Johann Hari

Last Saturday, in the drizzle and damp of Trafalgar Square, a bleak parable about how your free speech and mine are being eroded was acted out before an audience of tourists and pigeons. Some 600 people had gathered to defend the most basic right of all – the right to speak your mind. As befitted a rally in defence of freedom, it was gloriously messy and incoherent. The banners jabbing into the air declared: “Blasphemy is a victimless crime”, “I drew the Prophet Mohammed and all I got was this lousy fatwa”, and Voltaire’s line, “I do not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.” Communists mingled awkwardly with fascists, Lib Dem MPs spoke alongside defenders of George Bush. We argued, we sparred, we shouted. But we agreed on one thing: we must have the right to carry on yelling at each other in a democracy, without being tossed in jail or threatened with death for speaking our minds.

It might seem incredible we still have to say this in London in the year 2006, but the march was a response to the thump-thump of anti-free speech campaigners over the past year – and the proof of this ever-expanding threat came sooner than any of the marchers could have imagined. While Dr Evan Harris MP explained to the crowd, “We are facing at the moment the most concerted and multipronged assault on freedom of expression in this country since the Industrial Revolution,” the police swooped down to arrest one of the protestors. His “crime”? He was holding aloft a series of silly cartoons of the Mohammed that some fundamentalist Muslims have declared to be blasphemous. This ‘criminal’ was a 29 year-old man called Reza Moradi. He grew up in Iran under an Islamic fundamentalist tyranny, and he came to London as an asylum seeker because he wanted to be free to discuss, debate and, yes, mock religion. “The millions of Muslims who believe in freedom, the women who are oppressed… they do not feel this is offensive to them,” he said. Besides, he thought this was a free country where we could insult each others’ religion without fearing a knock at the door.

Reza’s friend – the great Iranian freedom fighter and feminist Maryam Namazie – immediately took to the podium. She said, “Whilst we may all be sometimes offended by some things, it is religion and the religious that are offended all of the time. They alone seem to have a monopoly on being offended, saying their beliefs are a no go area, and silencing all those who offend.” She began to pass the images of Mohammed around the Square. “Let’s all hold up these images. They can’t arrest all of us!” she declared. Still, Reza has received a summons for disturbing ‘public order’. Is it illegal to mock religion in this country now? If the police are going to be consistent, they should charge me, Peter Tatchell, Maryam and every other person at that rally, now. I await their summons for daring to speak freely at a free speech rally in a free country.

But the rally for free speech was not only assaulted by the police. It was attacked by a far-left group called the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who, in league with Islamic fundamentalists, are calling for an end to “the right to offend”. They spread weird disinformation that the “anti-Muslim rally” was organised by the disgusting BNP, and even attacked the Muslim asylum seekers who attended in nakedly racist terms as “Uncle Toms.” This group was humiliated when the two practicing Muslims who spoke from the platform received the biggest cheers of all, declaring that “Mohammed is big enough to take a joke.” Ali, a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s jails, said: “How can I accept a religion that is so cowardly it cannot be questioned? This Mohammed is not the one I accept. Don’t apologize. If you do, we as Muslims are losers.” Free speech defends Muslims – even fundamentalists – as much as it defends the rest of us. Peter Tatchell explained, “I support Iqbal Sacranie’s right to call my sexuality ‘diseased’. Why doesn’t he reciprocate my tolerance by supporting my right to criticise Islamic fundamentalism?”

As Reza was read his rights by the police, the black-British poet Labbi Sifre read from his latest work:

“Consider : Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Judaism, Hinduism,
the worship of the little green goblin from the planet absurdity
none of these is a country
none of these is an ethnicity
they are political philosophies
used to persuade or tell people
how they should live

In an age when the most powerful man on the planet (armed with weapons of mass
destruction) by his own admission believes he receives instruction directly from God

In an age when Christian believers in “Rapture” and Islamic believers in “the return of the hidden Imam” believe it right to speed us to salvation by promoting the chaos and destruction of the apocalypse

In such an age, not only do we have a right to challenge, criticize, caricature and satirize Muhammad, Jesus, Yahweh and other theistic concepts ... we have a duty to do so.”

Would somebody mind telling our police and our government?

In Britain today, rape is teetering on the brink of being an unpunished crime. Any man reading this article can go out tonight, pick out a woman, force her into sex, and be almost entirely certain he will walk free. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s a plain reading of the statistics. The Home Office figures show that just 5.6 percent of the rapes reported to the police in this country end in a conviction. Good odds for a rapist? It gets better: only a quarter of rape victims are brave enough to stagger into a criminal justice system they know will interrogate, bully and eventually fail them – so a man has to rape more than fifty women before it becomes statistically probable he will go to prison.

Naturally, this problem is being blamed not on the men who choose to rape, nor on the failings of the police and the courts, but on those dirty bitches who choose to walk about being women. They, you see, are behaving in a way that virtually incites rape. You thought we had moved beyond the “They wear revealing clothes! They get drunk! What do they expect?” argument? One right-wing journalist wrote recently, “Part of the problem is the new promiscuity, the new ladette culture, where some young women have more sexual partners on a week's holiday in Ibiza than most women have in a lifetime. The same young women feel it is their right to get paralytically drunk and have sex with a stranger hours after meeting, but draw a huge distinction with getting paralytically drunk and being forced to have sex with a stranger hours after meeting.” Fancy that! Those dozy bints are drawing a distinction between meeting somebody, finding them attractive, and choosing to have sex with them, and rape! But this writer is not a lone lunatic – a recent poll found widespread they-had-it-coming views. Some 34 percent of people believe a woman is “partially or totally responsible” for being raped if she has “behaved in a flirtatious manner,” and 26 percent blame her if she was wearing “sexy or revealing clothing.”

Imagine if there was an epidemic of heterosexual men being anally raped across Britain. Does anybody imagine we would hear the same arguments? Men shouldn’t wear those sexy tight tank-tops if they don’t want to be raped. Men shouldn’t get so hammered on a Saturday night that they can barely walk straight unless they want a hairy bloke to drag them into an alleyway. These are arguments nobody would ever make – but what’s the difference?

Yesterday, the government finally announced some small measures to stem the flow of this poisonous drunk-women-are-asking-for-it argument into rape-trial juries. At rape trials, it will now be standard for experts in post-rape trauma to be called to testify, to explain to juries why so many women wait a weeping week or month to report their rape to the police. The government is also trying to stop a vicious trend: at the moment, judges are routinely tossing rape cases out of court before they reach a jury, simply because the victim was drunk when the attack occurred and therefore can’t be “absolutely certain” it happened. (Somebody should ask these judges: if you were anally raped after a few bottles of port, would you be capable of remembering it with certainty the next morning? I suspect so). This judicial tendency sends a very clear signal: drunk women are fair game. Rape away. Rapists are getting the message: Home Office research has found that gangs of rapists now deliberately prey on drunk women.

