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Oh! What a Lovely War Bill

16/07/2015
japan, politics

Today, Japan’s lower house of government, the House of Representatives (broadly equivalent to the House of Commons in the UK, and rather less equivalent to the US Congress), has passed bills permitting Japanese military forces to participate in action against nations which are not directly attacking Japan. This will be the first time since the end of the Second World War almost exactly 70 years ago that Japan has permitted itself this right, and represents one of the largest changes to the nation’s security policy since its independence was restored by the Allied occupation in 1952.

It’s not a popular change. Opinion polls suggest that fewer than 30% of Japanese people support the bill, opposition parties have protested that the bill is being railroaded through parliament, and tens of thousands of people have gathered at rallies in Tokyo over the past few weeks to protest the legislation. It’s not popular with constitutional scholars, either; Japan’s post-war constitution, authored by Americans but supported by a majority of the Japanese people, renounces war and the use of force in international disputes, and forbids the maintenance of “war potential”. Last year, the government sought and achieved the latest in a series of revisions to the legal interpretation of that article (Article 9), which would allow the Japan Self-Defence Forces to participate not only in direct self-defence of the Japanese nation, but in “collective self-defence” – the right to assist Japan’s treaty allies should one of them be attacked, even if that attack is not directly on Japan itself. Today’s bill is the next step in pushing that change into law, but constitutional scholars remain convinced that the reinterpretation has stretched Article 9 past breaking point; a large majority of them have come out against the bill.

The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, knows it’s not a popular bill. After it passed the committee stage yesterday, he commented that the government has failed to explain the bill adequately to the public and will need to work on that in future; it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at such a statement, but this sort of cart-before-horse, father-knows-best approach is pretty much de rigeur for politicians all over the world when matters of national security or international relations are being discussed. It doesn’t excuse such behaviour, but it’s nonetheless worth pointing out that this doesn’t make Abe a fascist or evil; it just means that he’s a politician.

Besides, popularity barely matters. Though it’s taking its toll on the government’s approval rating, the LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito, could pass the bill through the Diet by themselves, having secured a large majority in the hastily called general election last December. Opposition politicians have resorted to frankly bizarre measures to register their displeasure, holding aloft placards during committee sessions and physically mobbing rival politicians in scenes bordering on fist-fights. The refrain, over and over, is that a bill with such low public support cannot be passed through the Diet in this manner.

This is, for better or worse, utter nonsense. The public does not support this legislation, but it hasn’t been sprung upon them as a surprise; changing the basis on which Japan’s military participates in international security is one of Shinzo Abe’s most long-held and clearly expressed desires, and the constitutional re-interpretation enabling this new law was passed before the general election last December. That election returned Abe’s LDP and their Komeito partners with a slightly larger majority than they had before. Any government, anywhere in the world, would look at that situation and conclude that whatever the public’s misgivings about this specific legislation, the LDP’s mandate to pass it is unarguable. Opposition parties were unable to turn the public’s dislike of Abe’s military ambitions into votes last December, so what aspect of democracy (as distinct from constitutionalism), exactly, is Abe riding roughshod over by passing a bill he’s openly been promoting since 2012?

It’s not that I don’t understand the anger and fear surrounding the bill, much of it focused on Abe himself. For all that he has learned to shut up about his own revisionist views of Japan’s Imperial history and decidedly neo-conservative ideas about how to make Japan’s society “beautiful” again (much of which is, as with neo-conservatism in general, little more than Fascism Lite with far less snazzy uniforms), he has been altogether less successful at getting other members of the LDP to do likewise. A great deal of the protest around the bill seems to be based not so much on fear of what collective self-defence will mean for Japan, but on a broader fear that Abe and his party want to move Japan away from the post-war pacifist consensus; to promote an ultra-nationalist agenda through schools and universities, to construct and impose rigid concepts of morality and “traditional” notions of societal duty, to adopt a more aggressive stance on the world stage and generally to return Japan to its more oppressive pre-war status quo. Opponents, who have dubbed the security legislation as Abe’s “War Bill” (which I use entirely facetiously in the title of this post), see that bill as being a huge step along the way to that objective.

