by
Les May
MANCHESTER
and Hong Kong are
6000 miles and 200 years apart. The
Peterloo Massacre
took place at St Peter’s
Field, Manchester on
Monday 16 August 1819 when cavalry charged into a crowd of
60,000–80,000 who had gathered to demand the reform of
parliamentary representation. It
took four Reform Acts, 1832, 1867, 1884 and 1918 before every man
over the age of 21 had the right to vote to select who should enact
the laws which governed him. The
1918 Act added about 5
million men to the 8 million previously entitled to vote. Many,
perhaps a majority, of the men who fought and died in the First World
war did not have the right to vote.
Some
women gained this right in 1918 but
it took another ten years before all women over 21 could vote in
Parliamentary elections.
In
Hong Kong on
Sunday, March 26, 2017, a
committee dominated by a
pro-Beijing elite chose
Hong Kong's next leader Carrie
Lam as the new Chief
Executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People's
Republic of China. She
was ‘elected’ after she gained 777 of the
votes of 1,194 Hong Kong notables and
was regarded
as Beijing’s favoured candidate.
China
is a totalitarian state ruled by the Communist party which is run by
a small elite. Beijing’s fear is that if a more democratic
system of government is instituted in Hong Kong the people of
mainland China will demand the same and the Communist party will lose
control.
Being
able to vote to select who will enact the laws under which you will
live is an essential, but not sufficient attribute, of a democracy.
The right to hold and express a different view to your fellow
citizens is another essential requirement of democracy. This is the
way we bring about change. Change is the one thing the Chinese
Communist party leaders fear. In
their eyes the status quo equals stability; change equals
instability.
Not
only is the right to hold and express a different view an essential
component of democracy it is also necessary if we are to feel equal
to our fellow citizens and to have any sense of personal autonomy.
Totalitarianism is the total antithesis of this.
The
men and women at St Peter’s field were there because they saw
extension of the suffrage as a way of improving their material lot in
life at a time when trade had slumped following the ending of the
Napoleonic wars. The demonstrators in Hong Kong are not on the bread
line, a fact which the apologists for the Chinese government who
appear on news programmes make much of, they want to be able to
choose lawmakers with views different from those of the Chinese
communist party leadership, or not, as the case may be.
In
Hong Kong as in the rest of China totalitarian conformity and the
suppression of dissenting views is imposed by the state. That’s
not the British way of doing things. Our totalitarianism has been
privatised. In some circles and on some matters we are no longer
allowed to hold and express a dissenting view.
Here
are three examples. In July of this year I wrote a review of a
booklet under the heading ‘Transsexuals vs Cocks in Frocks’*.
Someone saw this and in a post on Facebook described it as ‘funny’
and went on to express broadly similar views. He happened to be a
member of a self styled London based ‘anarchist’ group. This
group, behaving more like good Marxists, had a produced a statement
about so called ‘trans’ issues and everyone was expected to
follow it. He resigned.
Tim
Farron, leader of the
Liberal Democrats
from 2015 to 2017 is the sort of Christian who believes that
homosexual sex is ‘sinful’.
When asked about his attitude to it he denied this. Later it
emerged that he had done this only because he felt under pressure
from his party to do so.
Farron’s continued
association with evangelical anti-gay-lobby
groups was
seen as a ‘lack of
care’ to the LGBT
community. I
think this probably means that he declined to shield them from
hearing views they did not like.
Farron
eventually resigned saying ‘The
consequences of the focus on my faith is that I have found myself
torn between living as a faithful Christian and serving as a
political leader’,
but
not before he had been subjected to false
allegations by the former head of the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, Chris
Cooke,
who
made unsubstantiated complaints to the party about Farron's personal
conduct when ‘drunk’,
and later admitted that he ‘made
up a story to cause trouble’.
What
I find sad about both these cases is that neither of the people
affected was prepared to take a stand on the right of individuals to
hold and express a different point of view to that of their fellow
citizens. Someone needs to
remind
the
people who
complained that
freedom of expression applies to people you disagree with as well as
those whose views coincide with yours. The alternative is the echo
chamber of social media where you need only listen to views that
coincide with your own.
The
third example concerns the nature
of the complaints of ‘anti-semitism’
made against the Labour party. There is a tendency amongst Labour
supporters to view these as an attempt by some Jewish people to
prevent criticism of the policies pursued by the state of Israel and
an attempt to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn.
But
to those of us who believe that the
right to hold and express a different view to our fellow citizens is
essential requirement of democracy, it
seems more sinister.
Many
of the complaints seem to be about what people say or have said. An
otherwise
excellent 85
page report
from
the Institute
for Jewish Policy Research
with the title ‘Antisemitism
in contemporary Great Britain: A study of attitudes towards Jews and
Israel’
by
L.
Daniel Staetsky
says on pages
63 and 64 ‘However,
what Jews are exposed to far more frequently are people who hold, and
from time to time may express, views that make Jews feel
uncomfortable
or offended.
A person expressing such a view (e.g. ‘Jews think that they are
better than other people’) may hold this view in isolation and may
indeed hold a weak version of it, but when it is casually voiced in
front of a Jewish individual, it can cause considerable upset and
concern.’ (my
emphasis)
Taken at its face value this
means that one section of the population is demanding the right never
to be offended and the right to tell us what we should think about
them. This is a demand for exceptionalism.
In Hong Kong thousands of people
are running the risk of provoking the Chinese communist party into
ordering the Peoples Liberation Army (all despots like to claim they
are acting in the name of ‘the People’ and setting them free) to
clear the streets, in order to express their wish to select their own
lawmakers. Let’s not betray them by handing control of what we
think and what we say to any bunch of people who are afraid to hear
views that differ from their own. Freedom is having the right to
tell people what they do not want to hear.
* northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2019/07 › review-transsexuals-vs-cock...
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