According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, Newcastle City Council is considering requiring comedians who wish to perform at its town hall to sign a pledge they will not make any jokes about homosexuals, lesbians or ethnic minorities.
Councillors who are calling for the requirement claim it necessary to ensure comedians performing on their turf do not violate the council’s ‘social inclusion policy’.
In elaborating on their reasons for calling for this requirement, the deputy leader of Newcastle's ruling Lib Dems is reported to have said:
‘This is not about free speech. It is about whether the council should hire out its premises to those who are deliberately offensive to minorities.’
In a form of circumlocution for having come up with, doubtless, our Deputy Prime Minister would have been willing to give up one of his two jags, this same council leader is reported to have added:
‘The equality board is recommending to the executive that anyone who wishes to hire the City Hall should sign as part of their contract confirmation that the proposed use would not be offensive and break our social inclusion policy. If people do not wish to sign they could use other premises.’
If this is not a sign that, when the forthcoming bill is passed make incitement to religious hatred an offence, one can be sure to see a massive curtailment in the freedom of comedians to make jokes about religions, contrary to what government ministers have claimed, then nothing is.
More importantly, however, what the councillor has said betrays something far more sinister than simply a po-faced humourlessness for which leftist politicos are rightly noted.
What right have local councillors to consider the municipal premises over which they exercise control their own private property?
Surely, they administer these premises on behalf of the communities they represent. If these premises are open to hire by the public and someone wishes to hire them for a lawful purpose for which the premises are not inherently unsuited, by what right can a council withhold their hire on the grounds it does not approve of the purpose for which they wanted for hire?
Who is not being inclusive: comedians who refuse to sign the pledge because they want to be able to make jokes about gays or whatever, or these councillors?
May a conservative-minded local authority likewise withhold the hire of its town hall from comedians who refuse to sign a pledge that they will refrain from making jokes about vicarage tea parties or Women’s Institute flower-arrangement classes?
Surely, it is significant that, by far, the most successful tv comedy show in years, ‘Little Britain’, is a show that consistently sends up just about everyone in society - above all, perhaps, gays, which at least one of its two main stars openly admits to being in real life.
By the councillor's reasoning, the BBC would have to take ‘Little Britain’ off the air, not to mention the endlessly repeated episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil Fawlty dares to mention the war!
For those who have read this far, but seek something a trifle more edifying than this rant, I close with a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a work that gives such eloquent and prescient warning of the dangers of the cultural tyranny liable to attend the kind of democratic despotism Britain has increasingly become of late:
‘I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed in the world….
‘The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and all alike incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
‘Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratification and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
‘Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed them to endure and often to look on then as benefits.’
Have a nice day -- if you still can!
Comments (10)
De Tocqueville's 'Mild despotism' is the state in which the government performs all services, instead of allowing people to fulfil them themselves.
This reliance upon the state is insidious, it grows. Increasingly it targets one, another.
The Blair government is enormously ideological. They believe in 'governance', what they sometimes call 'modernisation'. It is a business term and essentially means perpetual monitoring and target setting.
With ever increasing information and services, the government believe that they can and should manipulate elements of society for the greater good. Unfortunately, the interpretation and design of data is necessarily subjective.
The effect of never ending rules and control is a direct threat to civil society, which is something that should be free and without structures of power and control except those chosen by itseld.
The government wishes to, but cannot do everything, it is inefficient and expensive, But, the people sigh in relief as yet another annoyance or responsibility is taken off their hands
Posted by Chas | June 25, 2005 7:55 PM
Posted on June 25, 2005 19:55
Hi guys - I guess my original comment was not clear. Apologies for that. It's not the story I object to, it's the way it is being used as evidence for the existence of a broader 'cultural tyranny' (see the author's original post).
My point being that this is simply a case of a few councillors (or imbeciles if you prefer) trying to bag a few extra votes, not a sinister manifestation of some vast PC conspiracy.