It is only through a blizzard of measures like this – put ‘drunk evidence’ before juries, give far more cash to rape referral centres, erode public prejudices – that we can establish a basic right. Any human being has the right to stagger around the streets of this country in revealing clothes after a hard nights’ drinking without being raped. Full stop.

Is there a more foolish figure in British politics than Alan Milburn? Whenever Gordon Brown makes an announcement, Milburn is there in the TV studios, ventriloquising Tory myths – that Brown is a roadblock to reform, that he taxes too much, and on and on. Commenting on last week’s budget, he bemoaned the slender new tax Brown has imposed on those hulking great gifts to global warming, SUVs. Why? He has, he said with a chuckle, just bought a “great big one” himself – presumably with the money he made flogging off his “experience” of the NHS to private companies the minute he left office. Ho ho.

And now Milburn is savaging Brown’s redistributive tax credits programme – the greatest domestic achievement of the current government, putting more money in the purses of struggling mums on estates – for “penalising hard work and endeavour.” Does Milburn have no shame? Every time Tony Blair gave him a job – from health secretary to running the election campaign – he hurtled over a political cliff, and Brown had to come to the rescue. Stick to the SUV drivers, Alan, they’re about your intellectual level.

Even as he lies in his long slumber on a hospital bed in Jerusalem, Ariel Sharon has won a last, lingering victory. I wish I could share the pensive optimism washing across Israel following the victory of his Kadima Party. Isn’t there a clear plan for more withdrawals from occupied Palestinian land? Isn’t this progress-by-inches? But the reality is much darker. Ehud Olmert is committed to withdrawing from a few useless over-populated scraps of Palestinian land, and illegally annexing the rest to Israel forever. This is not a plan for peace but a plan for permanent theft of territory acquired (and forcibly settled) by war. It consigns the only real route to peace – a return to the 1967 borders, and compensation for the Palestinian refuges – to the dustbin of history. Rest in pieces, Palestine.

Quand les attentats-suicides ont commencé en Irak, j’appelais à chaque fois mes amis à Bagdad, à Bassora ou à Hilla pour m’assurer qu’ils allaient bien. Mais j’ai vite compris qu’ils détestaient qu’on leur enfonce ainsi chaque bombe dans le crâne : allaient-ils devoir enregistrer un message du genre “Non, je ne suis pas mort dans un attentat-suicide aujourd’hui” et l’envoyer à toutes leurs connaissances trois fois par jour ? J’ai donc décidé d’attendre les journaux du lendemain pour en savoir plus. Aucun n’en parlait. Des attentats aussi sanglants que ceux du 7 juillet 2005 à Londres sont devenus si banals en Irak qu’ils ne méritent pas même une brève.

Après trois ans et au moins 150 000 cadavres irakiens, pouvons-nous encore, nous qui avons soutenu le renversement de Saddam Hussein pour le bien des Irakiens, affirmer que cela en valait la peine ? Je vois déjà rougir de honte tous ceux qui avaient gobé le prétexte manifestement fallacieux des armes de destruction massive.

George Packer, un journaliste récalcitrant qui vit en Irak et qui était plutôt d’accord avec l’invasion, décrit la situation présente : “Les gens ne sont pas libres de dire ce qu’ils pensent, d’appartenir à un groupe donné, de porter ce qu’ils veulent ni même de marcher dans la rue sans risquer leur vie.” Le pouvoir a été transféré de facto à des milices antidémocratiques. Ces gens “imposent leur loi dans les écoles et les hôpitaux, s’en prennent aux femmes non voilées, mettent en place des pseudo-tribunaux qui condamnent à mort au nom de la charia. Leurs bandes criminelles mettent le feu aux magasins qui vendent de l’alcool. Ce sont des agissements de brutes fascistes”. Quand on me demande si j’ai eu tort, je pense à cet ami irakien cloîtré chez lui et qui m’a dit : “Tous les jours tu effaces quelqu’un de ton portable parce qu’il a été tué. Par les Américains, par les djihadistes, par les milices - dans la plupart des cas on ne le saura jamais.” Alors oui, je me dis que j’ai eu tort. Horriblement tort. J’ai un argument faiblard, comme beaucoup de partisans de la guerre en train de virer de bord : le principe de l’invasion était bon, mais c’est le gouvernement Bush qui a merdé. “ Tu parles, m’a rétorqué une amie antiguerre, était-il si difficile d’imaginer qu’un George Bush se plante dans l’invasion illégale d’un pays arabe ?”

Elle a raison : il n’y avait aucun idéal platonicien de l’invasion parfaite à soutenir. Il n’y avait que George Bush, avec ses bombes à fragmentation, son modèle économique tout-FMI et ses raisonnements bidon : il a dicté sa guerre, à sa façon, avec cette odeur de pétrole qui flotte sur tout ce qu’il fait. Et il était illusoire, on le sait aujourd’hui, de compter sur une quelconque influence de Tony Blair, lui qui refuse même de condamner le camp de torture de Guantanamo.

C’était pourtant clair dès le début : avec les hommes de George Bush, le désastre était assuré. Mais qui aurait pu penser qu’ils déclencheraient un phénomène de torture de masse, que plus de 10 000 personnes disparaîtraient sans procès dans les prisons secrètes irakiennes ? C’est simple : tous ceux qui ont suivi les exploits en Amérique centrale des mêmes individus, les Donald Rumsfeld et les John Negroponte, dans les années 1980. Qui aurait imaginé qu’ils utiliseraient des armes chimiques dans une ville habitée par des civils, Fallouja ? Tous ceux qui savent que M. Bush n’a signé aucun traité sur les armes chimiques et que Donald Rumsfeld en a fourgué tant qu’il a pu à des tyrans. Qui aurait envisagé qu’ils privatiseraient massivement l’économie irakienne et feraient flamber le chômage à 60 % - la meilleure garantie de conflit ethnique ? Tous ceux qui se rappellent les thérapies de choc en Russie, en Argentine ou en Asie. Qui aurait cru qu’ils annuleraient les crédits de reconstruction, alors que la distribution d’électricité et d’eau est pire que sous Saddam Hussein ? Tous ceux qui connaissaient leur désengagement, chez eux, du secteur public.

Bien sûr, j’ai toujours su que l’administration Bush voulait avant tout s’assurer le contrôle stratégique des ressources pétrolières. Mais je me disais qu’on pouvait tolérer cette logique répugnante si c’était pour améliorer la situation en Irak. Encore bouleversé par ma visite au pays de Saddam Hussein, je savais que les Irakiens n’avaient qu’une hâte : être débarrassés de leur dictateur, peu importe comment.

Je pensais à la terreur infligée au “peuple des roseaux”, les Madanes (privés de leurs marais et affamés sous Saddam Hussein), et je me disais que cela ne pouvait pas être pire. Comme la plupart des Irakiens, je ne voyais pas qu’une guerre tordue déboucherait sur une occupation tordue ; que dans Bagdad livrée au pillage, l’armée serait envoyée pour garder le ministère du pétrole, pas les hôpitaux. Et ce n’était qu’un début.