They’re not wrong about Abe’s objective; you only need to read the man’s own words, in his book “Towards a Beautiful Country“, or look at the wish-list of constitutional change he and his LDP colleagues came up with before he came back to power in 2012. A man’s personal ideas and the policies he pursues in government may not always align, but it’s not unreasonable to fear the objectives of a man who has clearly laid out intentions to change his nation’s society in dangerous and worrying ways, and whose rule in government is effectively unopposed due to chaos within the ranks of opposition parties.

This broad unease only lends itself to making the protests and opposition to today’s bills seem fractured, discordant and uncoordinated. Part of the problem is that taken on its own merits, the bill is entirely reasonable. One may argue for or against the need for Japan to change the terms on which it engages with its security partners, but there are a great many logical and reasonable grounds for the claim that collective self-defence is required by the present international environment. For Japan to continue to exist securely under the US defence umbrella, even as the global influence of the US is increasingly challenged and the broad security environment of Asia remains unstable, seems untenable. A more even relationship in which Japan’s substantial military prowess forms part of the deterrent to conflict across Asia, and in which Japanese troops play a normalised part in activities such as UN Peace-Keeping Operations (as those of other militarily neutral countries, such as Ireland, do without difficulty), has much to recommend it. Ranked against that, protests claiming that this “War Bill” represents a rise of militarism – despite the fact that even with its implementation, Japan’s military engagement will remain pretty much the most restricted of any developed nation – are all too easy to dismiss.

Herein, perhaps, lies the core dichotomy and problem of Shinzo Abe’s leadership of Japan. His person suggests that he should be a disastrous leader – he is an unrepentant (if recently wisely silent) historical revisionist with barely-concealed fantasies of a return to the social and political order of Imperial Japan. His ultimate goal is a complete rewrite of Japan’s constitution which would dispense with its pacifist and human-rights oriented nature in favour of a stricter, more duty-focused constitution which he believes to better reflect “traditional” Japanese values. In some ways, this personality has indeed been disastrous; relations with China and South Korea, for example, deteriorated sharply under Abe’s leadership, though it’s unfair to lay the entire blame for that at his doorstep when the leadership of both of those countries demonstrated equal if not greater intransigence and historical dishonesty. In other ways, though, this personality and the stances it has created have been almost exactly what Japan needs; Abe’s policies have been pushed through with a force and vigour that has been sorely lacking in Japan for decades, and have seen kickstarts to employment, to inflation, to the role of women, to the broader economy, and to necessary adjustments to the nation’s international role. In each case, one can argue that Abe has pursued the right policy for the wrong reason – often horrifyingly wrong – but nonetheless, he’s achieved more in his years in power thus far than anyone since Junichiro Koizumi in the mid-2000s (and Koizumi, I’d argue, pursued the wrong policies for the right reasons, which is far worse).

Abe’s personality and his party’s regular gaffes colour everything they touch. Even as a supporter of its content, I will find it deeply uncomfortable to watch the “war bill” pass today, with the storm-in-a-teacup of protest making little or no odds to its progression through the various stages of government. I will find it even more uncomfortable if the Supreme Court, a far less aggressive and independent branch of government in Japan than in the USA, permits the bill to stand despite its extremely dubious constitutionality. I’d like to see Japan’s security position change, but I’d like to see it done right – with a constitutional amendment by popular vote, following a proper campaign of education and outreach about the reasons for its necessity. When a politician’s vigour and force extends to simply ignoring constitutional legalities, then no amount of democratic mandate (which, again, the LDP unquestionably possesses at present) can justify their actions. But perhaps that’s Abe in a nutshell; doing the right things for awful reasons, in awful ways, and making even those who support the actions uncomfortable along the way. He may be the most effective prime minister Japan has had in decades; he may simultaneously be the worst leader the nation has had in the post-war era.

