Abortion Counselling: Nadine Dorries vs Evan Harris
I love how Dr Harris breaks Dorries’ argument so easily, succinctly and utterly.
Twitter Joke Trial: Appeal Lost
Once upon a time Paul Chambers made a flippant joke on Twitter. Then he was convicted of ‘menace’ for it:
Paul Chambers, the Twitter “bomb hoax” guy, was found guilty on Monday of sending a menacing message on Twitter and fined approximately £1000. This was his first criminal offence. I wrote about this in an earlier entry as I was preparing a letter of complaint to the South Yorkshire CPS. My complaint failed to deter the CPS from pursuing their charge under section 127(1) of the Communications Act 2003. It did however contribute to the defendant’s decision to seek to have his initial guilty plea vacated. This was successful, to the surprise and renewed hope of many. Our hopes were dashed when district court judge Jonathan Bennett delivered his guilty verdict, which legal blogger Jack-of-Kent has described as a disgraceful and illiberal judgement.
Yesterday Paul lost his appeal:
The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
He was also saddled with a legal bill three times higher than his original £384 with £600 costs, as the court ordered him to pay a further £2,000 legal bill for the latest proceedings.
“The words in the message speak for themselves and they were sent at a time when the security threat to this country was substantial.”
Some responses on Twitter itself:
David Allen Green (his lawyer): I wish I’d never used words ‘misconceived’ and ‘illiberal’ before now, so I could use them for first time for#TwitterJokeTrial judgment.
Dara O’Briain So that’s the banning of sarcasm, irony, sub-text and any of the other subtleties of language that we use AS GROWN-UPS.
David Schneider All we need now is Gareth Compton telling us to stone the #twitterjoketrial judge and the Law and Twitter will implode.
Armando Iannucci The jury at #twitterjoketrial need to be sh…Oh, hang on, there’s someone at the door.
Dr Evan Harris I would feel differently if it wasn’t a joke & if it had any chance of causing the act allegedly incited.
David Mitchell A disgrace. He’s being punished for flippancy.
The blogosphere has reacted similarly. Heresy Corner adds:
This is not about modern technology, but about the new threat to deep-seated English habits of mind. What has changed is officialdom’s loss of a sense of proportion, or of their ability to use discretion and common-sense. That represents a more radical change than the coming of Internet. And the police, the CPS and the judges are on the leading edge of it. The old-fashioned traditionalist who doesn’t get it is Paul Chambers, doing what comes naturally to almost any English person and finding himself in the kind of situation once described so eloquently by Kafka. Who wasn’t English at all.
Twitter may have made Chambers’ witticism accessible to a member of staff dredging the search facility for mentions of Robin Hood Airport. Without Twitter, his joke would never have become public. But the medium is just that – a medium. What the police, the prosecutors and the judges didn’t get is the joke. Except that, being English themselves, they almost certainly did. That’s what makes this whole saga so tragic.
I’m not sure what else I have to add. As with the Compton case I blogged about yesterday – he made an ill advised but harmless joke, and has a criminal record for it, with all the damage that will do (and has done) to his reputation, ability to travel, emigrate and gain future employment. If you agree with me that this shocking attack on free speech needs to be reversed, you can donate to Paul’s legal defence fund here.
Blair and Free Speech
I couldn’t agree with Harris’, Glanville’s & Heawood’s position on this more. Blair is a despicable man but suggesting that Waterstone’s should censor him is entirely wrong. I agree he should be arrested and tried on war crimes charges, but that’s not Waterstone’s business. If he hasn’t been charged (and let’s face it he’s unlikely ever to be) they shouldn’t interfere in the book’s promotion in any way.
(cross-posted from The Guardian)
We respect the writers of yesterday’s letter (18 August) and share their view on the illegality of the Iraq war and Tony Blair‘s nefarious role in engineering this country’s participation in it. But we can not share their call for Waterstone’s to desist from promoting it on the grounds that the event “will be deeply offensive to most people in Britain”, even if that were the case.