Mais il est trop facile de se repentir ici, au calme. Les opposants à la guerre n’avaient pas eu à affronter les salles de torture de Saddam Hussein, et moi, je ne suis pas terré chez moi, tremblant, une kalachnikov à la main. C’est pourtant ce que vivent des millions d’Irakiens. Sans parler de tous ceux qui sont morts, à cause des raisonnements de gens comme moi.

A part Tony Blair et George Bush, à peu près tout le monde y est allé de son mea culpa contrit. Et maintenant ? Iyad Allaoui, l’homme que les Américains s’efforçaient d’imposer avant qu’un mouvement de désobéissance civile emmené par l’ayatollah Sistani rende les élections inévitables, affirme que la guerre civile a déjà commencé. Certains commentateurs de droite ont une fâcheuse tendance à faire porter le chapeau aux Irakiens : on pensait que vous feriez comme les Tchécoslovaques, les gars, mais bon, si vous préférez faire comme les Yougoslaves, pas de problème. D’autres murmurent que l’Irak aurait “besoin d’un Saddam” qui le tienne. Sauf que nous ne sommes pas devant une guerre civile comme au Rwanda ou dans les Balkans, où les voisins se taillaient mutuellement en pièces. C’est une guerre civile imposée d’en haut, livrée par une minorité faite de milices qui prétendent combattre pour préserver l’unité irakienne - à l’exception des djihadistes d’Al-Zarkaoui, très peu nombreux. Jusqu’en 2003, plus de 20 % des mariages irakiens se faisaient entre sunnites et chiites. Les maris vont-ils se retourner contre leur épouse, les mères contre leurs fils ?

Une solution se dessine. Les sondages montrent que la plupart des milices sont soutenues par la population parce qu’elles s’opposent à l’occupation étrangère. Le meilleur moyen de les priver de cet appui est donc de retirer les troupes de la coalition, et tout de suite. Les Irakiens l’ont bien compris : une enquête menée récemment par le ministère de la défense a montré que 80 % des Irakiens souhaitent le départ “immédiat” des troupes afin de pouvoir eux-mêmes s’occuper des djihadistes et des fondamentalistes. Comme en écho, un sondage de l’institut Zogby auprès des soldats américains a révélé que 72 % sont favorables à un désengagement dans l’année. Guerre surréaliste entre occupés et occupants malgré eux.

Certes, le retrait risque de créer un vide politique qu’exploiteraient les milices, mais c’est déjà le cas aujourd’hui. Il est donc grand temps de quitter l’Irak. Reste une question lancinante : le gouvernement Bush va-t-il renoncer au pétrole irakien après avoir dépensé 200 milliards de dollars pour s’en emparer, simplement parce que le peuple irakien et ses propres soldats le lui demandent ?

Institute of Ideas Debate: The Right to be Offensive.

This is the transcript of a debate I participated in just over a year ago, which turned out to be quite prescient in its concerns:

CHAIR: Dolan Cummings
Dominic Cavendish
Nick Cohen
Johann Hari
Munira Mirza
Ben Payne
Rachel Wagstaff

CUMMINGS: Alright, thanks for coming everyone. First of all, I’m Dolan Cummings, I’m from the Institute of Ideas and I’ll be chairing the discussion. One thing to say is it’s going to get hot in here, so if anyone’s wearing heavy jumpers or jackets you may want to take them off now. The idea of this discussion is inspired in part by a series of events called Roundtable Rumbles that we’ve developed at the Edinburgh Fringe over the last few years. The idea is that we gather a panel of critics, writers and theatre directors and we talk about a different theme each night, censorship being the sort of thing we might do. This one’s going to be slightly different given that in Edinburgh the discussions are very much based around particular plays and we’ll talk about four or five different plays on that theme each night. We’re not going to do that tonight; we’re going to take a step back and discuss the issue a bit more generally. If people on the panel, or indeed the audience, want to bring up particular work, not just plays but film or art work, then feel free to do that and we can bring that in a bit.

We do have Ben Payne, one of our speakers, who is associate director at the Birmingham Reporatry Theatre, and he’s going to talk a bit about a play called some of you will have heard of, Behzti, which was closed in December last year. The rest of the panel have not seen the play, so won’t be discussing it, and that’s kind of why we’re here. As you probably know, the play was forced to close after protests by a Sikh group who were offended by the content of it - the setting of it. And I’m sure you’re all familiar with the controversy that was repeated in a quite similar way when the BBC wanted to screen Jerry Springer: The Opera. So that’s our topic. We’re bringing in various bits of work that people want to talk about. But generally, this is not a polarised discussion in the sense that there’s someone who wanted to ban Behzti. I didn’t bring Christian Voice; but if anyone’s here from Christian Voice, welcome.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s not the censors versus the anti-censors, but I think there is a general consensus, certainly in the arts world, against censorship. The right to be offensive is a slogan which has been picked up by many people. And I think it’s maybe a bit misleading to assume that we all agree with one another and that there are no arguments to be had so I think it will be interesting to look at some of the nuances that come out during this kind of discussion. Having said that, if anyone does want to argue for censorship on religious or any other grounds, you’re free to do that. But I’m sure that some interesting shades of grey will emerge over the course of the discussion.

So, first of all, Ben, do you want to tell us a bit about the development of Behzti?

PAYNE: It’s difficult to talk about it because it’s a controversy now, not so much a play. It became a play that sort of had to encompass much wider debates than it was actually ever designed for. So forgive me, for it’s difficult to talk about it just as a play, but that’s what I’m trying to do.

Why was it controversial? I think the most instructive comparison is between Behzti and Gurpreet’s first play, which is called Behsharam, which was produced by the Rep and was actually seen here a couple of years ago. It’s also a satire; it’s about Sikh family relationships; it’s about lies; it’s about the marginalisation of women that can lead to all sorts of dysfunctional behaviour. It sold out here, but because there wasn’t a riot it didn’t really register as a blip on the media radar. Why not? The difference was that Behzti was about religion. It’s also a satire about lies, hypocrisy and corruption, but it’s within a religious context.

As you’ve probably heard, one of the main problems with it was that most of it was set in a Sikh temple, a Gurdwara. Contrary to most of the media reports about it, it did not depict rape and murder in a Sikh temple. These events were part of the plot, but they were never seen on stage. I accept that the suggestion that such things could happen in a holy place was offensive enough for some. But then for some, everything that happened in the play would be ok as long as it happened in a community centre and not a temple, which to me is quite an alarming point of view. Some writers have the ability and the courage to say what people think but don’t or can’t say - Gurpreet is one of those writers. But I think it’s important to stress the pressure of this, particularly for non-white writers, what’s called the burden of representation.

I worked with a British-Asian playwright several years ago where the pressure to present every possible point of view fairly, her concern about her community or how her family would react to the play led to her being hospitalised before the first night of rehearsals. This is a form of censorship which is more effective than smashing up a theatre, in my opinion.

