When I was about fourteen, two or three of my school friends and I formed a school Communist society. This probably only lasted a few weeks and was never formally recognized as a school society or club. The main activities involved me going to the local public library after school, reading The Morning Star (Britain’s official Communist Party newspaper) and making notes on what I believed were especially important articles and then reading them to fellow members of the society the next day. Oh, and I also spent quite a lot of time sketching possible society insignia during idle moments in class or on the bus home.
I thought about this again this last week, when the UK government announced it was introducing a new definition of extremism, which includes any ideology that seeks to ‘undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights’. Communism, of course, sought to do just that—although for a while the Westminster parliament did have one elected Communist MP (who lost his seat three months before I was born). So, according to the new definition, I and my friends were definitely ‘extremists’ (and I have to admit retaining a certain scepticism about just how far the UK’s rather peculiar system of democracy, including an unelected upper chamber and its first past the post system of elections that gives massive majorities to parties that don’t even secure 50% of the vote, is genuinely ‘democratic’—and that’s before we get on to the power of vested interests that operate from outwith the political process). Now, I admit that we weren’t in practice a great danger to the state and, of course, there were no organizations (not even the official Communist Party) standing by to groom us into acts of violence. No one was going to provide us with guns or bombs, and if they had, we’d probably have run a mile. As I say, we only kept it up for a few weeks—I don’t think we even managed a school protest. Nevertheless, seen from the point of view of the new definition, we were extremists.
What do I take from these reflections? That even if it is true that extremism today can be very, very dangerous and acknowledging that, in my lifetime, hundreds of people have lost their lives to acts of political terror, Britain is becoming step by step more intolerant of genuine diversity of opinion. An intellectually responsible society cannot not allow the basic assumptions of its own political order to be exposed to radical scrutiny—a scrutiny that, for much of the 20th century, shaped public political debate in this country. But the parameters of dissent are progressively narrowing—and I see less of a threat in students supposedly cancelling one or other controversial campus speaker (though how much this really happens, I don’t know) than in the top-down attempt to define the parameters of debate, a strategy that, history suggests, is always the best way to provoke ‘extreme’ reactions.
Confessions of a devout European 