We flatter ourselves when we boast of mastery of the ironic style. Unlike literal-minded Germans and Americans, we are not ashamed to live behind masks and speak in riddles. On the contrary, we delight in it and damn foreigners for their insistence on saying what they mean. They lack our sophistication. The delightfully quirky British sense of humour leaves them cold.
If we were harder on ourselves, we would notice that on the reverse side of the ironic coin are the smuttiness and evasiveness that always accompany self-censorship. We would wonder how we ended up in a country where fear of causing offence or crossing a powerful or litigious interest had become so ingrained the British could no longer speak plainly or read freely.
If you think I am being unpatriotic, try this test. Go to your nearest bookshop and ask for copies of Amanda Knox's memoir Waiting to be Heard or Lawrence Wright's Going Clear.
Knox's conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher, and her subsequent acquittal, was one of the most sensational court cases of the past decade. "Foxy Knoxy's" good looks and lurid love life added a ghoulish and occasionally misogynistic fascination to the affair. HarperCollins believed her story would sell round the world and paid Knox $4m for it.
Wright's book is very different. He is a Pulitzer prize-winner, whose investigation into Scientology is in the gruelling but rewarding tradition of the best of American journalism. Going Clear is exhaustive, fact-checked half to death and painfully fair – and all the more alarming for that. Wright takes readers through the grisly story of L Ron Hubbard's sci-fi cult: the abuse of the faithful and their children; the use of the lawyers, blackmail, smears and threats to terrorise apostates; the infiltration of state bureaucracies; and the relentless demands for money from initiates, which have made the church fabulously wealthy.
The public is interested in Knox's story and should be able to read it. Given that Scientology is a global racket with a British arm, there is a public interest in publishing Wright's book. But you cannot buy either of them in the bookshops. British publishers decided not to print for fear of the libel law.
Wright tells me the Scientologists hired solicitors from the London law firm Carter Ruck. They told the publisher Transworld that if it dared allow British readers to see his work, they would sue. Meanwhile, the British arm of HarperCollins – which, to declare an interest, publishes my efforts – refused to release Knox's memoirs because it was frightened of actions from Italian police and prosecutors.
You can still buy both books from America via Amazon. But what kind of grubby, hole-in-the-corner half-freedom is that and why should anyone expect us to be grateful for it? After listing countries from Brazil to France where Going Clear was on open sale, Wright told me that he did not understand this country: "When I think of Britain, I think of the gutter press. You allow that but don't allow serious work." I replied that the two went together, even though Parliament had reformed the libel law.
Maybe publishers are cowards. If they had the courage to fight the censors in courts, perhaps they could use the new law to advance the public's right to read without restrictions.
But Parliament has not limited the costs of going to court. Our unreformed legal profession is just as grasping as Hubbard was and a libel case can cost millions. Neither ordinary citizens, who want to correct lies about them, nor writers, who want to defend the truth of what they have published, are prepared to risk so much at the judiciary's casino. Not least because the judges have loaded the dice.
You would never know it but the British have legal protections for free speech. Article 10 of the Human Rights Act states: "Everyone has the right of freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority…"
The reason why you've never heard of Article 10 is that the judges never enforce it. They have created a vast law of privacy but done nothing to enhance our rights to speak, argue and investigate or, indeed, to protect the rights we once had.
Freedom does not just depend on laws. The culture of modern Britain matters as much and it is instinctively authoritarian. When presented with an unpleasant argument, the default response of the outraged is to call for a ban. It is as if only by demanding criminal punishment can we prove that our disapproval is truly righteous. Hence, the stories that pepper the press of the courts convicting citizens for racist, homophobic, anti-English or anti-Welsh insults.
It never occurs to the bureaucracy that a desire to punish is a neurotic symptom of liberal insecurity. Because I am called Cohen interviewers ask whether I would ban Holocaust-denial. I reply that racists, like misogynists and homophobes, do not have good arguments or even weak ones. Their views are not difficult to ridicule and refute. If you cannot beat a racist in open debate without calling for the police, you shouldn't be in the debating business in the first place and must step aside and make way for someone who can.
Never believe that you can safely confine the urge to punish and control to people you dislike. Because of its excessive secrecy, Britain remains excessively deferential. Politicians are meant to be the subject of unfair attacks. Yet their laws are barely scrutinised as the whips beat them through Parliament. Celebrities are meant to suffer hideous invasions of their privacy. Yet the ability of Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall to act as they did while the staff of the BBC looked the other way suggested that celebrities' privacy has not been invaded enough.
Hardly anyone notices that the press, online financial commentators, business broadcasters and academic economics journals failed to warn that the banks were careering towards ruin. Their ignorance was unsurprising. They could not investigate. They could not persuade judges and, indeed, their fellow citizens that they had the right to challenge the powerful, even if their challenges were not correct in every particular. Now we are bankrupt and have no idea what to do next.
Still, we have our irony, eh. The knowing smiles on pink, superior faces that tell the world we have nothing serious to say. • This article will be opened for comments on Sunday morning
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
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