But you have to start somewhere and Gurpreet is a satirist, and although satirists are comics, they start from the point of moral outrage, this is one of the many ironies of the affair, that the protestors and the playwright are angry about the same things, she just chose to express her anger in a play; they chose to direct their anger at her. Her satire is also tempered with great compassion for her characters. Mr. Sandu, who is the chairman Gurdwara’s renovation committee, is a rapist, but we also see he is a man who senses his whole life has been wasted. Beneath the hype about Jerry Springer and Behzti and their alleged offensiveness, there are some similarities. They are both pieces about blame, hypocrisy, guilt, corruption, not taking responsibility for yourself; about everything which is inhuman and ungodlike in us. They are both actually very spiritual pieces.

As I’ve said, the religious aspect was what was seen as being controversial, but other issues emerged. For some to suggest Sikhs could be gay was unacceptable; to suggest that a Sikh girl and a black boy could have a romance, this was unacceptable. I’m not sure those who called Gurpreet “white lover” or denounced her partner as a black dog, or who denounced her to her face as backstabber or mentally ill were really concerned about the subtleties of cultural representation. Perhaps more dangerous than this abuse is the way that our political masters seem to be prepared to collude in all of this. Fiona Mactaggart, the Home Office minister who is championing the bill against incitement to religious hatred has said “writers should not be allowed to strike fear in to a community.” Well forgive me, but I think that the small minority of demonstrators who turned violent on December 18th were trying strike fear in to a writer, so who needs protecting from whom?

There is apparently another MP, a Birmingham MP who is going around the Houses of Parliament saying that one of the chief delights of the new bill is that finally we’ll be able to put Salman Rushdie on trial for the Satanic Verses. So again, who needs protecting form whom? Does theatre have the right to offend? Yes. Freedom of expression always sounds woolly to me as a concept; I’m not even sure about the creative licence to offend, either. Just as I don’t know how the Home Office intends to stop writers offending, perhaps we’re to have a new Lord Chamberlain’s office, with a new blue pencil, I don’t know how you legislate for a creative or responsible offence either. The idea that there could be an arts council committee that’s job was to decide how one could be offensive - but nicely - fills me with a certain dread. In any case, writers are artists and artists are anarchists, if they see a rule, they will go ahead and break it. What I do believe in is the right to dissent, and the right of the dissenting voice to be heard. The final irony of what happened in December is that some would prefer that this voice was silenced, violently if necessary. And that is precisely what Behzti the play also depicts.

I’m aware that when I talk about this, I make the whole thing sound very dark. There were in fact some lighter moments. One of the two policemen who was assigned to Gurpreet came in one morning and said, “You know what Gurpreet, because of you, this morning I’ve gone out and bought the Guardian instead of the Sun.” And as Gurpreet said herself, who says theatre can’t change people’s lives?

And our website became a sounding off point for people of all sides to hurl really quite terrifying abuse at one another. But on another website, I found this, and this is far more eloquent than I could ever be. This is from a guy called Jatinder Singh, I have no idea who he is, and he says this:

Just a few days ago an Imam in Bristol was imprisoned for 10 years for raping a young girl in a Mosque over a period of time. Are we really saying this has never happened in a Gurdwara? A playwright is free to make a play about this. By doing so, it does not mean that this happens on a regular basis in a Gurdwara, neither does it mean that people watching the play will think all Sikhs are like this. By their very nature, artists present their ideas in provoking and challenging ways. Whether or not we Sikhs take that as an insult is our problem and not the playwright’s. It is a fallacy that things like these never happen in a Gurdwara. Guru Nanak himself robustly criticised and exposed the misdeeds and malpractices of religious figures - Pandits, Khazis, Yogis in his time. He did not modify his criticism by setting them in a community centre; he told it as he saw it, in the Mandirs and Mosques. We live in 21st century Great Britain, not in 16th century India. We live in a society that talks openly about problems rather than sweeping bad things under the carpet just to maintain some kind of face. Live and let live; speak and let speak no matter how offensive you find it. You are as free to vigorously state your opinion as a playwright is to make a play. You are not free to ban things and muffle people’s voices.

[APPLAUSE]

CUMMINGS: Thanks a lot Ben. That set’s up a nice practical context for us to discuss. I’ll introduce the rest of the panel, and I suppose people can respond to what Ben said as they see fit, but what’s particularly interesting I suppose is to look at why is this happening now? Why has this discussion emerged in a time where we think of ourselves being a more tolerant society? So perhaps that’s something of a paradox there, something that’s worth drawing out. So first of all we have Munira Mirza, who is a researcher in cultural policy at the University of Kent. Next to Munira we have Rachel Wagstaff - a playwright, a young writer with the Royal Court, and currently writing three plays. Johann Hari is a columnist at the Independent and also a veteran Round Table Rumbler, having taking place in our now legendary discussion on the War on Terror in 2003. Next to Johann, Dominic Cavendish who is a theatre critic with the Daily Telegraph and also the founder and co-editor of Theatre Voice which records these discussions and is definitely worth a look; and finally at the end, Nick Cohen, a columnist with the Observer.

Would anyone like to chip in first of all? Johann.

HARI: Well I think Ben spoke very eloquently, and I think none of us could imagine what we would do in the situation he was in, where there were violent mobs threatening a theatre. I think it was an incredibly difficult situation.

I think in one way, these are very good times for free artistic expression, not because of any social movement, but because of technology. It is now inconceivable that any government could ban a novel, it’d be put on the internet; it is inconceivable any government could ban a film, it’d be put on the internet. Even something that I imagine pretty much all of us here, and I’m a militant free speech purist, would agree should be banned, child pornography – actual films of children being abused – even that can’t be stopped being distributed on the internet. So in a sense arguments on censorship when it comes to those art forms are now dead. We can argue about it, but it’s not going to make a difference. Even in Pakistan, or Iraq – well, not Iraq now, but authoritarian states, even in North Korea, probably the most repressive state in the world, there’s been a proliferation of internet terminals and mobile phones and obviously the government is trying to crack down on it, but even there, it’s becoming hard to maintain that wall of censorship, so that’s a good thing.

The problem is that it means for the remaining art forms which aren’t subject to those technologies - you can’t put theatre on the internet without it ceasing to be theatre; it then becomes a film or whatever - I suspect we will see increasingly the urges to ban. The urges to be angry will be directed to those things where it is possible to ban them. It’s still possible to ban… this play has effectively been stopped in a way it’s impossible to do with whatever film we would want to talk about banning or with whatever novel we would want to talk about banning, so I think that’s partly why it’s happened in the context of theatre.

