I was, however, very disappointed to learn today that Patrick Stewart has publicly backed David Miliband for Labour leader. I’d like to Fisk him. I’d like to deconstruct each one of his superficial points on the aspects of Miliband’s personality, not his politics, that make him the best possible Labour leader. But I’m just going to leave this one to Jean Luc Picard…

Ed Balls was of the opinion that the public wanted even more spending and were prepared for the extra tax, by reference to polls that the Treasury had – which I said was nonsense. On these issues, the public fib.

This is a really extraordinary claim. Blair’s faith in third way ideology is so overwhelming, so evangelical, so blinkered, that even when there is clear evidence that mild, mainstream social democratic thinking might be popular, it must be a lie. He’s imbibed so completely his own rhetoric, that redistribution can’t win elections, that he refuses to believe any evidence to the contrary. Those thinking about the direction Labour should go in might want to think twice before considering the wisdom of this fantacist.

As the Labour leadership contest enters its final leg, party members will be receiving their ballots in the post today. But while the national media is zooming in on a two-horse race between the two Milibands – one the candidate of continuity, the other of modest change – The Third Estate talks to Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, sofa star of This Week and the only contender for Brown’s vacant throne offering genuine left-wing reform.

“I am running for the leadership because I am the best candidate for the job,” Diane Abbott confidently declares. “The most immediate task is to rebuild and revitalise the party and no other candidate has my experience of the party.”

Drawing on her experience as a trade union official, a councillor, an MP, a member of the national executive and a veteran of many grassroots campaigns, Abbott believes she is better placed to engage with ordinary Labour party members than any of her rivals.

“I want to build on the best of the New Labour years, but I am the only candidate offering a fresh vision for the party,” Abbott says. It’s a vision that ranges from greater internal democracy to putting civil liberties back at the heart of its politics. At home, she wants to challenge, not just to the timing of government cuts but their scale, while abroad she wants to see new thinking about Britain’s place in the world by scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent and withdrawing British troops from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, advocating bringing the railways back into public ownership, Abbott seeks to address one of the core failures of New Labour. “We need to admit that the market is not the answer for everything,” she says.

Labour’s defeat in May’s election has ushered in a new period of reflection for the party. But while most of her rivals are seeking to trim around the edges, pushing for centrist reform, Abbot is clear about her party’s mistakes and how they must be addressed.

“Ordinary people thought that New Labour was not on their side,” Abbot says. “Increasingly it seemed like an elitist project trapped in a Westminster bubble. New Labour became increasingly undemocratic. The Prime Minister was not listening to his cabinet and the Parliamentary leadership was not listening to its own members and supporters or the general public.”

Abbott argues that if ordinary party members had had a real say, Labour could have avoided some of its most damaging mistakes.

“Scrapping the 10p tax rate, the introduction of tuition fees, the failure to regulate the banks properly, the attempt to introduce 90 days detention without trial, locking up children in immigration detention centres, the failure to bring the railways back into public ownership, creeping privatisation in the NHS, and, above all, the Iraq War. These are all things that contributed to our defeat at the last election.”

It has been fifteen years since Clause IV was famously re-written and Labour became New Labour. But after thirteen years of New Labour government, on the day that Tony Blair’s memoir hits the shelves defending his decision on Iraq and urging Labour not to return to the left, what would Abbott say to disaffected left-wingers who have abandoned a party they feel abandoned them long ago?

“I cannot defend the many right-wing decisions that were taken over the past thirteen years and I never have,” Abbot says. “But I can offer an alternative. Under my leadership we will get back to the business of being the Labour party that delivers for the people of this country. Being in opposition gives us a chance to have a real look at the state of the party, and get back to the principles we were built on.”

While a spell in opposition may well be what the party needs to reflect on its many mistakes in government, the conclusions it draws will depend largely on who it selects as its next leader. Abbott’s candidacy, like those of Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, has been overshadowed somewhat by the Miliband brothers, and in particular the elder front-runner. But if David Miliband wins, will it prove the party has learnt nothing from the failings of New Labour?