Greece: Debt Relief is the only way forward

06/07/2015
economics, politics

The Greek people have voted in a landslide to reject further austerity measures demanded by the “Troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) in return for financial aid that would allow it to continue repaying its debts. This leaves Europe, and indeed the world, in unknown territory; nobody really knows what happens, or can happen, when a sovereign state that belongs to an international currency threatens to default on its debts after rejecting the proposals of the ECB et al. Conservatives and neo-liberals, unsurprisingly, are predicting apocalyptic scenarios; the complete collapse of the banking system and economy of Greece, the confiscation of all bank deposits over €8000 in the country, the expulsion of Greece from the Eurozone and potentially even the collapse of the Eurozone itself. Greece, the neo-liberal lobby wails, is risking the entire European Project through its intransigence.

French economist Thomas Piketty is having none of it, and if you read one thing about the Greek situation this week, it should be Piketty’s absolutely searing and on-point interview with German newspaper Die Zeit. Piketty’s core point is that Europe’s success stories in the post-war 20th century were all based on exactly the kind of debt relief which the Troika now seek to deny to Greece. Germany’s debt burden in the immediate post-war era was around 200% of GDP, but within ten years, it had fallen to 20%, largely thanks to negotiations which cancelled huge swathes of German debt. That debt relief was given with the understanding that an economy simply cannot grow and thrive (and thus have any hope of paying off its debts) while it is shackled by enormous public debt, and the so-called German “economic miracle” of the mid-20th century was a product of the willingness of German’s creditors to forgive its debts in favour of peaceful growth and stability. Exactly the same logic was applied as recently as the 1990s, when former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland (whose political leaders now parrot German’s hard-line on Greece) saw the majority of their huge debts cancelled in order to support their growth and development.

Compare that to the situation of Europe’s so-called “PIIGS” – Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, the countries which lost out most severely in the 2008 financial crash and which were forced by the Troika to assume the enormous private debts of their banking systems as public debts. Each of these cases is different – Ireland, at one extreme, had a very low and manageable level of public debt which was then completely destroyed by the nationalising of debts from the country’s huge, failing banks; Greece, at the further extreme, had serious problems with national debt all along, which it attempted to hide with manipulation of its public accounts, but were compounded by the forced nationalisation of huge amounts of private debt. Each was dealt with similarly, however; the Troika forced the national government to take on private debt from failing banks as public debt, then demanded that the country impose incredibly severe austerity in order to service its now-enormous debt burden.

That austerity has been absolutely horrific in its effects. Pensions, education and health budgets and support for the sick and disabled have been slashed. New, regressive taxes which target poor and middle-income people have been imposed. Infrastructure projects have been halted. As a consequence, unemployment has risen drastically (especially youth unemployment, which is now a full-blown national crisis in countries such as Greece and Spain), the economies have shrunk, and the vicious cycle has continued – because a shrinking economy makes it even harder for the government to pay back its debts.

It’s all apparently become too much even for the IMF, one of the members of the Troika, which broke with the party line at the start of this month and published a draft report which said what everyone in Greece has known for years – the country’s debt burden is unsustainable. It cannot and will not be repaid. Attempting to torture the money out of Greece – for that is precisely what the austerity measures being imposed right now amount to – isn’t going to work; the astonishing economic pain which countries such as Germany wish to impose on the Greeks will just result in an even smaller economy with even less capacity to pay back its debts. In other words, the left-wing government of Greece, which just received a resounding vote of confidence from its people in the referendum, is absolutely right to reject the Troika’s demands. Whatever happens next, even if it is as bad as the neo-liberal doomsayers predict, will be a short, recoverable shock compared to the many, many decades of stunted growth, harsh austerity and drip-fed ECB handouts that lie in store for Greece in the Troika’s plans.

