Censorship and Freedom: the Longford Report (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

It used to be said of certain parliamentary constituencies that a sheep or a scarecrow would be elected by them if it bore the rosette of Conservative or Labour, whichever was favoured there. Likewise, it is predictable that the direst rubbish will be acclaimed by sections of the population, so long as it is rubbish supporting Christianity and seeking to put more fetters on people’s lives. And that is the essence of the Longford Report on pornography, whose long-awaited foregone conclusions appeared at the end of September. Despite the adverseness of reviews such as Bernard Levin’s in The Observer, one has actually to read the Report to find how low it is: a methodological mess, a rag-bag of contradictory allegations given the name “evidence” and ulterior motives called “conclusions”.

One example will show what the Report is at. In the general introductory section, the third chapter is headed “Violence and Pornography”. A lengthy paragraph associating social revolution and the “underground” with violence leads straight into an account of Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer. Streicher, it is said, collected pornography. The counter-information that Hitler did not is given backhandedly: “very little is known about Hitler’s own interest in pornographic materials” — i.e., being wicked he must have had some even though we’ve no evidence for saying so. However, Hitler was “probably” impotent, and his mistress (a contradiction there, surely?) Eva Braun "may, it is thought” have practised lesbianism with her sister. Over the page, and we are back with hippies and “peaceniks” playing sexual perversions.

Making Dirt Stick

The Longford Report is the dirtiest book in town, throwing and smearing mud in all directions. Some of it is hair-raising in crude audacity. The special sub-committee on advertising which finds “We are satisfied with the disciplines that the advertising industry has voluntarily imposed upon itself” comprised four members—of whom two are Chairmen of advertising agencies. The sub-committee quotes from and recommends the British Code of Advertising Practice, and points a special finger at one publisher refusing to observe it: curiously enough, Paul Raymond, proprietor of Men Only, which was raided by the police shortly after the appearance of the Report. Note should be made, too, of the nature of censorable books proposed in a chapter by Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard: “Not unsuitable because of anything: just unsuitable.”

The conclusion of the Report is a draft “Obscenity Bill”, with two prime concerns. First, a new “test of obscenity” is laid down:

For the purposes respectively of the Obscene Publications Acts 1959 and 1964 and of section 2 of the Theatres Act 1968, an article or a performance of a play is obscene if its effect, taken as a whole, is to outrage contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large.

The second object, with particular reference to the theatre, is that the sections of existing Acts allowing for “public good” as a defence against prosecution “shall cease to have effect”. As stated in the 1959 Act, this defence is

that the giving of the performance in question was justified as being for the public good on the ground that it was in the interests of drama, opera, ballet or any other art, or of literature or learning.

Lord Longford has denied that these changes attempt to extend censorship. Of course they do. What is the Report about, except to demand that what Longford, Mrs. Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cliff Richard (and eleven ecclesiastics, and Moral Rearmament) disapprove of should be banned?

Who Constrains Whom?

The Socialist attitude to these questions can be simply stated. We are against all censorship, and in favour of unrestricted expression of opinion and sentiment by everyone. There is no reservation in this statement. “All” does not mean all except that of obscenity, etc., and “everyone” includes our opponents (those involved in the Longford Report, for instance: atrocious as it is, no Socialist will deny or impede their right to say any of it). Nor is the argument one of artistic merits and the interests of the higher things in life. The position is that while any one section of society has the power to regulate what others may see, read or know, the minds of the majority are held in chains.

Part of the Longford case is that the minds of many need to be chained. Mrs. Whitehouse is quoted as saying “it has nothing to do with taste, it has everything to do with the kind of world we are trying to build”. A “senior consultant, F.R.C.P. and former Dean” refers to “the necessary function of government in preventing mental pollution by the mass media”. Masud Khan, editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library, proposes that pornography (but not censorship, however) is “inherently fascistic”. Lord Platt is recorded as having visited the Study Group to say that the Bible — “on sale in children’s bookshops, in school libraries” — contained disgusting pornographic material and was likely to corrupt children; but perhaps that is not what the Study Group wanted to hear.

Thin Air

Yet, for all the laborious efforts here to prove a case for banning pornography, it remains unproven. David Holbrook cites psychiatrists, philosophers and biologists. The American President is quoted pronouncing the non sequitur that if the mind is elevated by great works it must be lowered by bad ones. The only decently-researched item in the Report is the Appendix by Maurice Yaffé, summarising the voluminous findings of the US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, and other recent enquiries. This Appendix is referred to several times in the main text of the Report, making one wonder if any of them (apart from Holbrook and Mary Miles, who add a disapproving paragraph) read it. For the conclusions on page after page are that no evidence exists for connecting pornography causally with anti-social behaviour or sexual crime, or for claiming any effect on children.