“David Miliband is the New Labour continuity candidate, the heir to Blair,” Abbott says. “The majority of ordinary Labour party members were against many decisions of the New Labour project. However they see the desperate times we face under the coalition and some think that David Miliband is the quickest way out of it and back to power.”

Abbott believes voters will naturally return to Labour, but the sell will be a hard one. “My view is that the general public are not fools,” she says. “When the Lib-Cons have finished destroying our country we will certainly have voters that will naturally come back, but the rest will take convincing. There is nothing convincing about the same old, New Labour rhetoric, which offers no real alternative to the status quo.”

As a left-winger, and as the country’s first female black MP, Abbott neither sounds nor looks like the status quo of British politics. Her place on the ballot paper was far from secure, however, until fellow Socialist Campaign Group MP, John McDonnell, withdrew his leadership candidacy. By doing so, he said he hoped he could help ensure that a woman got onto the ballot paper of an otherwise testosterone dominated contest. But should politics be about gender, or race, or should it be about having the right ideas and the right policies?

“I am most grateful to John McDonnell, because his withdrawing did ensure that a woman made it on to the ballot,” Abbott says. “However he is a staunch socialist and would not have withdrawn for another principled progressive.”

Abbott agrees that politics is all about policies, but argues that in the 21st century, a winning progressive movement in any country has to reflect the views and concerns of women and minorities. “If we do not have a political leadership which looks like the community around us then it will lack the legitimacy we want to represent,” she says. “Politics should be about representing the needs of people and people come in many different forms. A lack of diversity and a lack of representation in any institution are instantly reflected in debate, policies and implementation.”

One policy that Abbott keenly supports is electoral reform which, more than any other, threatens to split the coalition government. A referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote (AV) system was, albeit rather too little rather too late, included in Labour’s manifesto and Abbott has pledged to back the key coalition proposal.

“It may not be the ultimate solution, but will certainly be fairer than the first past the post system we currently use,” she says. “It is more proportional, reduces the need for tactical voting and will help to reflect true public opinion of fascist parties. Groups like the BNP are very unlikely to get 2nd or even 3rd preferences.”

Like many of her fellow party members, however, she is somewhat less keen on the government’s decision to link the referendum on voting reform with boundary changes.

“I am appalled at the Lib-Cons attempts to use voting reform to bring about boundary changes,” Abbott says. “These are clearly designed to ensure that they maintain and gain more seats in further elections. Tainting the reforms with trying to maintain power is highly inappropriate and may mean that people will not vote for AV reform despite believing this is the best system. This in effect defeats the point of the entire reform.”

This last comment perhaps best reflects Abbott’s philosophy. A socialist, a democrat, a thorn in the side of the Blairite establishment, but Labour through and through.

“We have difficult times ahead,” Abbott says. “I love my party and believe that we will rise to this challenge. But to do this we need every disaffected activist in the Labour movement behind us. They are a group of people who understand solidarity and I am certain they see the importance of uniting against the Lib-Cons.”

The task ahead for Abbott, and for her party, will not be an easy one. In less than a month it will choose which direction it will take. And contrary to the retired rhetoric of the Mandelsons of this world, that choice is not between backwards and forwards, but between left and right. If, after thirteen years of Blair and Brown, after Iraq and Afghanistan, after the systematic rollback of civil liberties and human rights and the stark betrayal of its socialist roots for a market-orientated philosophy, Labour elects David Miliband, it will have learnt nothing from the failings of a leadership that sacrificed genuine progressive principles for power for power’s sake. If, on the other hand, it chooses Diane Abbott, reported to be the favoured candidate of Miliband’s Marxist mother, voters may once again find themselves faced with a genuine choice at the next election and the Labour Party may find itself saying out with the New and in with the old.