None of this is to say that Greece is a poor, abused and angelic figure; the country falsified its accounts for years. However, it wasn’t ordinary Greek people who have lost their pensions, their healthcare and their public services who did this. It certainly wasn’t young Greeks whose employment prospects have completely evaporated who did it; they were children when it happened. The austerity tortures devised by the Troika would go so far as to extend the punishment to people who aren’t even children yet; decades from now, the private debt nationalised at the demand of Europe’s fiscal masters and the public debt held over Greece like a weighted sword will still be being repaid, at huge personal economic and human cost, by people who haven’t yet been born. This is precisely the scenario that led to the debts of countries like Germany and Poland being forgiven; yet it is seemingly a scenario that moves few hearts in Germany and Poland today.

Whether hearts are moved or not may not matter. It’s entirely likely that Greece simply cannot be removed from the Euro, whose currency union mechanisms were originally designed to be irreversible, and that the Troika – already fragmenting thanks to the IMF’s draft report – will be forced to return to the table with the Greek government and work out something different. That “something different” will have to include debt relief in some form; and yes, the rest of the PIIGS will demand that the same rules apply to them. There will be howls of protest from neo-liberals in Germany and elsewhere; but not because some natural order has been upset or some terrible debt-dodgers have been allowed to “get away with it”. Rather, the howls will be because the great neo-liberal con perpetrated in the wake of the financial crisis has failed; the con which demanded that all the money which the wealthy had placed in too-good-to-be-true financial instruments and dodgy banks should be indemnified and protected from risk by the national governments (and thus the ordinary people) of the countries in which those banks were based. The wealthy individuals and corporations threatened ill-defined economic chaos if governments did not allow them to use ordinary taxpayers and public services as “human shields” to protect them from the storm of their own making; governments, in thrall to neo-liberal thinking, acquiesced across the board. If Greece wins its argument with the Troika and receives a debt relief settlement, and the other PIIGS follow suit, it will be a sign that after seven long years, that neo-liberal bluff is being called.

Japan in 2012: Anger, Apathy and the Ballot Box

15/12/2012
japan, politics
4 Comments

Tomorrow, Japan will hold a general election for the first time since 2009. A lot has changed since 2009. At home, the impact of the 2011 Touhoku Earthquake is still felt, especially in the area of nuclear power policy; abroad, Japan has ended up in unwelcome territorial disputes over a handful of rocky islands with South Korea and, more worryingly, China.

Tomorrow’s election won’t be about any of those things. Not really.

The 2009 election was momentous for a simple reason – it elected the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to office. This was the first time since 1955 that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had not held power. The LDP was created in 1955 as a broad but tightly managed coalition of conservative political groups – including many whose wartime histories were murky, to say the least – and it held the reins of power throughout the remainder of the 20th century, becoming so deeply intertwined with Japan’s powerful bureaucracy that it could be hard to tell where the LDP ended and the civil service – the machinery of government itself – began. Yet in 2009 they were thrown out of office, losing to the DPJ in a landslide.

Tomorrow, it’s almost certain that the people of Japan will vote the LDP back into office. The most likely scenario is that they’ll have a majority (along with their perennial coalition partners, New Kōmeitō, which is effectively the political wing of the powerful Buddhist group Sōka Gakkai and as such commands a moderate but very reliable share of the vote from Sōka Gakkai followers), but will still need to work with other parties to get legislation through the Upper House. Some media outlets, though, are confidently predicting that the LDP, with New Komeito, will enjoy a “supermajority” – 320 seats in the Lower House (Japan uses the Westminster parliament system, so this is equivalent to the House of Commons in the UK), enough to force through almost any legislation it wants, regardless of how the Upper House may vote.

How might we interpret this? After less than three and a half years in office, Japan is throwing out its first non-LDP government in 54 years and inviting the LDP to return – what does it mean?