Posted by Jonathan Watson | June 24, 2005 12:59 PM
Posted on June 24, 2005 12:59
How do they decide what is offensive and what isn't? Does the comedian submit a script for the approval of the humour-impaired councillors for them to discern exactly who might be upset by each and every joke? Do they pay a fine if a single member of the audience decides that they don't like a joke?
With people like this leading the charge of the apathetic brigade, how can anyone still believe in the myth of enlightened government?
Posted by EU-Serf | June 20, 2005 1:31 PM
Posted on June 20, 2005 13:31
OK Jonathan. Don't believe the petty and small minded Daily Mail. You can contact Councillors mentioned in the Evening Chroncle (the local newspaper) directly. Just in case you haven't looked at the article, the names mentioned are Faulkner, Proud and Shipley. Take a look at the Councils official list of concillors with contact numbers.
http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/councill2.nsf/a995f08678e0882f80256688005190dd/80c241dfde265b3c8025700d00291db2/$FILE/A%20-%20Z%20List%20Of%20Councillors.pdf
As you say, it's best to get the information from the horse's mouth.
Posted by PhilB | June 20, 2005 8:54 AM
Posted on June 20, 2005 08:54
OK Jonathan. Don't believe the petty and small minded Daily Mail. You can contact Councillors mentioned in the Evening Chroncle (the local newspaper) directly. Just in case you haven't looked at the article, the names mentioned are Faulkner, Proud and Shipley. Take a look at the Councils official list of concillors with contact numbers.
http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/councill2.nsf/a995f08678e0882f80256688005190dd/80c241dfde265b3c8025700d00291db2/$FILE/A%20-%20Z%20List%20Of%20Councillors.pdf
As you say, it's best to get the information from the horses mouth.
Posted by PhilB | June 20, 2005 8:05 AM
Posted on June 20, 2005 08:05
I'm grateful for somebody saying that. It's like people talking about "small minded Daily Mail readers" on Question Time or whatever seemingly almost every week or abusing Sun readers. Don't these papers (and they certainly can't be classed together in anything but the crudest of terms) account for a readership of over 16 million? So chances are you know somebody who reads one of them regularly.
Most people in my experience are canny enough to discern what is a "story" and what is a genuine concern. And you certainly don't need to be inculcated with a Guardian/Independent diet to be able to do this - quite the opposite.
Posted by AW | June 19, 2005 1:23 PM
Posted on June 19, 2005 13:23
Um, Jonathan, your post seems like yet another immensely tedious example of 'shooting the messenger' and suggesting that a story is not worthy of consideration simply because of the paper that printed it. But since the local paper in Newcastle also reported the story, your insinuation that the Daily Mail misrepresented or made up the story is flat-out wrong.
It seems as if you can't bear it when idiotic politicians and councillors are lambasted for their stupid antics, why is that? Why does it get up your nose so much? And why do you think it's worth letting the rest of us know how much you hate imbeciles being exposed as imbeciles?
Posted by The Happy Rampager | June 19, 2005 9:30 AM
Posted on June 19, 2005 09:30
Do you believe everything you read in the Daily Mail? This is simply yet another immensely tedious example of the 'loony council' stories they like to come up with on an almost daily basis to try and provoke us. No doubt it will all come to nothing.
Posted by Jonathan Watson | June 18, 2005 7:56 PM
Posted on June 18, 2005 19:56
It's true - it was reported in the Newcastle "Evening Chronicle" of 16th June 2005.
It is on this link
http://icnewcastle.icnetwork.co.uk/eveningchronicle/eveningchronicle/index.cfm?page=2
under "It's not a laughing matter at top venue".
And incidentally, it's "The Peoples Democratic Republic Of Newcastle ..."
Posted by PhilB | June 17, 2005 9:27 PM
Posted on June 17, 2005 21:27
Well, it is the Daily Mail, so we have to be a little careful that it is the literal truth and not just the Daily Mail's spin on things.
However, if accurate, this is plainly mad. One of the reasons I have never understood anti-semitism is that jewish people are often so willing to make jokes about themselves. Will a jewish comedian be banned from making jokes about jewish mother-in-laws?
Posted by HJ | June 17, 2005 2:58 PM
Posted on June 17, 2005 14:58