International desk: the tyranny of the group veto

We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto.
The arguments around animal rights, Danish cartoons, Livingstone and Irving have more in common than you think.
By Timothy Garton Ash

It was a bright cold day in February, and the digital watches were blinking thirteen. Across the street from the concrete skeleton of a large building, a noisy crowd was repetitively chanting "Stop the Oxford animal lab! Stop the Oxford animal lab!" Just around the corner, at least 500 demonstrators, among them many Oxford university students, gave their vocal reply: "Stand up for science! Stand up for research! No more threats, no more fear! Animal research, wanted here!" A student wordsmith had obviously worked hard on the chants, which continued with "Pro-science! Pro-gress! Pro-test!". Then there crackled through an oldfashioned electronic megaphone the voices of Oxford academics, a doctoral student and, most movingly, the mother of a disabled child. They explained howprogress in medicine depends on carefully regulated animal tests and called on us to resist the "animal rights terrorists". A large banner held aloft in the middle of the crowd proclaimed "Vegetarians against the Alf". Alf stands for Animal Liberation Front, the extremist animal rights network which has attempted (sometimes violently, sometimes successfully) to intimidate universities into not doing research on animals.

Standing at the corner of Mansfield Road, I was proud of the demonstrators who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans or higher rents - these we expect. But here were students turning out on a chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

At stake was much more than the particular issue of using scientific tests on animals in order to save human lives. For a few minutes, Mansfield Road, Oxford, was at the front line of a new struggle for freedom that is being fought in many different places and guises. These days, the main threats to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association no longer come from the totalitarian ideological superstate that inspired George Orwell to write his 1984. (First line, for the few readers who may not have caught the opening allusion: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.") That totalitarian horror still exists in places like Burma, but the distinctive feature of this new danger is the creeping tyranny of the group veto.

Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: "We feel so strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this path and you must fear for your life." I don't claim that the two cases are strictly comparable. Human lives are saved by medicines developed as a result of tests on animals; no comparable good is achieved by the republication of cartoons of the prophet. But the mechanism of intimidation is very similar, including the fact that it works across frontiers and is therefore hard to tackle by national laws or law enforcement agencies.

If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten violence, and you will get your way. Frightened firms, newspapers or universities will cave in, as will softbellied democratic states, where politicians scrabble to keep the votes of diverse constituencies. But in our increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to anti-abortionists and from Jehovah's Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists. Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom. That, I think, is what is happening to us, issue by issue. These days, you can't even read a list of the British war dead in Iraq outside the gates of No 10 Downing Street without getting a criminal record. Inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, we are becoming less free.

Let me now make a shocking leap in the argument. If you agree with me so far, and believe that reason requires consistency, then you should want David Irving let out of his Austrian prison and Ken Livingstone let off with a rap over the knuckles. Why? Because the fateful tendency in all this is to reject everyone else's group taboos while obstinately defending your own. The result is indefensible doublestandards. In the case of Irving, and the much less serious one of Livingstone, I have been struck over the past few weeks by the contorted equivocations ofmy own group - by which I mean, roughly speaking, liberal Europeans and English-speaking persons who believe (as I do) that the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews was the greatest single crime of the last century and should be a foundation-stone of today's moral consciousness across the world.

Yes, say my fellow group-members (aka friends and acquaintances), Irving should not have been sentenced to three years' imprisonment, but some such lawis still needed. Not in Britain, they hastily add, but at least in Austria. And: perhaps in a few years time the law will no longer be needed even in Austria, but it still is now. Or: well, you're not going to weep any tears for Irving are you?

This will not do. What is sauce for the Islamist goose must be sauce for the fascist gander. What Irving says is horrible, an insult to the Jewish dead, survivors and relatives, but on any reasonable assessment it does not result in a significant threat to the physical safety or liberty of living human beings. As for the possible return or continued propagation of fascism in Austria: the greater (though still not very great) threat of that comes from the anti-immigrant propaganda of extremist politicians like Jˆrg Haider, who sit in Austrian parliaments not Austrian prisons.

If someone says "the Nazis didn't kill so many Jews and had no plan for their systematic extermination", he is a distorter of history who deserves to be intellectually refuted and morally condemned, but not imprisoned. If, however, someone says "kill the Jews", or "kill the Muslims", or "kill the Americans", or "kill the animal experimenters", and points to particular groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters, they should be met with the full rigour of the law. That's why, of all the recent high-profile cases where free speech has been at issue, that of the London-based hatepreacher Abu Hamza is the only one where I feel a criminal conviction was justified. Not because he was a Muslim rather than a Christian, a Jew or a secular European. No. Because he was guilty of incitement to murder. This is the line on which we must take our stand. Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no compromise.

And that, I think, is what those students had instinctively understood when they turned out for a very English little demonstration on a bright, cold morning in Oxford. Orwell would have been proud of them.

(Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European Studies at Oxford University)