Always win when you’re singing

I’ve always been an admirer of Chris Huhne. I’ve backed him twice as party leader and generally think he speaks a lot of sense. So I was delighted when I saw that he was the one senior politician willing to speak outagainst another sordid legal manipulation by nuLabour.

Australian citizen Dr Gerald Toben was remanded in custody after his arrest by British police at Heathrow Airport. The police were acting on an EU arrest warrant for alleged Holocaust denial, something which is not an offence in the UK.

It’s difficult as a mainstream politician to speak out against anything to do with Israel or the Holocaust. It leaves you wide open to blind charges of antisemitism and racism. When I was a student, simply speaking against ‘No Platform‘ was enough to have you tarred as a racist. As someone who was brought into politics as a young teen through Rock Against Racism, I find any form of racism disgusting, but I find the denial of free speech to be one of the tools that help the propagation of racist views.

I cannot understand why people should be racist, I can understand that sometimes people can have their hopes and fears twisted so that they pin all their problems onto people who are ‘different’ to them. But the only way to stop such views is to expose them to light, not cover them up and allow them to fester in the darkness. And as we sink further into recession, more people will pin the blame for economic decline onto those of a different race or creed.

To ignore racism or antisemitism is one of the biggest elephants in the room of the western world. It isn’t going to disappear just because we all stop talking about it. We must remove the stain by keeping it in the public eye and undermining it by reasoned argument, not simply through a rug over it and pretend it isn’t there.

Even more worrying is the threat that this arrest poses to all of us that communicate through the world wide web, whether through blogs, postings or emails. Dr Toben has never committed any crime on EU soil. He is only a wanted criminal in Germany because he posted particular vile views on his Australian web site, which can be viewed in Germany.

Only a couple of months ago, the West appeared to be up in arms, as China continued to block’sensitive’ internet sites during the Olympics. Yet Germany retains a veneer of openness, whilst threatening to lock up those who publish something the government doesn’t like. Have we all conveniently forgotten that the Nazis weren’t adverse to a little book burning themselves, as they sought to control what people could read and say?

A threat that something you legally post on the internet could be used to arrest you next time you leave the country has got to be of concern to all of us for whom liberalism has to encompass free speech. For us there is full agreement with Voltaire’s  ’I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.’

Most LibDem commentators appear to agree Chris, as do the mainstream media. Only one LibDem blogger seems to believe that the extradition is correct. But everyone agrees that Dr. Toben’s views are sickening and that he is just plain wrong.

I know that I am not alone in finding Dr. Toben’s views abhorrent. But democracy and freedom are not just there for those with whom we agree. A true test for a liberal democracy is that those values are there for those with whom we disagree most strongly.

Ironically, I can do no better than the words of former Soviet dissident and refusnik Natan Sharansky, now a notable politician in Israel. In Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, it reads:

“If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won their freedom.”

So what sort of a society do we want for the UK?