And just very quickly, also why I think this particular row in this particular way came up. For most of the 19th century and all of the 20th century it was a great cause of the left to defend free speech whatever the circumstances, whatever the comments and I still believe that is absolutely the purpose of the left. And I would say, as individuals, the right to offend which we all enjoy has to matched by the responsibility to not to ask for censorship when we ourselves are offended, which is very difficult to do. Just to give you an example, someone I really despise, Richard Littlejohn - recently the Gay and Lesbian Police Association, people I like and really good people, proposed launching action against him for inciting homophobia, and I thought that was a really bad idea. If we cherish and use the right to offend by talking about our sexuality and so on, we can’t then turn around when we’re offended, throw up our hands and say “ban this man, he’s mean to us!”.

But I think the problem is that the left has always defended the right to free speech, and has got caught up in the project of multiculturalism and I think that’s very problematic. For some people, defending or attacking multiculturalism has becopme a proxy for defending or attacking asylum seekers and immigrants. Well, I believe we need to take more asylum seekers – not fewer and I’m strongly in favour of immigration, and I believe we’re in the middle of a disgusting panic about this which is very worrying. But I really think that we shouldn’t get bogged down in multiculturalism - which is a system that gives particular rights and particular sensitivities to, basically, groups of organised superstition – like the self appointed leaders of the Sikh community, the self appointed leader of the Christian community. And it’s very revealing that these right wing Christian groups like Christian Voice will now use the language of multiculturalism, and say “we’re a faith community, we have a right to be protected.” And if you accept the language of multiculturalism then really you don’t have any answer to them. They are a faith community. If you’re not going to offend one group, then you have to say you’re not going to offend every one. I think that’s very problematic.

We need to unpick the logic of multiculturalism. I agree we have to replace it with something progressive. Not the Robert Kilroy-Silk anti-multiculturalism, which was a kind of pretext for just bashing Asian people. I think Ulrich Beck, the sociologist, came up with a very good alternative. He talked about contextual universalism, which is based on the idea that there are certain values that are universal in every culture, like say democracy. So you would never say “well they have a culture that doesn’t respect democracy. People in North Korea, they don’t really want it.” But what you would acknowledge is that universal desire to be democratic will always be interpreted differently in different contexts. So, we are a democracy, Germany is a democracy, but we don’t have the same forms of democracy. Obviously, it’s going to be contextually different.

CUMMINGS: Munira, you’re researching some of what Johann was talking about, do you want come in on that?

MIRZA: Yeah, I think what I’d like to do is look at a broader context of how censorship is discussed today and I think it’s important to remember that we live in quite liberal times. I mean, legally, it’s possible to put on plays now that you couldn’t put on in the sixties. In 1968 they changed the regulations of what could be shown on the stage and prior to that the Lord Chamberlain could ban anything that would depict sex on stage, or nudity, or swearing. So in some senses, we are more tolerant of what we can show in a formal sense, in a legal sense.

What I think is interesting about the contemporary climate which Johann touches upon is that the culture in which we live is very cautious about offending groups. As a theatrical community in particular, we’re very worried about offending religious groups and I think that comes from, rather than the law or an oppressive authoritarian state, self developed concern about that; it originates from the theatre itself. Even though the government is proposing a ban on incitement to racial and religious hatred, I think the theatre needs to accept some responsibility for its own cautiousness.

The Behzti play is quite interesting as before the play was put on, there was consultation with the community prior to it being shown, and I think that really reflects the way things are going with theatre today. The theatre increasingly justifies it’s position - art increasingly justifies that position - on the basis of being relevant and inclusive of communities, and when it’s built on that premise, it’s very difficult to challenge that, it’s very difficult to be robust and say, “actually, we do have a position where we are going to be offensive.” And I think the framework, the policy framework in which theatres are forced to constantly answer to the community, makes it very difficult for them to stand up and say well actually, we want to say something; these community representatives, however unelected they may be, we might want to do something that may offend them. The problem, I think, comes down to an understanding of the audience. I wouldn’t call it the right to be offensive; I’d call it the right to here offensive things. At the moment, we assume the audience is vulnerable, or that the ethnic minorities in the audience are vulnerable, and that they can’t take offence, and that we need consult with them before the things go on stage in case they’re too traumatised afterwards; and the reality is, yes, things are offensive - everyday I read a newspaper and see something that appals me. But that’s life, and we have to assume that the audience are capable of making it’s own mind up and are capable of hearing things they don’t want to hear.

CUMMINGS: Ok, I’ll ask Ben to respond on the consultation bit. Nick?

COHEN: I think in some ways the reaction to what happened in Birmingham is - obviously you’re pretty depressed at having your theatre surrounded and your play closed down – but I have to tell you, from my personal neck of the woods, from hanging around the liberal left in journalism, and elsewhere, for the past 20 years, what happened is a bit of a tonic. At least papers like the Guardian and the Independent came out and defended you. There’s absolutely no guarantee that they would on past experience. If you go from the Rushdie case onwards, a lot of people – Johann said the left has a good record in defending free speech, it has no such thing, actually – even just going back to the Rushdie case, you find all kinds of people the sort of John Berger, Sir John Le Carre, coming out for censorship – as Johann rightly says, it’s so obvious it’s barely worth talking about, there’s a conflict between liberal principles. On the one hand there’s the principle of multiculturalism tolerance, on the other the principle of free speech.

All I wanted to say is that you better actually work out which side you’re on, because I think this is going to get worse, for two reasons. Now you mentioned the, in my view, disgraceful behaviour of Fiona Mactaggart. You can be rather easily be cynical and say, “there’s an election coming, for God’s sake, we’ve probably alienated the Muslim vote after Iraq, we don’t want alienate the Sikh vote as well.” Well there is something more going on with New Labour, and I use New Labour in the broadest sense possible, with the progressive sixties left, the people who are in their forties and fifties, who have in some ways done great things - they were defeated politically, after 1968 you had conservatism rampant and triumphant, certainly in America, to a lesser extent in Europe – but they have created a new morality on sex, on race, on homosexuality; which, in the business of conservatives, they are having to accept, but they have done it from an embittered and defeated position but, and this is where Johann is getting it so wrong, they have been the first to say, on hate speak or whatever - they have been the first to use censorship. So it’s not just Fiona Mactaggart being a rather opportunistic politician, it’s something more. They genuinely think, and it’s the way a lot of liberal force is going, they genuinely think why are you being nasty? Why are you defending these otherwise good people? Which is often a fair question, but that is not going to go away after the election.

The second thing is that there is just an almighty smash up coming on the left, there really is, between those people who say, “Look, if you defend the rights of Sikh women, you’re being racist. If you defend the rights of gay Muslims, you’re being islamophobic. If you defend the rights of the victims of Saddam Hussein, you’re a tool of American Imperialism”; and those who have universal values. And that is only going to get worse for one reason for one very good and very optimistic reason because as last we’re actually getting the voices from the Muslim, from the Hindu and from the Sikh communities coming through and knocking on the door of theatres like the Birmingham rep and putting on their plays, and asking for their plays to be put on. And they are, by definition, because of the perfectly natural defensiveness of minorities in any country, going to be offensive.