Small-Scale Revolution
On Wednesday at 9pm nearly 100 people, under the cover of darkness, and without a copper in sight, got onto RBS territory at Gogarburn, and started unloading trucks full of marquees and plumbing. It took RBS security a good 10 minutes to realise we were on the back lawn of the global headquarters, and the police another 5 on top of that. Let’s just get that again: around 100 amateur radicals, pulling off a secret action successfully, under the noses of arguably the biggest bank in the UK. Okay, so it’s Spy Kids, but frankly it’s bloody cool.

photo: amelia gregory

A lot of the secrecy stuff is, I’m sure, based on what is second nature to various kinds of software programmers, network managers and certain kinds of military and police personnel, so this isn’t to say that the skills in Climate Camp are unique. This goes for all the practical skills needed to put on a Climate Camp: plumbing, electrics, carpentry – all these things aren’t exactly rare.

What makes the camp quite different though, is that the vast majority of people involved don’t do these things professionally. This means that the form of mutual aid practised at the camp actually pushes away from the kind of monotonous labour-specialisation that the modern world offers us: it gives a chance for everyone to pitch in with other activities, in a way that actually has quite a lot of responsibility attached to it, not just as a hobby on the side.

So while the camp isn’t a solution in itself, I think it does offer some breathing space away from contemporary work patterns as much as it does economic ones (note that the camp works on a donation basis, and there are no commodities or the like sold on site). This doesn’t mean that the camp addresses fundamental issues like commodification on any profound or serious level, but people are transformed in their engagement with the camp, in small ways, and quite slowly. This is why I think it’s a small-scale revolution: like a Hornby™ revolution perhaps. But it’s also a dry-run: if the revolution needs practical skills, I know where I’m looking for them.

Towards A Class Analysis Of Landscape Gardening
The fields we built our camp in were RBS owned property. We held that site, and kept setting up for 3 days, though the RBS media machine would have it, peculiarly, that they ’showed us the right place to camp’ when we got there. However, while RBS understandably didn’t want us there, and turned up the pressure to leave at 1pm on Wednesday (Section 60 stop and searches, heavy police road blockades, etc), there is something we shared with them: a taste in gardens.

Everyday I had a conversation with someone about how beautiful the site was, with its mixture of wheat and long grasses, the scenic clumps of trees complete with small frogs and the occasional adder, the clover and moss paths that wound over the hill and round the back of the meadows, the small bridge folly over the moat.

I suspect that there’s a lesson here about the bourgeois nature of environmentalist aesthetics. There’s certainly something fishy about the innocent-smoothie-style, happy-go-bunting imagery that occasionally bubbles over Climate Camp propaganda; something which shares a feel with the beautiful, semi-wild gardens of RBS’ choosing.

I’m not sure what an anti-capitalist critique of gardens would be, but I imagine it would be along the lines of ‘man and nature shouldn’t be separated; let’s do away with the manipulation of our environment to create a space that breaks down the boundaries of artificiality/ nature.’ Well, we didn’t do that. We enjoyed the landscaped, semi-18th century garden RBS’ landscapers designed as much as anyone.

How To Lay Siege To A Bank, Medieval Style
What came to pass in Gogarburn was essentially a distorted form of a medieval siege. An army of tents were set up directly overlooking RBS headquarters, complete with watchtower. Their shiny glass walls reflected our brightly coloured bunting. On Sunday evening hundred of activists swarmed on to the manicured back lawn of the headquarters, totally outfoxing the police once again, and a couple of windows were smashed. The fortress-like building itself became the target.

the rhino siege tower (photo: amelia gregory)

On the Monday, the day of action, the watchtower became converted into a rolling siege tower, complete with wheels and a rhinoceros head. Toy bows and arrows were made, and most impressively, the Molassapult: a catapult which threw molasses at the Headquarters. The sheer imagination of the actions was astounding. Most of these were in Edinburgh proper: the Cairn Energy molasses oil spill; the Lady Gaga spoof song ‘Dirty Oil’; all those white biohazard suits.

If Climate Camp was previously thought to be too slick and rehearsed, this was the remedy: anarchic, clowning, messy and really very surreal. No one who was there will forget the image of 40 police kitting up and looking scared shitless at the site of a 0.001mph moving papier-mâché and chicken-wire-rhino siege tower.