A few broad ideas have been thrown around by the press and a variety of commentators. One idea is that Japan is lurching to the right, politically – that the re-election of the conservative LDP, which includes factions with some worryingly revisionist views about World War 2 and a hawkish desire to “re-interpret” Japan’s pacifist constitution, means that the Japanese people are becoming more militaristic and hardline in their views. Another idea is that the election is a referendum on the DPJ’s handling of the Touhoku Earthquake, the Fukushima nuclear disaster and subsequent events. So; “it’s all about militarism”, say one group of talking heads; “it’s all about nuclear power”, say another.

Those are nice, convenient talking points. They’re also incredibly simple, which should ring warning bells. They betray a deep desire to find a simple narrative for this election, when none exists, and they speak more about the biases of their authors (who are personally obsessed with “Japan’s attitude to WW2” or “Japan’s attitude to nuclear power”) than they do about the feelings of the Japanese electorate. In less polite terms, they’re flat-out wrong.

This is not to say that issues like militarism and nuclear power haven’t featured in the election – but they have not been major issues. On militarism, many of the politicans involved have form, but have seemed to quite deliberately keep their mouths shut. The LDP is led by Abe Shinzo, a man who was previously prime minister for a fairly disastrous one-year term in 2006/7. He is well-known as a hawkish character with rather revisionistic views on Japan’s wartime history and a strong desire to “re-interpret” the constitution to allow the building up of Japanese military power, but during his period as Prime Minister, he reined in those impulses (although he never seemed happy doing so, and this may have contributed to his early exit from the job). He’s reined them in once again on the campaign trail this year – he’s been gaffe-prone as ever, but not over issues of national security or history. Other hawks are also to be found on the campaign trail; the newly created Japan Restoration Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai), for example, is led by Osaka mayor Hashimoto Toru, who wants a referendum on the pacifist clause of the constitution (Article 9) and picked a bizarre fight with teachers over the treatment of the Japanese national anthem in classrooms. His new political partner is former Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro, a loud-mouthed and vainglorious right-wing ideologue whose entire career has been spend picking bizarre fights with intellectuals, pacifists, foreigners, women or whichever minority group he could think of to insult on the spur of the moment. Yet even these two characters have kept squeaky-clean through the campaign, avoiding being tarred with the nationalist brush as much as possible. Hashimoto has even emerged as an extremely moderate voice on foreign policy, suggesting, for example, that Japan should share administration of the disputed Senkaku and Dokdo islands with China and South Korea respectively.

Why put firebrands in charge but then make them shut up? Because there’s no appetite in Japan for right-wing, nationalist firebrands. The “lurch to the right” narrative about Japan simply collapses when you look at ground truth – across every meaningful opinion poll, the Japanese people strongly support Article 9 of the Constitution (which renounces the nation’s right to wage war) and reject advancing militarism or nationalism. Having neighbours like North Korea or China is frightening, certainly – and recent events have made the region feel even less safe – but the last thing the Japanese electorate wants is a hawkish leadership who directly provoke their neighbours through such actions as military build-up. Moreover, in this election in particular, the opinion polls are clear – foreign policy as a whole is a long way down people’s lists of concerns.

What of nuclear power, then? As it turns out, that’s a long way down the list of concerns as well. Perhaps that’s because the status quo isn’t working out too badly – most of the nuclear reactors are still offline and Japan hasn’t experienced any power shortages (the impact of boosting imports of fossil fuels in order to cover up the shortfall may not have been felt yet – expert commentary on that differs greatly). Either way, it doesn’t seem to bother people greatly that none of the parties are committing to a rapid end to nuclear power, or that the LDP in particular doesn’t seem committed at all to winding down the nuclear power industry which it was so directly instrumental in creating. Only one party, the Tomorrow Party, focuses on nuclear issues; it’s led by Kada Yukiko, the likeable and sincere governor of Shiga Prefecture, but mostly made up of former DPJ politicians who bailed out of the party a few months ago, following their powerful faction leader (and DPJ co-founder) Ozawa Ichiro. Everyone knows that Ozawa is the real power behind the Tomorrow Party, and neither Kada’s role as a human shield nor the party’s strong anti-nuclear stance is likely to prevent it from being wiped out at the ballot box.