CUMMINGS: Let me just bring in Dominic here, there’re just a couple of things I’ve wanted to ask you, as you see a lot of theatre is this something you recognise from theatre. One thing, was censorship an issue you were thinking about before Behzti? Munira made the point that with the much more liberal environment, we don’t have official censorship - has that been an issue in theatre aside from the multiculturalism issue? The second thing, do you recognise, that as theatre tends to be seen as the bastion of the liberal left, politically correct, liberal elite tendency, do you recognise that schism emerging, the one that Nick is talking about, that maybe it’s not so easy just to say that we’re not all right thinking and have our consensus?

CAVENDISH: I think that’s interesting. Certainly, this play caught the entire critical establishment – if you want to call them that - off guard. I think The Times managed to get in and review it, but beyond that, if nobody had seen this coming up on the schedules, and thought this is something we need to review, they hadn’t really got the sense that there was going to be a demonstration about it. I freely admit I had the luckless task of seeing Bonnie Langford in panto in the nights before Behzti kicked off. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course one should have thought ‘this is going to be a seismic play.’ As it’s been pointed out already, since censorship came to an end in the 1960s, those battles seem to have been won. We’re at a point where now play going, with the odd exception – in the mid-90s, physically explicit theatre - we feel we’ve moved somewhat beyond censorship style debate. I thought that was interesting to observe, that actually there are different processes going on.

The question that’s forming in my head, if it’s taken us hundreds of years to reach a certain plateau of play creation where there isn’t an automatic looking over the shoulder to wonder who’s going to censor this, who am I going to offend here, are we right to expect communities and playwrights that are in some ways emerging here, to instantly adopt that laissez-faire policy? I mean, I do think – I would like to ask Ben at some point - this point about the play being set in a Sikh temple seemed to be the main sticking point for objectors, that they felt it was absolutely fine to put it somewhere else, for the actions described to be reported as such, but for the actions in the play to not have been set in a Sikh temple, that seems to me to have been a rather provocative thing to have carried on with, given that the play could’ve gone ahead with content pretty much unchanged. That’s the question for me.

CUMMINGS: Let’s get Ben to pick up on that. If you could explain what happened?

PAYNE: To try and provide a bit of context, Birmingham is a very civic city; it prides itself on its multiculturalism, for very, very good reasons and the way in which it’s invested in culture in terms of regenerating itself as a city. It’s quite difficult to explain what the difference is between a city like that compared to somewhere like London, which is much more fragmented. The kind of way theatre operates there, it’s completely different. For us, we weren’t consulting the community over the content of this play, what we were trying to do was say, “we’re going to try and do this play and we’re going to be completely open about the fact we’re doing it, that this is what it’s going to be.” For us not to do that, the argument went, felt that we were going to be surreptitious about it and sneak it on and hope no body noticed, and in a city like Birmingham that wasn’t going to happen - we’ve got city councillors that sit on our board. So there is an element in the theatre to be open and responsible about what it is programming.

The difficultly was that the dialogue was perceived as us saying we want you to advise us on the content of the play. Now, for me, that’s completely unacceptable. The writer writes the play, she’s not writing the play by committee, we’ve made a decision to programme it. These people do not have a right to decide where the play is set, and make changes to it, and that’s where there was a misunderstanding, as it was assumed that dialogue was about us saying we want you to tell us what should and shouldn’t happen in the play. To have changed it to some other place would have meant changing – as far as I can see -the whole play. The one parallel that did come up was that TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is Murder in the Cathedral, not Murder in the Cathedral Gift Shop. The setting of it is absolutely fundamental to the meaning of the play, and you either embrace that or you don’t embrace that.

CUMMINGS: Can I next ask you Ben, do you think that this community centre thing was genuine? It seems to me that maybe it’d be obvious to anyone that a theatre wouldn’t make changes radical artistic changes on the grounds of what you were saying. Do you think the leaders who said, “Put in it in a community centre and then it’ll all be fine”; do you think they expected you to do that and then it would’ve been alright?

PAYNE: Well, there’s also the sort of sense that somehow this community that we’re talking about is somehow homogenous, and all has the same kind of opinions, and of course it doesn’t. And I think to a certain extent there became a kind of critical mess where it just became about the fact that we were doing the play at all. And it became actually a kind of political football with wider issues about factions within the community and all kinds of other political issues that were going on. So in many ways there was a certain point where it became about not where it was set but the fact it was happening at all.

CUMMINGS: Rachel, let me bring you in as a writer. Ben was talking earlier on about the burden on representation on someone like Gurpreet. You’re fortunate, I suppose, not to have this spread of characteristics that determine what you’re meant to be representing, although maybe if you were a novelist, you’d be told off for being too domestic. Do you see any kind of constraints on what you are trying to do? Do you see censorship as an issue in terms of your writing?

WAGSTAFF: I think there’s a very odd sort of split. If you’re from a minority, there’s a tremendous pressure on you to represent your minority in a good light; and if you’re from a majority, there seems to be a tremendous pressure on you to attack the establishment; you have to write something edgy, you have to almost write something offensive in order to be noticed. And I think that’s a real shame for certain young emerging writers that feel they have to be as edgy as possible.

I went to see Mercury Fur recently - and I’ve almost recovered. I thought it was one of the most astonishing, astounding plays I’ve ever seen. I felt sick throughout it. But people seemed to be more interested in talking of all the violence and all the torture that we were anticipating seeing on stage rather than the beautiful lyricism in certain moments of the play, and rather than the tremendous acting.

I think there was an interview in Time Out with a couple of the actors, and the actors were making jokes that they were scared of being lynched just from being in this play; and it seems people want to talk about the content of a play rather than its aesthetic sensibilities, and that seems a very strange and unfortunate thing to me as well. I don’t know if Dominic wanted to…

CAVENDISH: Well I think it’s interesting that in the midst of these conversations about religion – which I think is actually quite central to what this discussion is going have to tackle – up came this rather, in some ways, retro play by Philip Ridley from which took us back to the In-Yer-Face school of British theatre, where you’re presented in a voyeuristic fashion with the possible spectacle of a young boy, a young Asian boy, being tortured and killed for the delectation of a party goer. And this was bill boarded outside the theatre as “containing scenes that might offend”, and it did seem rather peculiar.

The word offend is quite an interesting one - I don’t see how one could be offended at the representation of this, given that if you go on the internet beheadings and torture are now becoming almost routinely available - child abuse etc. There’s almost a kind of phoney squeamishness being presented at the audience, whereas, actually, as you say, the interesting thing to engage with is - does this play work? Is this play lyrical? Is it interesting? Is it exciting? Does it somehow cohere?

CUMMINGS: Well Johann, you were talking about that.

HARI: Well, I think it’s important to bear in mind as well that not so very far from here in Amsterdam last year we saw an artist be beheaded in the street in a city where for centuries people have gone for freedom; artistic, religious, intellectual freedom. And I think Nick is right – this is coming here; this will happen. We got a briefing at the Independent - my lovely colleague Yasmin Allawi Brown gets death threats, and was told, “You, mouthy Muslim woman,” – by a mouthy Muslim man – “You, mouthy Muslim woman, stop saying this, stop doing it or we will come and we will kill you! We know where you live and we know who you are. Shut up!”