Indeed, there is one factor which is treated altogether curiously by the Report. Notwithstanding the impression given by phrases like “widely sold” and “big business”, the fact is that pornography is expensive and hard to get. How many of the newspaper readers have ever seen, let alone bought, it? The Report tells how Mary Stott of The Guardian went to the Study Group’s office “simply anxious to see her reactions to hard pornography”. If it were as over-accessible to the public as Longford’s crew represent, why did not Mary Stott pick up a bundle at the corner shop long before? The cheapest price for a pornographic booklet is about £3 (the same as an agency ticket for Oh, Calcutta!, with which the authors of the Report seem obsessed). In those terms, the talk of easy availability to children is a monstrous red herring. The pious question asked, “Would you like your child (or godchild) to read this?” needs a supplementary: If you would, can you afford it?

Propaganda & Capitalism

The point is not at all frivolous. Most people’s views on pornography are founded not on what they have seen of it but on what they have heard. The first chapter of the Report speaks of “the influence of literature on behaviour, with special reference to the Bible, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf”. If one grants that these books have been widely influential, the influence has not come through reading them. The first and the third have been pressed on populations among which it is difficult to find persons with more than vague knowledge of what is inside them. The number of people who have read Capital is, even today, relatively small. The influence has come from their presentation for propagandist purposes, in directive renderings to which independent reading would be an antidote. This is another side of censorship where the censor seeks to form his subjects’ conclusions for them, laying down the reaction which makes reading unnecessary and imposing social and political penalties on whoever reacts otherwise.

The purpose of censorship is to support the rule of class-divided society. Thus, though Socialists oppose it, we do not campaign for its abolition: the belief that any class government anywhere can permit this is unrealistic. Politically, the reasons why capitalism needs its Official Secrets Acts, libel laws and prohibitions on incitement to this or that are obvious enough. In the field of what is called morality, the purpose is simply to ensure that the working class gives no trouble. In this regard, the hypocrisy of the “establishment” should be seen for what it is. Despite all the talk about art and humanity, the authorities stiffen or relax censorship on strictly practical grounds and only to a marginal extent because of theoretical arguments. Considering all that goes on in our world — supported by the contributors to the Longford Report — it is the depth of cynicism to speak as if seeing a dirty book were the worst thing that could befall a child. If only it were!

Exploitive Society

Of course there is no case to be made out in support of pornography, any more than there is one for football or detective novels or jig-saw puzzles or a thousand other recreational phenomena. The condemnation that large sums of money are made from pornography comes strangely from supporters of capitalism, which exists by making money out of every human desire and need. Much bigger profits are made out of “just” wars, housing shortage, and taken-for-granted activities which poison the environment. Presumably the Hodder company will make profit from the publication of the Longford Report; Malcolm Muggeridge is paid for writing and speaking against pornography and birth-control; but no-one suggests that the viewpoints presented are thereby disqualified.

However, there is one comment on most pornography that is not made in the Report. Its nature is, above everything else, exploitive. Its subject-matter is seduction, humiliation, infliction, indignity — people persuaded or made to do things for other people’s gratification. Far from violating the values of present-day society, this picture of personal exploitation accurately reflects them. That is the real difficulty for the censors in defining pornography. Its forms may be elusive, but the content is no different from that of the allegedly respectable functions of a society based upon the exploitation of man by man. Perhaps the indignation of the Longford Study Group is Caliban’s rage at his own face in the glass. One can see in it also, however, the bitterness of disappointed Fabians. A lifetime’s social reform was supposed to turn the working class into sober, moral, acquiescent people: and here they are, as recalcitrant and randy as ever.

Freedom, not Humbug

Don’t be taken in by the Longford Report — or by the majority of its opponents. Censorship can never be in the interests of any section but the ruling class. It is not stated like that, so the arguments for it have to be specious ones invoking illusory menaces and the welfare of the young and “vulnerable”. On the other hand, most self-styled “opponents” of censorship are seeking not its abolition but its transfer — themselves to have freedom, others to be shut up. Socialism means the freedom to say, see and know without restriction. It is worth saying also that this includes not being forced to accept what one does not want; but that is a freedom capitalism won’t give us either.

Robert Barltrop

Censors at odds (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

In November our front-page article dealt with the Lord Longford report on pornography, and stated our case that all censorship is against the interests of everybody but the ruling class.

David Holbrook, a member of the Longford committee, has produced a new book called The Masks of Hate in which psychiatric examination of some popular present-day writers is used to make an argument for their perniciousness. His targets include the James Bond novels, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter and Kingsley Amis.