Okay. So it’s not the military, and it’s not nukes. What, then, are the people of Japan voting on? How have they made their decision to return to the embrace of the LDP?

That’s a trick question. They haven’t made that decision at all. The sad, dull reality of the 2012 General Election in Japan is that the populace isn’t returning to the LDP; they’re not actively choosing to elect Abe Shinzo as their next Prime Minister. They’re just getting the default option, because “None Of The Above” doesn’t feature on their ballot papers.

With only a handful of days left before the election, the LDP was sitting at around 23% support in the opinion polls. This is a party which is expected in some quarters to get a “supermajority”. Twenty-three per cent. A “supermajority”. To put that in context, that’s the same percentage of the vote as the Liberal Democrats in the UK got in 2010 – and in the 1997 UK general election, when the Tories were wiped out by a Labour landslide, they still got nearly 31% of the vote.

Still – the LDP are doing better than the DPJ, who languish at 11% to 14%, depending on which polls you read. The newbies in the Japan Restoration Party manage similar numbers – 8% in the lowball polls, 13% in the optimistic ones.

Who’s really winning this election, according to the polls? “Don’t know”. Only days before polling closes, “Don’t know” is in for a sweeping victory, with around 40% of the vote. After all the wrangling, the posturing, the temper tantrums for the cameras, the angry accusations, the manifestoes, the TV appearances and the endless shouting of slogans from the loudspeakers on top of cars in busy urban areas, nearly half of the people of Japan still don’t know who the hell they want to vote for.

Six months before an election, that’s understandable. Three months before an election, it’s understandable. A month in advance, you’d start to worry. Less than a week in advance, those figures no longer mean “Don’t Know”. What they actually mean is, “None of the Above”. What those voters are really saying is, “A plague on both your houses”.

Whether the LDP wins a supermajority or not; whether the DPJ is all but wiped out or manages to save some face; whatever happens in the election will come down to whether those 40% of voters decide to turn up, grit their teeth and vote for the least-worst option (which might well help the DPJ to save face, since Abe Shinzo’s right-wing tendencies do scare people a little, and his incompetent tenure and humiliating resignation in 2007 isn’t so long ago) – or whether they just stay at home, which would probably let the LDP romp home with a large majority but a deeply questionable mandate.

Why is this happening? If you want a neat, simplified narrative, here’s one. The LDP – and its conjoined twin, the Japanese bureaucracy – is in decline. A fragile coalition of otherwise competing interests and viewpoints was held together through the 60s, 70s and 80s by Japan’s economic miracle. Dissent was silenced by financial generosity, each special interest group or uppity politician bought off with gigantic amounts of public cash being spent on their pet infrastructure projects and local communities. Everyone got rich, so everyone stayed quiet. Nobody wanted to upset an applecart so brimming with rich harvest.

Since the financial crisis and the end of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, things have been a lot more uncertain. The idea of the LDP and the bureaucracy managing Japan with stunning competence has been demolished by two decades of flatlining growth, declining levels of full-time professional employment and currency deflation. However, the impact of this has been delayed, for the simple reason that Japan is still a great place to live. It’s safe, it’s secure, it’s convenient – outside central Tokyo, it’s even fairly cheap. Healthcare and education are good. Poverty exists, but it’s hidden away on the margins. The applecart isn’t quite as full of ripe fruit as it once was, but it’s still not a good idea to upset it.

At the same time, dissatisfaction has set in – and it’s only grown as generations who finished university in the 1990s and 2000s realised that many of them would never have the kind of full-time employment their fathers had enjoyed. Few of them would be as wealthy as their parents had been. A large number, forced to take part-time or short-term contract jobs rather than full-time “salaryman” work, would never have enough money to buy a house or start a family. The covenant at the heart of Japanese society – “work hard, trust the government, and you’ll live well” was being broken. The LDP, authors of that covenant, seemed either not to understand what was happening, or not to know how to fix it – or perhaps both.