A few smashed windows, lots of subvertising, blockades of offices and a good swathe of molasses found that nice balance between mayhem and publicity stunt. The smashed windows alone will have sent RBS’ insurance premiums through the roof, never mind the gardening costs. Of course, there’s a serious question about the effects of inflicting economic damage on a bank that it basically owned by the state – it’s theoretically the taxpayer who loses out. But I don’t think anyone could argue that’s what will actually happen: it’s not as if the profits of RBS are currently being ploughed into the common good.

How do you take action against a bank? Well, I think the Edinburgh camp made a start at showing some ways forward. It’s not an easy thing to do, and the G20 Bank of England protests certainly didn’t achieve it. The Climate Camp definitely felt better than telling people to put their money in the Co-op or pull back from the capitalist system all together by investing in a extra-security mattress. This felt closer to the real thing: you stand outside, brandish your pots and pans, and run straight at it.

the molassapult (photo: tim morozzo)

I think the medieval feel came from the demonstration of our own powerlessness to which I alluded earlier, but also from a very practical consideration. There’s only so far we can go when up against the police before we’re classed as being a real threat, and therefor liable to far more oppressive reactions. A siege tower is one thing; a car driving at the fences would have been another. This is how I think we end up with the weird pre-modern (or what Antonio Negri might call alter-modern) protest form of the medieval siege: it’s the confrontational public mass actions pushed to the edge, without becoming and out-and-out military attack. Instead, people were quite happy to settle for the wacky races version of insurrectionism.

Broadcasting In Austerity
On the weekend there was lots of positive mainstream media coverage of the camp in the Scottish press: pictures of tents and campers, and lots of messages about RBS and climate change getting through. However, when it came to the day of mass action, the press just couldn’t cope. Too lazy to actually do any reporting, they just printed whatever press releases got sent to them. Many of these came from activists, but there were also several from the police, including two which made totally false allegations about a phantom oil slick.

Now, this attitude to printing press releases without checking them seems to have become a trend in journalism. I think it’s got worse since the financial crisis: many newspapers, faced with decreasing advertisement revenues, have simply fired their subeditors, and the journalists are overworked for low pay, pay which is  kept down by temps and interns on precarious contracts.

However, as Reuben pointed out on this blog last week, it’s not just about bad wages, but also the rise of totally free online content:

It was arguably naive for us all to assume that we could suddenly get journalistic content for free … without the product itself being altered … The age of online freeganism could prove deeply problematic both for journalists and those of us who have an interest in quality journalism.

The dominance of online media as a method of publication and broadcast had an upside and a downside. On the upside, our weird acts of spectacle could be easily turned into little pieces of information and sent around the world without any checks. The disparity in technology is really quite ironic: our medieval siege tower and catapult could be photographed, filmed and tweeted on the latest MacBooks, iPhones and Nikons, even though they themselves were constructed out of ticcy-taccy.

The downside, of course, is that all this can just as easily be done by canny police or lazy journalists. The net effect is that while there was a lot of ’social media’ work done at the Camp, in the end it was the same tactics being used by the police which, seized the day and smeared the protests.

As is so often the case, the response to this might need to be a two-pronged approach, particularly as resistance grows against austerity measures over the next few years. On the one hand, as Reuben advocates, that means defending the ability for professional journalists to still produce some kind of high quality reporting; on the other it means taking our alternative media networks much more seriously, and putting the time into making them work.

All That Anarchist Shit
This, I think, is quite similar to the politics of the Climate Camp: pushing for reforms (e.g. an end to RBS investing in fossil fuels) while creating space to create far wider change. In the wee small hours of the morning after the last day of camp, a group of us drove far out of Edinburgh, away from the camp site, along with a truck loaded up with wheelie bins of human shit. High up in the Scottish hills, overlooking a beautiful loch, we unloaded our cargo, shovelling the waste material of 700 campers into hastily constructed composting crates. Penny Red might think just using the compost loos alone is commitment enough: let me tell you, there’s greater commitment than that.