What is interesting is that Kingsley Amis also contributed a chapter to the Longford Report, advocating censorship as Holbrook does. Among his recommendations was to ban books which are “not unsuitable because of anything : just unsuitable”. Holbrook finds Amis’s writings unsuitable because they are “devaluing human nature” and “present false solutions”. Perhaps a duel with blue pencils at ten paces is imminent.

However, this demonstrates one or two things. First, that what amateur censors really seek is not “social good” but the removal of what they dislike. Second, their failure to realize that governments impose or approve censorship on political grounds, and only to a very minor extent on theoretical (e.g. psychiatric) ones. And third, that proponents of social reform in general terms are unable to foresee its detailed application and outcome. Both Holbrook and Amis believe, of course, that more extensive censorship laws would be used to prevent the working class from seeing their bêtes noires; but The Masks of Hate serves to show that if it happened they might find their own books deemed “just unsuitable”.

Robert Barltrop

The Observer Guide to Voters (1974)

From the December 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The front of the Observer Review of Oct. 6 was headed To help readers make up their minds on how to vote on Thursday, we asked some prominent non-politicians how they will vote. The page was then devoted to the views of these famous people. As The Observer is regarded as the leading journal of the so-called quality press, and would naturally claim that its readers fail into the same top category, why on earth should they need this to help them make up their minds? Having lived in this world for some years, if they haven’t formed some view by Sunday, it would seem odd that they should be able to by the following Thursday with the help of these assorted names. In fact, the whole page should really be an insult to the intelligence of the readership. But I don’t doubt that the people who run the paper know better about that than I do.

So let’s have a look at advice from this bevy of intellectual beauties. First the only woman, the authoress Muriel Spark. (It goes without saying that in the following issue there was a whine: “Why only one woman?’’ On the face of it, I should have thought it clear that there was one woman too many.) Her advice was that as the Tories and Labour had both been useless in office (well, hear, hear ! so far anyway), she advocated voting for the Liberals to see what they would be like. This sage advice is about the level one can hear in any taproom. On this basis, if the third party was the Nazis, one must give them a chance to show what they can do too. I have never read any of her novels and on the strength of her political wisdom I shall keep it that way.

Professor Max Beloff, head of the Open University (you can’t get brainier than that), tells us to vote Conservative because he thinks the Labour Party is circumscribed by its relationship with the Unions. Well, no doubt it is, Prof. Well spotted. What about his Tories? Are their actions not circumscribed by something called capitalism? You think they have been free to organize the world so as to give us all a nice pleasant, secure and peaceful life? But why have they not given us that during all the years (well over a hundred) that they have held power since capitalism first blighted society? You yourself have lived through many periods of Tory rule and know how meaningless it has all been in relation to the little details like poverty, slums, unemployment, wars. You didn’t have to learn (or teach) about that in University. You were there. With such advisers, who needs ignoramuses?

Let us listen to an intellectual who is a nice chap and as thick as they come, Colin Cowdrey, the cricketer. Surprise surprise, he is going to vote for the Tories who will preserve “our heritage” and “produce the best sort of country for my children to grow up in”. Well played, sir. Well hit, indeed. You see Cowdrey’s kids are growing in the best sort of country for them. Because they chose a father who had one flash of inspiration better than all the brains. He married a millionaire’s daughter. Now that’s what I call sound advice — far better than voting Tory. But I fear Colin’s advice is not very practical for the millions of wage-slaves who read it (oh, yes; Observer readers might not like to be called wage-slaves. But nine out of ten of them are).

Let’s get back quick to a brainbox. John Osborne, who has done well as a playwright (for which he can largely thank the Observer, whose then Drama Critic, Ken Tynan, so boosted his “Look Back in Anger” that the thing couldn’t possibly miss). What does Osborne advise? Vote Labour. And he then goes on to castigate that party till in the end he says that it “has been largely responsible for the moral slum and squalid climate we have created since the heady days of 1945”. Vote more squalid slums! Vote for more intellectuals! They are obviously all round the twist, but if they are in the Observer . . .

Illustration by 'Tony' from the original article.

Another Laborious type is James Cameron, the famous columnist. At the end of a famous career with the quantity press, he is interviewed in the Guardian and says (in language which is de rigueur for the trendy press nowadays) he would “give his knackers” to write for the Guardian. Presumably, Mr. Hetherington happened to be in need of a spare pair at that moment, for Cameron is now aboard the great leftist paper. He will vote Labour “as ever”. And does he really think Labour is so good? No: like Osborne, he votes Labour even though the only thing he says about it is that he “waited in vain for someone (his italics) in Government to resign over this year's H-Bomb Test while a splendid Health Service withers for lack of money”. Someone should tell Cameron that it was Attlee’s government which first started this country on the H-Bomb road. Because you can be sure he knows nothing about it. Too busy pompously advising others to have time to learn a damn thing himself.