When it comes to literature, drama, journalism, artistic expression and scientific publication we must be consistent in our support for free speech. How can we defend the right of the Birmingham Repertory to put on and advertise a play like Behzti, despite it being deemed offensive to some Sikhs, and then call on a bookseller not to promote one of its books – or a library not to stock it – on the grounds of offence? The answer, in a liberal society, is to not read the book if it offends you, and to not buy a copy if you don’t wish royalties to go to the author.
While Iain Banks and colleagues say “Waterstone’s will seriously harm its own reputation as a respectable bookseller by helping him [Blair] promote his book”, we think its reputation would now be harmed by caving in to this sort of pressure.
Dr Evan Harris Trustee, Article 19
Jo Glanville Editor, Index on Censorship
Jonathan Heawood Director, English PEN
The Commons is Poorer Without Dr Evan Harris
Mark Henderson in the Times decries the loss of Dr Evan Harris from the House of Commons:
Yes, he is an atheist who believes that others’ religious beliefs should not constrain personal freedom. But many of his positions that some religious people dislike are well-supported by evidence: the scientific case for reducing the abortion time limit, for example, is flimsy, as the Commons Science and Technology Committee, on which Harris served, showed to good effect.
Harris’s support for evidence-based policy and free speech also extends to plenty of races in which religion has no dog. How can his support for well-regulated animal experimentation, for example, be characterised as solely motivated by drab, secular determinism? Or his advocacy for reform of the libel laws? Or his forensic scrutiny of the Government spending decisions that have decimated much of British physics?
It was science and evidence that defined Harris’s parliamentary career. This sometimes brought him into conflict with some (though not all) religious people, and it is impossible to deny that he takes a stronger line than many when it comes to religious interference with personal freedom. But it is very wrong to suggest he is a secular “one-trick pony” who sees everything through an anti-religious prism.
Parliament will be poorer for his departure. It needs MPs who share Harris’s respect for evidence.
I couldn’t agree more. Policy should always be determined by reason, by evidence, after rational debate and discourse. Evan Harris has been the parliamentary champion of these principles for years, and as I told him last night, has long been my political hero because of it. Sholto Byrnes in the New Statesman said:
If more MPs had been like him, it is highly unlikely that politicians would have come to have been held in such low regard. If more Liberal Democrats had been like him, I suspect they would be doing much better and might even have stood a genuine chance of replacing Labour as the main party of the left.
A consistently strong voice for the NHS and for science, he shared the title of “Secularist of the Year” with Lord Avebury in 2009 for their work in helping abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. He has campaigned against faith schools and argued courageously in favour of abortion, euthanasia, immigration and gay rights.
Some readers — especially those who have described me as being “an apologist for religion” — may be surprised to see me praising him. On the contrary, although I may disagree with some of Evan’s stances, I think he has been one of the most principled MPs in parliament, sticking to his convictions and standing up for a true-liberal view of free speech and of the idea of liberty itself.
If you want to help re-elect him in the contest which is realistically no more than a year away, leave a message here, contact him via his website or tweet him on his twitter profile.
General Election: Rational and Irrational
It was an awful night wasn’t it? I mean what happened to the rise of the Liberal Democrats? How on earth could so many polls have picked up such a seismic shift in British politics for so many weeks, for it to drop right back off the bottom of the scale again? How could so many rational people vote Tory again, given what they did last time, and considering how awful their policies were this time? It wasn’t all doom and gloom though:
Caroline Lucas’ triumph in the Brighton Pavillion constituency was despite the first-past-the-post voting system, and really should be celebrated by anyone involved in progressive politics in the UK, particularly those who are looking for a genuine alternative to the neoliberal consensus offered by the three main parties. Sadly in my constituency the Green vote melted away – Joan Ruddock was returned as MP yet again, and the council went overwhelmingly back to Labour.