Maybe that’s the difference between a socialist and an anarchist: while the one might be up for a bit of discomfort, the other gets right in there.

• Jim Jepps on why seeing the back of NHS Direct might not be the end of the world.
• Why is Malcolm X like David Cameron? Read Dave Osler to find out.
• Also at LibCon, Sunny thinks the Guardian is being taken for a ride by the Tories over the Labour leadership.
• Adam Curtis looks at how attitudes to debt in the UK have shifted, and why.
• The BBC is coming under pressure to stop making jokes about class. Victoria Coren is worried, and you should be too.
• Finally, Prisoner Ben needs your help – more specifically, your cash – so he doesn’t have to quit his PhD. Paul Sagar has more. Please give what you can.

Image: puliarf/flickr

Over the past few weeks and months stories have been surfacing suggesting that Lance Armstrong, seven time-winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, Livestrong founder and inspiration to millions, may have taken performance-enhancing drugs at some point during his career. Given that he’s a professional cyclist, this is hardly a surprise, though it will probably be a disappointment to his fans. But far more important than the question of whether he used illegal performance-boosting drugs or not is the issue of why it matters. Not ‘why it matters to those of us with no interest in professional cycling’, though that’s a fair question too, but why it matters if he took drugs at all. I simply don’t see the problem with having performance-enhancing drugs in sport.

The main objection to these drugs seems to be some hazy notion that it’s ‘cheating’ to take them – you know, because they make athletes perform better than they would have otherwise, in much the same way as, um…training. Or simply taking one or more of the huge number of legal supplements like creatine, a substance which builds muscle mass and is used by huge numbers of professional athletes. So what’s the difference between the legal stuff and all the substances which are banned? What makes creatine OK but anabolic steroids verboten? Sure, creatine can be produced naturally by the human body, but blood doping’s banned, and I’m pretty sure human bodies are capable of producing blood as well.

The principal difference appealed to by supporters of the ban, of course, is that most prohibited performance-enhancing drugs are much more dangerous for those who take them than those substances which are permitted. Now, if I was Reuben then at this point I’d probably launch into an impassioned defence of individual liberty. I might point out that simply making the decision to become a professional sportsperson is taking a serious risk with your health in any case – if you’re an elite gymnast, it’s more likely than not that you’ll get a chronic injury at some point, for example – and that it’s infantilising and unjustifiably authoritarian to ban adults from making lifestyle choices which don’t harm others. And if I was to do all that, then I’d have a point. But it isn’t quite as simple as that. Individual liberty is incredibly important, but we shouldn’t fall into the trap of supposing that the only way someone’s autonomy can be restricted is through the force of law. Banning an athlete by force of law from taking a drug certainly restricts that athlete’s freedom, but so too does pressuring that athlete into taking that same drug if you’re a manipulative coach who cares more about medals than about the lives of the athletes in your care. A restrictive law can enhance freedom if what it’s restricting is the ability of the powerful to control the powerless.

However, while it may not be as simple as ‘legalising all performance-enhancing drugs = more freedom’, a blanket ban on any performance-enhancing substance really doesn’t seem justified on the grounds of personal safety alone. A more nuanced response would be far more appropriate: lift the ban on all performance-enhancing drugs, but make sure all athletes are made fully aware of the side-effects of any drug they’re given so they can make an informed choice, and make them disclose full details of any and all drugs and supplements they’re on, so there’s no longer any incentive to lie. And maybe, in some cases, try and reduce the absurd amounts of prize money so that athletes and coaches alike aren’t so desperate to win that they’ll put lives on the line for it. It’s a difficult issue, and I don’t claim to have all the answers. But just as with recreational drugs, a blanket ban is neither effective nor justified.

I am glad to say that the eye-for-an-eye principle is now seen as a little uncouth even when dealing with quite serious crimes against human beings. Yet I keep hearing not completely jovial calls for the cat bin woman to be thrown into some kind of huge garbage can. Yesterday Metro printed a letter from a particularly mad cat lover known as Wendy Keelan who wrote:

The evil scumbag who threw a cat into a bin should not be afforded police protection. The public should be allowed to throw her into a bin face down in water. She should be put in jail and the key thrown away. Thank God the cat is well and with its loving family.