When the DPJ won the election in 2009, they promised a huge variety of things – their manifesto, in fact, read like a bit of a fantastical wishlist, and that quality has been used as a stick to beat the party with ever since. Their main promise, though, was unspoken; “we’re not the LDP”. Indeed, the party itself was a Frankenstein’s monster of a thing, composed of refugees, waifs and strays from across the political spectrum – including many politicians who had served time within the LDP itself. Their commonality was not anything that they were, but something that they were not. They were not the LDP. They won a landslide victory.

Tomorrow, they’ll collapse. Many of their Diet members, elected in 2009, will be unceremoniously dumped from office. The party has already fragmented; former DPJ members can be found in many of the new parties contesting tomorrow’s elections. Most will lose their seats regardless. They weren’t the LDP in name, but they reflected many of the things people hate most about the LDP in every other way – the factionalism, the in-fighting, the sheer ineffectiveness. Fukushima uncovered collusion with the nuclear industry; a humiliating cabinet resignation earlier this year came about because of connections with the Yakuza, Japan’s organised crime groups. Both incidents had a strong whiff of the old LDP around them. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

What the DPJ did offer, at least, was one place where people tired of the LDP’s misrule could place their ballots. This time around, there’s no such place. Some of the DPJ’s 2009 coalition of voters will drift back to the LDP – but few, I suspect. The LDP’s support figure of 23% is actually about the same as their polling figure in 2009. Last time, it earned them humiliating defeat; this time, it’ll win them a landslide. Most DPJ voters will have drifted elsewhere, fragmenting the anti-LDP vote. Some will go to Nippon Ishin no Kai, creating a third force in Japanese politics that could be fascinating to watch in years to come – assuming the tectonic stresses between the egos of Hashimoto and Ishihara don’t pull it to shreds first. A handful will go to the Tomorrow Party, or off to other marginals like the Japan Communist Party. Many, I suspect, will just stay at home. They took a gamble on believing in the DPJ, and lost. Politics has ceased to speak to them, or for them. That’s a volatile situation, even in a comfortable, modern nation like Japan. It leaves a void to be filled – perhaps by extremists, perhaps by non-party campaign groups, perhaps even by faith-based political movements. None of those are comfortable thoughts for the LDP – a party returning to power, but by no means back in the good books of its electorate.

 

anti-gay ads: not a freedom of speech issue

15/04/2012
politics
11 Comments

I normally find myself on the very liberal end of any discussion about freedom of speech – I don’t, for example, think that Liam Stacey should have been prosecuted for his appalling racist trolling about Fabrice Muamba on Twitter, which is not an entirely popular point of view. It’s therefore been interesting to find myself on the other side of the looking glass this week, holding views which are in opposition to a number of people whom I like and respect.

The basis of the discussion is an advertisement which was booked to run on a number of London Bus routes by a group called Anglican Mainstream – a deeply conservative, right-wing Christian organisation with links to the US religious right. The ads read “Not Gay! Ex-Gay, Post-Gay and Proud. Get Over It!” – a reference to the group’s claims that they can “cure” gay people and turn them straight, a kind of therapy sometimes (mockingly) called “pray the gay away”.

Now, this is obviously pretty offensive stuff. For a start, being gay isn’t an illness, so it doesn’t need a cure – any more than your race, your gender or the colour of your eyes needs a “cure”. Moreover, gay “cure” therapies have been discredited by professional medical bodies and shown to cause serious harm to people who attempt to go through with them. Young people from conservative Christian families are sometimes sent to special camps to “fix” their homosexuality, and the results aren’t happy, well-adjusted heterosexual people – they’re a lifetime of psychological trauma. Even promoting these false ideas about “cures” can seriously hurt vulnerable young people, by making it harder for their families to accept their sexuality.

