text of the comment is here. Within minutes my comment was removed by the censors, my posting account was permanently closed, and I was banned from any further activity on “Comment is Free – but Facts are Sacred!” Truly, freedom of speech is far too precious a gift to be wasted on people who do not hold the correct opinions…

But there is a second issue too, about the process by which groups are transformed into mobs. As I thought of the Hong Kong demonstrators, the Occupy Parliament Square protests, and the Evans case, I found myself reflecting on the students who were the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, how gullible and unworldly they were, how easily they were led astray by malign and cynical manipulators, how quickly their idealism was transformed into arrogance, intolerance, hatred and then violence - violence that they ended up inflicting not only on their opponents, but on each other - and how the results were ten years of chaos, anarchy, and ruin in China.

“Is it even permissible nowadays to express the view that you actually believe that Ched Evans is innocent? (I guess I'll find out in a few minutes.)

Because I don't believe he raped the woman. I've seen all the evidence that was put before the jury, and I find their decisions bewildering.

There are two videos that show the woman arriving at the hotel with McDonald. There is nothing at all in her conduct in either of these two videos to suggest that she was so drunk that she didn't know what she was doing. Based on the videos alone, you couldn't even say with any certainty that she was drunk at all. When she was tested the following day after her visit to the police station her blood alcohol count was zero. She never gave any evidence about what happened in the hotel room because her story all along was that she didn't remember anything between being in the kebab shop and waking up the following day.

The jury's decision was completely perverse. In convicting Evans while acquitting McDonald they essentially decided that the same person, in the same place, at one and the same time, was both too drunk to give valid consent to sex, and not too drunk to give valid consent to sex.”

In no way does this comment come close to contravening any of the paper’s published posting regulations. It simply expresses my view, and explains briefly why I hold that view. The Guardian newspaper is a private organisation and it is perfectly entitled to censor and ban whatever and whoever it pleases. But it should spare the rest of the world its nauseating, self-congratulatory rubbish about comment being ‘free’ and facts being ‘sacred’.