Such garbage in not even internally coherent. If she is put in jail, then police protection is neither here nor there. It would also be hard, under such circumstances to arrange a public bin throwing – I’m not sure they have wheelie bins in jail.

But there is actually something more serious about the Metro being so irresponsible as to publish a letter like this. The fact is that she is almost calling for an extra-legal assault – seeing public bin throwing has no basis in our legal code. And she is whipping up aggression not just against any random individual – but a woman who’s had picture has been splashed across the papers for day while being publicly vilified. Personally I do not the want to see the life of a fellow of a fellow human being absolutely ruined to avenge the feelings of a cat.

In recent times animal rights activists have made rather a habit of disgracing themselves. The family of Isabella and Lola Kouparis – already traumatised by the fax attack on their baby daughters – faced widespread accusations of lying and even threats of violence. Meanwhile PETA a fairly mainstream (if standardly batty) animal rights group engaged in a thoroughly tasteless and idiotic attempt to make political capital out of the baby p tragedy. Having found out that one of his abusers had tortured guinea pigs as a child, they posted up adverts with his picture that read “Steven Barker: Animal Abuser, Baby Abuser, Rapist. People who are violent towards animals rarely stop there.” Ok then.

Unfortunately incidents like the 2010 cat-in-bin catastrophe offer these often misanthropic lunatics the chance to get heard in papers like the Metro. Its high time they got back in their idiot box.

Demand Media Studios is apparently where you need to go if your a writer without work, or indeed a film maker. You apply to join them as a freelance writer, and if accepted will enjoy the chance to write about a subject matter of your choice. Operating in the UK as well as the US, they regularly pay $15 for a 500 word article – a rate that rips the shit of out union rates, and even minimum wage rates. What you write then gets posted on one of their enormous websites. They, in turn, make money not through selling on your work, but through getting top rankings for an enormous range of google searches.

A few months back, technology magazine Wired caught up with Christian Munoz-Dunozo. An experienced wildlife filmaker, he had come to find that jobs were increasingly few and far between, and was “trading speed for finesse”, shooting ten videos in a morning at $20 a piece for Demand Media. His story is somewhat emblematic of the current media age. If it was once important for producers, writers and film makers to offer content that people would pay good money for, the overarching imperative for making money out of online media is “content, content, content!”. Stacking up clicks, and appearing a lot of searches arguably matters more than developing reader loyalty – a concept that has been somewhat problematized by the advent of google searches as the great gateway to the internet.

Of course freelancers in the media have always faced the difficulty of irregular work, and Demand Media – like similar companies – bills itself as a means to “fill in the gaps”. Yet Christian’s story is indicative of something else that is happening here. Namely, that the profession is being increasingly proletarianised: good journalistic jobs are being cut, and are being replaced by positions in content factories. Indeed Demand Media’s list of featured freelancers reveals an impressive array experienced and talented journalists who are now part of their system.

It was arguably naive for us all to assume that we could suddenly get journalistic content for free – with sales revenue being almost wholly replaced by advertising revenue – without the product itself being altered. Of course both a sales-based media and an ads-based media can be characterised as “market-dominated”, but there are nonetheless important differences between the two. Most importantly, a sales-based media business does have an incentive to focus on providing the kind of content that people are most interested in. Advertising revenue however provides a different focus. Rather than pushing media organisations to focus on the content that interests people the most, it pushes them to focus on content that is easily conducive to advertising: this might be because it is popular, but it might also be because it is connected with a wealthy or well defined consumer base, or because it is clearly connected with particular high value consumer goods. Why, after all, do you think newspapers have such enormous business and technology sections?

Moreover, while a sales-based media business will want customers to come back again and again, advertising revenue depends heavily on the number of unique visitors. As such getting people to click can be far more important than the quality of their reading experience.