COHEN: When Theo Van Gough was assassinated in Amsterdam, Index on Censorship, the leading liberal journal in Britain, absolutely gloated over his murder and said he brought it on himself. This was a magazine founded by Stephen Spender to defend Soviet dissidents, with everyone from Havel down to Nelson Mandela on its Board of Directors, absolutely gloating, and saying, “He deserved it, he’s a descendent of Vincent Van Gogh, and everyone knows Van Gogh was mad – my, he cut his ear off!” They’ve finally taken it off their website.

I’m sorry, I just want to say one more thing, because I think you can only say one or two things sensible things in a meeting before you really have to shut up - you become a bore. I want to profoundly disagree with what was just said about ten minutes ago about, “oh look, we’re where we are because of centuries of struggle, we shouldn’t expect other people in the world to be in the same position as we are.” It reminds me of quite the stupidest thing Nye Bevin ever said, when he said, “We must remember,” – he was talking about the Third World – “that where they are now, we once stood.”

This is such nonsense. Osama Bin Laden is as modern as everyone in this room. The most militant Sikh leader, or Jewish leader, or Hindu leader, is as hip and groovy as all of you here. Milton might have written the first great defence of free speech, no one had done that before; the ideas of democracy, the ideas of freedom of speech, the ideas of Feminism weren’t there then, but they are now. What is happening is that people are fighting against them. To use a phrase that a brilliant Muslim writer uses, to say that somehow we must have lower standards, we must expect worse for people because they have got a brown skin or a black skin, to use this wonderful phrase that this Muslim writer uses, to my eternal shame I can’t remember her name, it’s the racism of diminished expectations. And it’s also impossible that if you are a young Sikh playwright in Birmingham the idea that you will accept patriarchy, that you will accept oppression as just natural, it’s no longer possible, it’s just not possible anymore however oppressed you are, there are different worlds available to you. That’s why I said there’s a great smash up coming, people are going to have to decide, and nice liberals are going to have to decide, which side they’re on in all this.

CUMMINGS: Ok, I’ll ask Dominic to respond to that a bit later. Let me just put something to you, Johann, and people can pick this up. Do you think that there is possibly a danger of polarisation because of these things being blown up in terms of becoming censorship issues and becoming controversies rather than about the plays, as Ben was saying; that there’s kind of a circling of the wagons. What happens if someone writes an anti-Muslim play, which may or may not be very good - it may be politically objectionable, and you would actually want to write a criticism of it - but in a climate where there are people threatening to kill that person, do you feel perhaps constrained, and as liberals that we should come on board and say it’s good stuff and shouldn’t really criticise it at all, because of this censorship?

HARI: I’d difficult. What we are not confronting is the old battle. Just to disagree with Nick, the Fabian left, the centre left, was very good in battling against theatre censorship until it ended, until the sixties – I agree that since then, the record is much more patchy. But we’re not confronting that threat now, what we’re confronting is the veto power of mobs and the emotional blackmail of religious groups – I prefer to call them organised superstitious groups - but, you know, depending on your interpretation of religion. Personally I was quite gutted that I didn’t get any death threats from religious groups for ages, and I kept thinking “why is everyone else getting them and not me?” But then, I was quite glad - I may have got the world’s first Buddhist death threat.

I interviewed the Dalai Lama. I hated him, he hated me; it was a disaster. And amongst other things, it ended up with him calling me a fat bastard. I wanted to challenge about some of the really awful things in Buddhism, like the fact he describes anal sex as evil, whereas it’s one of my favourite hobbies, and various other things. And after we’d got very tetchy, and it was getting very unpleasant, I thought that I’d go back to something consensual and I said, “Your Holiness, you’ve been very critical of income inequality in the West.” And he said, “Yes, I don’t understand why people need so much money. We each only have one stomach.” Then he paused and said, “Not you. You clearly have at least three.”

So anyway, subsequently, I wrote this up explaining that he was a real bitch, and then I got Buddhist death threats, quite a few. I didn’t do what we were advised to do which is take them to the police. Fortunately it worked out and I think I got the final laugh when I managed to email them back saying, “Well you’ve fucked your Karma for the next six lives.” So you know, I win in the end!

CUMMINGS: Ok, Munira and then Rachel.

MIRZA: Just to go back to a point that Nick made earlier about the rise of the religious extremist in society, that in the cause for censorship that we might be pandering to these extremist groups. I think what we have to remember is that the cause for censorship, or the way in which censorship works in this country, is not because there are more strict Muslims in society or there are more strict Sikhs. I think the Behzti play was very interesting, as the protestors outside the theatre did not represent all Sikhs in Birmingham, they were a minority. And community representatives, as they’re called, who are invited on to councils and boards and various committee meetings are not representative as such. They are given status by authorities, by institutions not necessarily by the people they supposedly represent, and I think there is a problem with the structure and the way we try and engage with ethnic groups by using these individuals. We can’t see that the problem with censorship is that because we have ethnic minorities in this country, they are inevitably going to bring in different cultural values. That they will be unable to understand freedom of speech, I do agree that would really be the racism of low expectations. So we have to have a less patronising attitude to what ethnic minorities as a whole are willing to accept in terms of censorship and so on.

-BREAK IN RECORDING-

CUMMINGS: Ok, this discussion will continue to run in the bar, but for now we’re going to finish off with the panel, and I’m going to give everyone two minutes each, and no more than two minutes, to say whatever you think is the most important thing you want to bring out of the discussion.

CAVENDISH: Well, because theatre obviously seems to have somehow slipped down the menu of things being talked about directly here, there was a cluster of points made over there that I wanted to somehow tackle. There was this point about right wing hegemony, slandering and viciously abusing immigrants - would we approve of this? And I think, why turn this into a caricature? Are we in a climate at the moment where you could even have a level headed debate about immigration in major national institutions, like the National Theatre or the RSC? I spoke to a director at the RSC who was taking part in the Gunpowder season recently, a guy called Robert Delamere, who said that in staging Thomas More, a play written four hundred years ago, he found a topically and an outspokenness, in the first half at least, about immigration and the pressures this may place on an indigenous population in a way that he hadn’t come across at all in any of the scripts he’d come across at all in any of the scripts that he’d looked at when he was staging work at the Royal Court.

I think if one looks at the bubbling up of resentment about Behzti or Jerry Springer, I think what’s possibly key is this feeling, it was articulated best by Nick Hytner who after the Behzti riot, came on to Radio Four and said “no one has the right not to be offended.” And he then continued to say to John Humphries “if I wanted to come on to this programme and berate you for your religious views, I should absolutely have the right to do that. I can tell you that what you hold and cherish as your most devote belief is silly and utter nonsense.” And I think therein lies a feeling of suspicion about those who control, who hold the cards, in the theatre community and elsewhere, in the arts establishment and the media, that somehow it’s ok – that it’s somehow an open field day on religious belief and that’s something that I think religious groups are feeling could be exacerbated unless they put their hands up to signal their discomfort with it.

