Blair’s assault on free speech

“Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” John Milton‘s classic defence of free speech has been at the heart of our political culture for 350 years. But it is a view evidently not shared by this Government. In one of its most illiberal moves to date, it is planning to circumscribe our freedom to indulge in robust debate.

Having alienated many Muslims with his warmongering and his Draconian anti-terrorist laws, Blair now hopes to win them back with a law banning “incitement to religious hatred“. It is of course unacceptable that anyone should be harassed on the basis of their faith, but there are already plenty of legal remedies to protect people from threatening or violent behaviour. This dangerous assault on free speech is just a cynical attempt by Labour to win back the Muslim votes it lost over the Iraq war.

But this assault on freedom of speech will only make him popular with bigots as there is a fundamental difference between race and religion. The former is innate and immutable, whereas the latter is ultimately a matter of personal discretion. Since it is impossible to draw a clear line between criticising a faith and insulting it, will criticism of religious belief soon be illegal? In fact the Bill doesn’t even define religious belief, so its protection will presumably extend to Satanism and all sorts of other crackpot cults. Laws, as we all know, change cultural climates: it’s what they are for. This Bill will only encourage fundamentalists of all faiths to take offence at anything that threatens their narrow agendas. Britain should be a beacon of secularism in a world beset by religious bloodshed. Instead, our politicians twitch nervously in a faint-hearted capitulation to unreason.

Besides, the sacred texts of all the main faiths contain incitements to religious hatred. Are they also to be banned? The proposed law has already emboldened religious fundamentalists to try to suppress free expression – witness the furore over Jerry Springer: The Opera and the successful campaign by a Sikh mob to close down a play in Birmingham. Muslim extremists are hoping to use the new law to ban The Satanic Verses. All of which begs the question: how can Blair fight religious totalitarianism abroad, while encouraging it at home?

Blair insists that the legislation poses no threat to free speech, since very few cases will be brought under it. But the number of prosecutions is irrelevant. Laws, on the whole, don’t work by telling us what to do and punishing us when we stray; instead, they prompt us to regulate our own behaviour. The religious hatred law will impinge on free speech even without prosecutions. It will have an impact every time the local arts centre decides, just to be on the safe side, not to book a certain act, or the wording of a council leaflet is changed. In myriad ways, little by little, our freedom will be eroded. And most of the time we won’t even notice.

Economic myths of immigration

Probably the primary misconception about immigration is that it harms the UK economy. Immigration critics typically claim that immigrants take away jobs, depress wages and drain funds by consuming social services.

A fundamental truth about the economy is that as long as people desire more goods and services than they have, the number of jobs is practically unlimited. In fact, when more workers, create more jobs. For example, total employment and the size of the labour force in the USA have tracked each other fairly closely over the past 50 years despite dramatic changes in immigration flows.

Also, many of the jobs immigrants come to the UK to fill are jobs British workers are not taking. And when they prevent immigrants from taking those jobs, UK producers and consumers suffer the consequences.

What about wages? Immigration increases the supply of domestic labour. Basic economic reasoning shows that when you increase the supply of any good, holding other things constant, its price should go down. However, immigration brings many secondary effects that offset the increased supply. Most immediately, when immigrants earn money, they demand goods and services. This increases the demand for labour, which in turn creates more jobs and pushes wages back up.

A less obvious, but no less important, consequence of immigration is that with a greater supply of labour, more goods and services are produced. This leads to lower prices and an increase in the purchasing power of existing UK wages.

Finally, a larger labour force can raise the profitability of capital investment. If increased capital flows match the increased labour force, wages are not pushed down.

So how should we design an immigration policy for Britain? The Government proposes a points-based system, sorting workers into four skills categories. Yet this rests on the assumption that it knows which workers the country needs -which it doesn’t. So let’s have a market-based system instead. The Government would decide how many permits to offer over a set period and auction them to potential employers or foreigners seeking work. Employers could then decide the value to them of filling a vacancy from outside the EU; similarly, foreign job-seekers could decide the value of working in the UK. Why should Britain charge for this right? Firstly, because work is valuable and it’s reasonable for the citizenry at large to gain from a right they own. Second, the policy would favour those who value it most – normally the relatively skilled. Third, the price of permits would motivate employers to tram domestic alternatives. Finally, the revenue raised could be used to compensate the countries of origin for the cost of training the workers we want to import.

In short, we need not fear that immigrants will burden our economy, take more jobs than they create or depress our wages. Quite the contrary, immigration brings economic benefits, so it should not be artificially limited.

Lawmakers must be tough to be kind

When it comes to social policy lawmakers struggle between two conflicting impulses. On one side is the “tender compassion” that favours giving immediate help to suffering; on the other is the “tough compassion” that recognises that “anything that lessens the pain of a predicament also lessens the incentive to avoid it, and so increases the amount of it”. Take the case of single mothers and their children. The State today provides them with free housing, education and healthcare, among other benefits. This is compassionate, but it has inevitably swollen the stock of single mothers by removing the stigma that used to attach to fathers who abandoned their families to penury. Likewise, it’s a simple fact that if you give more money to pensioners with no savings, you will end up with more pensioners with no savings. In recent decades, political compassion has mostly been of the tender type. Let’s hope David Cameron – who calls himself a compassionate Conservative – understands that sometimes you have to be tough to be kind.