The age of online freeganism could, then, prove deeply problematic both for journalists – with organisations like demand media increasingly making a mockery of union rates – and those of us who have an interest in quality journalism, or who think society benefits from a real fourth estate. It is a shame that the Murdoch press took the lead in pushing back for paid-for content, since this inevitably pushed most progressive opinion into a defence of everything-for-free. But if we do not want journalism to be reduced to a bi-product of the marketing sector, then we really do need to think more critically about whether we should be paying nothing for online print.

The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend…Freedom of expression as it has developed in the democratic west is a value to be cherished, but not abused.

Guardian Leader Comment, 4 February 2006, on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

In September 2005, a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Protests and counter-protests were called all over the world, both by those who found the cartoons grievously offensive and wanted them suppressed, and by their opponents who viewed the first group as attempting to quash free speech. Of course, it wasn’t really as simple as that. There were also plenty of people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who didn’t see the issue as a simple conflict between the right not to be offended and the right to  free speech, no matter how offensive. That Guardian editorial I’ve quoted is a good example, and one with which I broadly agree. Nothing justifies the actions of those who burned diplomatic missions or participated in violent riots in response to the cartoons’ publishing, but at the same time the decision to publish the cartoons in the first place seemed designed to provoke a reaction, and indeed to have little other purpose. It’s perfectly coherent to maintain that the decision to publish the cartoons was a stupid and gratuitously offensive act, and simultaneously to support the right of Jyllands-Posten and any other newspaper to freedom of expression. In short, having the right to do something does not entail that doing it is a good idea. I have the legal right to swear in front of my grandmother, and would consider any government that tried to take away that right to be worryingly authoritarian, but it doesn’t follow that me doing my best Malcolm Tucker impression the next time I see her can really be said to be an important contribution to the debate about offensiveness and the limits of free speech.

It’s interesting, given the above, to compare reactions to the Muhammad cartoons and to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” The American Right has been frothing at the mouth about the latter on various fairly dubious grounds (aside from anything else, the plan is for an Islamic cultural centre, not a mosque, to be based two blocks from the Northern tip of the World Trade Centre site, not “at ground zero”). Some of the rhetoric from those opposed to the centre’s construction has been pretty ugly, and some of the people involved in the campaign against the centre’s construction are unambiguously batshit insane Islamophobes. But the response from the liberal left (such as it is in the US) seems to have principally been a rights-based argument, focusing on the Constitutional protection for freedom of religion (set out in the First Amendment) and the trouble is, that’s not really an adequate response. Many of those opposed to the centre’s construction are happy to acknowledge that Muslims have a right to build mosques and cultural centres wherever they like – their argument is that a Muslim cultural centre near Ground Zero is insensitive and in some way offensive (this is a line argued by a number of both Republican and Democratic politicians). This reasoning has been mocked as absurd, most notably on last Monday’s episode of the Daily Show (viewable here until Tuesday – sample quote “Who knew that the First Amendment had the same mantra as Century21 – location, location, location?”), but actually, it’s perfectly coherent. It’s pretty much identical in form to the view I argued for above on the Muhammad cartoons – the right to do something doesn’t entail that it’s a good idea.

The important feature of the “can but shouldn’t” argument in this case, however, in contrast to the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, is not that it’s incoherent but simply that it’s wrong. The idea that building a Muslim community centre near the site of the World Trade Centre is offensive just doesn’t hold up. There’s already a mosque (a real mosque, as opposed to a building with an area set aside for prayer) nearer to the ground zero site than the proposed centre, and it’s been there since before the World Trade Centre was even built. Plus the events of September 11 weren’t an attack by Islam on the West in any case – dozens of Muslims were among the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and, as can’t be repeated often enough, judging Islam by the actions of the September 11 hijackers is like judging Christianity by the groups which bomb abortion clinics. These are all good reasons for defending the construction of Park51 (to call it by its actual name), and they’re convincing enough without the need to accuse those who hold a different view of being mad or incoherent. There’s a difference between thinking something’s a bad idea and calling for it to be outlawed, and it’s just simplistic to imply otherwise.