So, there was an outcry on Twitter and other social media sites, and within hours, Transport for London had announced that it had been “made aware” of the campaign and would not be running it. Mayor Boris Johnson seemed to claim credit for the U-turn (he does have an election coming up next month, after all), but TfL’s own statement simply said that the ads had been booked by an external agency and nobody at TfL had seen them until the outcry brought them to their notice.

Victory, right? I tend to think so. Others, however, disagree. I’ve seen arguments – from perfectly rational, liberal people, who absolutely abhor the content of these ads – that this is a defeat for freedom of speech, that it’s politically motivated censorship and that it just makes the problem worse, since it suffocates debate over these issues.

I understand the arguments, I really do – and I also despise the knee-jerk social media reactions that say, “this offends me! Make it go away!” You don’t have a right not to be offended. That goes for if you’re a Muslim horrified by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, a gay person disgusted by homophobic ranting, a US conservative who finds a blog post to be anti-American, or an atheist who doesn’t want to be served by someone wearing a headscarf or a crucifix. All of these people can be offended if they want, but they don’t have a right not to be offended – they don’t have a right to insist that the offending thing be banned. We live in a society of many cultures, religions, views and positions, and many of them will offend you. You have a right not to be damaged by things that are done to you (as in, for example, the case of the gay couple refused entry to a B&B they had booked), but you have no right not to be offended by what people say, what people wear, what they write or what they draw.

The thing is, I don’t think the issue of the “Ex-Gay” ads is a question of freedom of speech, and I don’t think it’s about a right not to be offended. I think there’s a difference between “freedom of speech” and “privilege of being broadcast”. It’s as simple as this – you’re free to say what you wish, to think what you wish, to express what you wish, but there’s no obligation on anyone else to broadcast that for you.

The best example of this is the idiot newspaper columnist who writes something absolutely abhorrent, and people get upset about it. They contact the newspaper to complain, or perhaps get clever and organised, and contact the newspaper’s advertisers to say they’ll boycott their product if they continue to support this horrible stuff with advertising money. “Censorship!” howls the idiot columnist. “You hate freedom of speech! How dare you!”

Except it’s not censorship, and it’s not an attack on freedom of speech. Nobody is saying “arrest this person and lock them up for saying such things; gag them and break their fingers, so that they can never say such things again” (well, some people probably are saying that, but they’re an unrepresentative minority whose knees jerk that bit harder than everyone else’s). What they’re actually saying is, “you bear responsibility for what you say, and we’re exercising OUR freedom of expression by reacting to it.” In short – you’re free to say what you like, but you don’t have an inalienable right to a handsomely-paid newspaper column in which to say it. You’re free to say what you like, but nobody is obliged to publish it for you.

Coming back to the Anglican Mainstream ads, then – they’re horrible, but if Anglican Mainstream want to put them on signboards in front of their buildings, or distribute leaflets about them, or put them on the Internet, they’re entitled to do so. That’s free expression. If they can find a publication that’ll print them, they’re entitled to do so. I don’t think anyone should be arrested over these ads. I don’t think they should be “banned” by some higher authority with the power to stop things from being said or written or printed in our country.

I do, however, think that the transport network of our capital city, used and seen by millions of Londoners each day, has every right to respond to an outcry from its customers and make a sensible decision about which ads to run. TfL has absolutely no obligation to run these ads. If it thinks they’re horrible, or will hurt or offend passengers (to whom TfL does have an obligation), it’s quite right to refuse them.

This doesn’t hurt freedom of speech. Anglican Mainstream can speak all they want, and no matter how much it offends me, I absolutely defend their right to do so. But TfL, a body which exists to serve Londoners, doesn’t have to help them to be heard. We all enjoy the right to speak, but the right to be heard or to be listened to is, quite rightly, something that’s a lot harder to earn.