Elsewhere the Commons lost Dr Evan Harris, which quite frankly is a disaster, although you wouldn’t know it from the Torygraph:
A stranger to principle, Harris has coat-tailed some of the most vulnerable and weak people available to him to further his dogged, secularist campaign to have people of faith – any faith – swept from the public sphere. The Lib Dems served the purpose of providing him with a parliamentary seat, but his true love was the National Secular Society. For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves. He pretended to defend Roman Catholics by attacking the Act of Settlement, with the real aim of undermining the established Church of England. A drab, secular determinism was his sole motivation; his parliamentary career consequently a one-trick pony.
Now he’s gone to spend more time with his NSS pamphlets and the House of Commons is better for his passing. His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland. But now Dr Death cannot bring a malign influence to bear on the legislature any longer. Bye bye, Evan.
Nasty, nasty, just plain nasty, and that was written by an Anglican priest, who’s supposed to believe in charity. Evan Harris’ parliamentary career (which will surely resume after the next election in 6-12 months) was marked by an emphasis on science, rationalism, evidence-based policy making, compassion and common sense. Whatever the issue you knew the moment he was interviewed about it you knew he would be the one, often the only Member of Parliament who would actually make complete sense. On parliamentary reform:
The recent Coroners and Justice Act – to mention just one of many – contained significant amendments to the law on murder, mercy killing, manslaughter and assisted suicide. While the media debates these matters and the public expects its MPs to, these weren’t even discussed in two days of debate because of the way the government organised the guillotines, as I protested, with no consultation and without regard to the lack of propriety involved in seeing the elected house passing laws “on the nod”. No other self-respecting democracy would tolerate this control of the agenda by the government.
On free speech:
On maintaining a secular NHS:
But maybe Ben Goldacre puts it best:
Recently we were comparing hate mail, and it occurred to me that you could only really pay tribute to the vital contribution Evan has made by listing all the groups who despise him, and the vicious hate campaigns they have mounted. The antivaccination conspiracy theorists hate him, because he drove for more and better evidence on the MMR and autism hoax, and helped expose it through the GMC. The animal rights protestors hate him, because he has dared to stand up for necessary and well-regulated animal experiments, an unpopular cause even among those who quietly benefit from their results. He is despised by fundamentalist christians, because he defends stem cell research and a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body when she is pregnant. Homophobic christians (not all christians, but the homophobic ones) despise him, because he is clear that if you run a B&B, you have to let a gay couple stay, the same as any other (and although nobody ever mentions it, if you’re gay and run a B&B, you have to let a christian stay too). He is despised by homeopaths because he dared to examine the evidence for their magic beans, he is despised by climate change denialists for the same reason, and alongside all of this, he has led the field on libel reform and on free speech, on disentangling church from state while remaining respectful on religion, he has stood up and been a clear thinker on the role of scientific advisors and evidence on policy, and much more.
But of course he was up against the likes of this:
@Nadine4mp: Do my eyes and ears deceive me? Has Dr Death really lost his seat ?
Evangelical Christianists are on the march, demanding special rights in employment, and now in politics seek to supplant progress, equality and reason with myth, superstition, fear and hatred. That’s not the politics I recognise in this country, that’s not even the way I see this country at all. Make no mistake it’s a triumph that the BNP had such a catastrophically bad night on Thursday night, and that the Green Party is now represented in Westminster, but that chamber is not the place for those who seek to turn the clock back on modernity itself. I myself will continue to argue against religious extremism in any area of civic life, and for the diversity agenda to continue to operate against bigotry and discrimination, not to uphold rights to discriminate. I’ve long been a fan of Dr Harris and hope very much for his political career as an MP to resume with as short a gap as humanly possible. I hope my readers who agree that the principles of the Enlightenment should be fought for at all costs will join with me in making sure we get this vital asset to our lives back in parliament soon.
