New Labour and speech crime

Right- thinking people oppose proposals to criminalize "glorifying" terrorism. But it's not sufficiently appreciated that New Labour's keenness to criminalize speech - be it glorifying terrorism or inciting religious hatred - arises from a key part of its managerialist ideology.
Think of it this way. Most of us believe there's a sharp distinction between words and deeds, speech and facts, consciousness and reality. So we're relaxed about inflammatory speech, believing there's a big distance between this and the acts correlated with it.
Managerialism, however,  doesn't accept this dualism. It attaches greater importance  to speech and language. Whether this is because it lives in a Baudrillard world in which language is  the only reality, or because it believes language determines reality is a secondary consideration.
Robert Protherough and John Pick, in this superb book, are good on this. They express the managerialist view thus:

Change the accepted language...and you change how people think and behave, even what they become.

They give the example of brand names. It used to be that strong brands - Shipham's Paste, Coleman's mustard, Marmite - emerged over time as customers recognized their quality and distinctiveness. Facts created brands, not words. Today, though, managers believe brands - Consignia, Dasani - can be created out of nothing by smart marketing - by words, not facts. Protherough and Pick say:

When managers are 'creating a range' they are pursuing a conceptual notion rather than producing things which meet real needs.

And policies are just another product, in which the marketing determines the content, rather than vice versa. Peter Mandelson captured this when he once said:

If a government policy cannot be presented in a simple and attractive way, it is more likely than not to contain fundamental flaws and turn out to be the wrong policy.

Alan Finlayson in this book picks up the lesson here:

Media management and presentational policy is not simply about maintaining a government and continutring to ensure that it is successful in the opinion polls. It is, itself, a way in which government takes place...Policy is not policy if it cannot be disseminated to good effect. This gesture, regardless of the content is central to governance in the capitalist-media-liberal-democracies.

Now, the point here is not a "left-right" one: FInlayson and Protherough and Pick are from different ends of the spectrum. It's about the role of language in politics and culture. In New Labour's managerialist ideology, words matter far more than they do in our conventional empiricist ideology.
It's no surprise, therefore, that New Labour is keen to criminalize speech. It thinks speech has more powerful effects than we do - to New Labour, speech can create reality. Is it really an accident that the empricist philosophy of Locke and Hume is associated with liberty, whilst post-modern philosophies are less so?
But let's be clear. New Labour's anti-libertarian attitude is no mere accident. It's a part of its managerialist ideology.

Comments

[John East]

A brilliant and very original observation. Well done.
Your piece left me with the thought, "So how do we return to sanity? A world where speech and writing describe rather than define reality."

I can't think of an answer.

[Paddy Carter]

a bit of devil's advocacy ... like it or not there is some truth to the importance of 'the message' for political parties in a modern democracy - not sure you can lay it at the door of New Labour. It may be something that they have seized upon, but it's not really something they have created. Maybe.

There is, surely, quite a lot truth to the idea that words (narratives, world views, however you want to describe it) are important in the gestation of terrorism. I can quite understand the impulse to want to arrest the process of indoctrination into terrorism - and I'm not sure that it's a 'managerialist' impulse. How does a non-managerialist respond to the existance of extremists preaching jihad? lassiez faire?

What I don't understand is why existing laws against inciting terrorism are not sufficient. What is this thing 'glorifying' that is not incitement, but is not simply expressing support or sympathy either? But, perhaps this just shows I don't know enough about the limitation of existing incitement laws.

[Paul Davies]

Ah, the perils of mass communication... Locke and Hume never had to worry about this damn Internet and 24 hour news malarky... People have always "prefered to look at poses than listen to reason"*, it's just now people are listening to them in turn...

Or am I being too cynical?

*(Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

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