You can absolutely defend the right of a playwright to point out the abuse that can go on in a religious community, but I think there is a terribly grey area here about how much can you license open mocking of a religion? That’s the debate that will spin on as there’s such an overlap between religious practice, the behaviour of certain ethnic groups and the religious beliefs that they hold.

COHEN: Well I think this is absolutely falling for the fallacy of multiculturalism, the fallacy that we’re all in windowless boxes, that we’re lumped together by religion of all things – who’d have thought it in the 21st century. What you are saying is, in practice – and it’s happened globally with liberal left, and Iraqi socialists, and Kurdish socialists and Iraqi democrats ever since 2002 – what you are saying is not, “I as a white, from a Christian background, members majority community, will not dare offend Muslims”, what you are saying to Muslim women, to Muslim democrats, to people who don’t want theocracy, “Oh, actually believe all you believe in, but I’m not going to support you when you try to get there.” It is a kind of liberal betrayal while maintaining your self righteousness.

CUMMINGS: Ok, who’s next?

HARI: Ok, just very quickly I’d say from Dominic’s position, it’s actually essential to mock religion. Some of the most dangerous forces we confront in the world, whether it’s George Bush’s evangelism, Osama Bin Laden’s islamofacism, and everyone in between, are religious. I’m part of a group that’s persecuted. Fortunately I was incredibly lucky to be born when I was, but every major religious text says the way I choose to live is abhorrent and wrong. So I think it is essential to abuse and mock these people until there is not one of them left.

Secondly, in terms of John’s point, which is a really important one I think, about what you would do if there was a right wing movement was promoting this, I would say there was actually an analogous situation happening now. There is considerable academic research - I’ve got reams of it - showing that people who are exposed to rape pornography and rape fantasy pornography are considerably more likely to rape. There is something about experiencing considerable amounts of rape pornography that lowers your inhibitions against rape, so there is actually a comparable situation. There is a cultural phenomenon that is out there, it’s being accessed, extraordinary figures – five million people accessing rape fantasy pornography every day, sorry – five million people a week - and there has been a comparable rise in the rape rate in the same time that’s happened. I think it’s very difficult if you are a free speech purist like me to know how to respond to that. Because what you’d like to say is that we should respond in a rational way, by trying to make the arguments against people who do that. You know, if someone’s staging an immigrant hating play, I would say you stand outside and hand out leaflets about immigration, but it is difficult to engage rationally with some of these things, it’s a very difficult situation.

Just on two very quick last lines, I disagree with two members of the audience. I disagree completely that theatre should be inoffensive and not shocking. The plays that have really rejuvenated theatre, whether it’s Look Back in Anger, Waiting for Godot or Saved, have enraged and perplexed and appalled audiences. I think part of theatre’s problem is that much of it’s far too bloody bland and boring - who would react to it anyway? And the guy at the back who said, “I don’t believe in censorsing theatre because nice middle class people like us go, but the bovine masses who watch television or cinema, those are the art forms you need to watch.” Well I think you speak for yourself by making such an absurd point. Last line I’d just put: is there anything any of us can think of that’s worth saying that would not offend somebody?

MIRZA: The question about right wing domination of theatre, if that was to happen what the reaction would be? I’m disappointed with Nick and Johann for their lily-livered defence of free speech, actually. I do think you would still have free speech under those circumstances. In fact, we have tabloid newspapers that every day say horrible things about immigrants and we won’t ban them, because we think that people should have right to read them, and that the way to challenge that is to have a discussion. In fact a practical case - not to do with theatre - in Oldham, when BNP councillors were elected, they were unable to speak on the platform on election night, they were banned by the council from speaking in case they incited further racial hatred, and what did that do? It pissed the people of Oldham off because they were being patronised. So I think it’s very counter productive even in those circumstances to say that ordinary people should not be allowed to listen, because effectively what we’re saying is that they’re to stupid to get it – they’re not like us Guardian readers as someone said back there.

I think there is some disagreement on the panel about the origins of this problem. I don’t think it comes from immigrants coming here or from different cultural values, I think it’s very much our own problem – it’s a home grown one. As the Radiohead song lyric goes, you do it to yourselves. We’re the ones who create these structures where we invite community representatives on to boards. We’re the ones who go on constantly about being inclusive and relevant and tackling diverse cultural issues, it’s not because people are demanding sharia law, it’s because we’re saying that we want to respect their different identities. So I think we need to tackle the problem here rather than project it on to these other cultural groups.

On the question of censorship in theatre and whether it’s always a bad thing, actually censorship is a good creative spur. You think about Renaissance theatre which was under very strict censorship, and they had possibly the most creative period in English theatre; and actually if there’s something worth saying, theatre writers and artists are pretty creative at being able to say it. I don’t think the imposition of formal censorship need be a problem in that sense. I think there is an unwillingness to challenge taboos and what you have now is this curious paradox where actually uncensored theatre is less creative, you know, this pressure to be edgy which Rachel talked about, which I think is very interesting - the pressure to be controversial actually takes away our judgement, takes away our ability to judge things aesthetically. Someone complained that we weren’t talking about theatre, well that’s the way subsidised theatre works, we don’t talk about the art, we talk about the community or the people who are going to watch it. We don’t ever talk about the content and I think that is the consequence of this kind of discussion

CUMMINGS: Ok, Ben, Rachel?

PAYNE: I would make an argument or plea for diversity, but not in the sense of the perceived idea of diversity. If Behzti was the only Asian play, or only play by a British Asian writer that the Birmingham Rep had done, then maybe there would be more of an argument about our responsibility in putting that play on, but the fact is for twenty years we have been doing that work, and some of it has been very celebratory. The Rumina is an Indian epic, which a very large Asian audience came to see. I think there is a place for that kind of theatre; I think that there is also a place for plays like Behzti. I don’t agree that just because people wanted to stop it, it meant it was a bad play and that we shouldn’t have done it. If theatre is just about the bland and the celebratory and the inoffensive that isn’t diversity as far as I’m concerned. And the man who is saying that theatre is only for Guardian readers is hanging around in the wrong theatres. It may be where you’re going to the theatre, but that’s not the theatre in Birmingham. So come to Birmingham.

CUMMINGS: Let’s give the final world to Rachel.

WAGSTAFF: I’ll be brief. I agree with Manira that it’s very easy to patronise people or believe that people won’t understand or come away totally corrupted from seeing an entertaining, thought provoking, exciting play. I also agree with this gentleman over here, that we’ve lost what the theatre is about. Fundamentally it should be about enjoying yourself, having a very entertaining evening, and simultaneously having an exciting evening that will lead to big discussions in the bar afterwards. So I think we should adjourn there.

[Special thanks to the lovely Alistair Nixon for typing this out...]