Posted in News on 05/02/21
When I started in publishing, newspapers reviewed books, publishers took authors to lunch, and social media was a daring new invention.
The closest thing to a Woke debate was the use of ‘he’ vs ‘she’ vs ‘they’.
Commissioning editors were free to acquire books. You still needed ‘buy-in’ at acquisition meetings. This, however, would be from the heads of sales, rights and marketing, not from junior assistants.
No junior employee would have refused to work on a book.
No one could have predicted that Richard Dawkins would have been no-platformed by a university (Trinity College Dublin).
Public debate has taken a new direction. Social media sites facilitate the instant spread of speech. As the user base has grown, so has its power.
JK Rowling was vilified on Twitter for her comment about ‘people who menstruate’ being, in fact, women. She was lucky that her book sales meant that her publishers, Hachette, stood up to employees who tried to duck out of working on her new book, The Ickabog.
She also received celebrity support The Sunday Times reported that: ‘the actress Frances Barber and the playwright Tom Stoppard are two of the 58 signatories to a letter which says that JK Rowling is a victim of “an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media”.’
I admire the signatories for standing up to the Twitter witchfinders.
Gillian Philips, a longstanding HarperCollins author, was dropped overnight for backing Rowling through the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling.
Political commentator Douglas Murray is perhaps not entirely tongue-in-cheek in yearning for ‘good old-fashioned publishing vices’:
What we would all benefit from is a return of some good old-fashioned vices including studied indifference and high-handed dismissal. If somebody at a junior level says they feel unsafe because something will be published with which they disagree, the CEO should say: ‘Well, I think our company is unsafe with someone so dim in our employ. Your veto does not work here. Bog off.’
Yet the corporate giants tend not to stand up for most authors against this new McCarthyism. Oganisations such as PEN are selective in whose rights of free speech they support.
To quote my latter-day hero, Piers Morgan, on the Rowling debate:
When I go into a bookshop, I expect to be confronted by all sorts of books containing views I don’t agree with, by authors I personally despise. We live in a democracy, not a woke totalitarian state.
Where publishers such as HarperCollins are wrong is in thinking that by sacking or cancelling an author, the problem will go away.
The problem is not confined to book publishing. Universities have safe spaces. Twitter allows its users to ‘mute’ Tweets ‘that contain particular words, phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags’. The more we’re protected from opposing views, and dissent is dismissed with slogans such as ‘hate speech’, the less resilient we become.
With offence now legally in the eye of the beholder, the annexation of books, programmes, performances and, indeed, jokes will continue.
From Fawlty Towers to Animal Farm to Little Britain, popular culture has been edited to avoid offence. No doubt Shakespeare’s plays will soon be bowdlerised or include warning signs – along with the Bible.
Even where books fight their way through censorship, they can be denied the oxygen of publicity by the escalating no-platforming.
Objecting to the practice, as long ago as 2014, journalist Sarah Ditum wrote in the New Statesman:
No platform now uses the pretext of opposing hate speech to justify outrageously dehumanising language, and sets up an ideal of ‘safe spaces’ within which certain individuals can be harassed. A tool that was once intended to protect democracy from undemocratic movements has become a weapon used by the undemocratic against democracy.
When it’s not just the Rod Liddles of this world who are targeted, but authors as wide-ranging as Germaine Greer, Suzanne Moore and Brett Easton Ellis, publishers should heed the warnings.
As Murray said: ‘Free speech is like oxygen – you only notice it when it’s starting to run out.’
And as François-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire) almost said: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
Publishers who turn a blind eye to the no-platforming of authors such as Woody Allen, or who argue that it’s acceptable to be anti-Jewish because of Zionist policies, are on a slippery slope. Think of Robespierre.
Then there was the Scottish Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, passed by the Scottish Parliament on 11 March 2021 but with no start date as yet. With vague definitions such as ‘stirring up hatred’, could such a bill lead to authors like J.K. Rowling facing jail time or other legal sanction for comments on public platforms?
Perhaps the real danger is that of self-censorship.
In George Orwell’s words: ‘The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.’
The difference between our private thoughts and public utterances grows wider. Orwell spoke of the ‘gramaphone mind’.
While I applaud the work of organisations such as Academics for Academic Freedom and the Free Speech Union, our goal should be to make their work redundant.
That is where publishers, agents, authors and their regulating bodies come in.
And where I hope, in a small way, to play my part.