Polly T insists we must indeed have censorship
Polly Toynbee seems to be in favour of Baroness Hodge, Dame Margaret, Lady Hodge*, as the anti-establishment candidate to run Britain’s censorship system through Ofcom. Well, yes.
Except of course there should be no one at all censoring the system:
Here’s the new chair’s hardest political task: tackling Ofcom’s abysmal failure to prevent GB News becoming Reform News, contrary to every intention and spirit of broadcasting impartiality laws. That needs exceptional bravery and the sharpest political teeth.
And, well….if someone wishes to broadcast propaganda for a political party then they must be free to do so. We do not say GB News is doing that, nor is this us saying that we do - or don’t - support Reform or any other party. But free speech really does mean that anyone’s wholly free to say whatever it is they think they wish to. Subject only to those two limitations of libel and incitement to immediate violence - and only one of those is or should be a criminal, rather than civil, offence.
Try to imagine the revolt on the right if Labour sanctioned an upstart broadcaster with, say, George Galloway as its main nightly presenter (he’d be as good at it as Nigel Farage), a string of leftists paid large sums by a benefactor founder and a news agenda focused on far-left tropes. Beyond that scenario, it’s hard to devise a leftist channel as aggressively poisonous as GB News, which pours out Farage, Matt Goodwin, Lee Anderson, Darren Grimes, Martin Daubney and Richard Tice, and is frequently accused of breaking rules about accuracy and impartiality.
Why would anyone bother to set up such a thing given that we’ve already got the BBC?
To return to jocularity on this point.
It’s, just about, possible to see the argument in favour of an insistence upon accuracy and impartiality when there’s only the one channel. So, back when, the BBC perhaps should have been so limited. Maybe. But now that we simply do not have a bandwidth problem at all then this insistence that any particular outlet be balanced is a nonsense. Balance, as Polly regards it, meaning being allowed to say things Polly agrees with and not those things she does not.
Given that there is no longer that technological limitation then opinion not just should but must be allowed to run riot. Right up to that limit of actively advocating for a riot and not quite and exactly actually doing so.
Some of us are, after all, old enough to remember that Wisdom of Crowds book. That explanation of Galton’s Ox and so on. The only time the collective does actually arrive, on average, at something like the correct answer is when every opinion, belief, nonsense and absurdity is included in the consideration. The moment some set of opinions is limited, excised from consideration, we become subject to groupthink and groupthink can go wildly off course, diverge appallingly from reality.
The only useful form of speech is free speech. We should return to it.
Tim Worstall
*A note for those unblessed by a detailed knowledge of things British, the three are the same person