Then we get a trendy-lefty Bishop, John Robinson. (You know, Honest to God.) “The one thing that unites me is getting shot of Heath and the Unfair Society.” He doesn’t tell us why he thinks we had a “fair society” under Attlee or Wilson (or what the devil he means by the term). And although he is contributing advice on how to vote, he does not tell us how he would vote himself but actually says that if the election had been on the 3rd instead of the 10th he would have voted differently! If you think I am pulling your leg and even a South Bank fake-socialist couldn’t utter such drivel, go to the library and see.

There is no room to deal with them all so just one more; yes, another Professor, the well-known Crick. What do you think the Professor’s subject is? Politics! Now there’s an expert for you. “My prediction is that I’ll vote Labour again, out of habit.” So on Sunday your actual Professor of Politics does not know how exactly he’s going to vote on Thursday; he can only predict. (Perhaps he had a bet with Ladbrokes on which way he was going to vote.) But, as he indicates, he is really a Labourite. He speaks thus of his Fuehrer: “A leader who has narrowed politics to the business of staying in office regardless, who has betrayed the country over Europe and who, in industrial relations, has become a past master of the pre-emptive cringe”. Which is worse or more lunatic: to vote for a leader because you are a starry-eyed nit who worships him, or to do so even though you know and say in print that he is an opportunist so-and-so?

Let’s squeeze in a reference to Kingsley Amis. He clearly hasn’t a clue and admits this. What he says is that all the parties are a lot of rubbish and he refuses to vote at all. Well, in a way that’s refreshing. He doesn’t understand. No doubt doesn’t care, either. Lucky Jim is all right, Jack. Which leaves one with a thought that has occurred before. The SPGB has always warned against workers following leaders, even if and when the leaders seemed people of some quality. Workers must do their own think. But how much more sensible does our advice appear when it is obvious that the famous names who monopolize the media and make sure that a Socialist voice is almost never heard, are such obvious nincompoops as these professors and bishops and all. Wake up, ye wage-slaves. You can’t possibly be as blind as the moronic specimens who lead you.

L. E. Weidberg

Socialism and the Intellectuals: A Confession of Impotence (1957)

From the March 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Fabian Society have just issued Tract No. 304. It is by Kingsley Amis and is entitled Socialism and the Intellectuals. On the inside of the.cover we are told that he is “a poet, novelist, literary critic and lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea. Author of the widely-acclaimed and best-selling Lucky Jim” Having read this we rubbed our eyes and looked at the title again, but right enough it was Socialism and the Intellectuals.

That the Fabian Society should have thought that this statement of Mr. Amis' qualification was a reason for giving weight to his pronouncements in a field quite foreign to him is an example of how foreign the field is to the futile Fabian Society—futile as far as understanding and changing the present basis of society is concerned.

We asked ourselves why on earth was a man with the qualifications mentioned straying into a field that must be practically unknown territory to him? We read the opening sentences of the pamphlet and were still more bewildered, for this is how he begins: “As will soon become obvious from what I have to say, I am not a politician, nor am I specially well informed about politics." After reading the pamphlet we came to the conclusion that the last phrase was too modest; he obviously is not informed at all! As he puts it on page 10: “The intelligentsia—and once more I include myself—doesn’t understand economics." However, this does not prevent him from saying what should and should not be done! Nor does it prevent him from adopting the patronising attitude that is typical of his kind.

In spite of the title there is not a word of explanation of Socialism in the whole pamphlet, though the word is used a few times. The inference we gather from his remarks is that Socialism is what the Labour Party stands for, and Marxism is what the Russian State stands for.

Cartoon from the original article.

Before he comes to a definition of the Intelligentsia Mr. Amis has some illuminating remarks to make on himself. He tells us that his father was an "office worker" and “I grew up in a modest but comfortable lower middle-class house in the London suburbs." Here one can find the outlook of the man laid bare. He could not say “working class," it would have stuck in his priggish throat. He was a scholarship boy at a London day school “and, also on a scholarship, studied English at one of the less pretentious Oxford colleges." How beautifully indefinite and smug this is. In other words his father depended upon the sale of his labour power in an office, at what job we don't know, in order to obtain the means to live and keep his family. We gather that Mr. Amis also depends for his livelihood upon the sale of his labour power in order to live, in spite of the scholarships. But the thought of identifying himself with the working class, of which in fact he is a member is abhorrent to him, just as it is abhorrent to his fellow so-called intellectuals.

Here is how he defines the Intellectual:

“I want to make a few distinctions and definitions. I take as my general field of reference the middle-class intellectual, using the phrase in a pretty wide sense. One could reel off a fairly long list of the occupations pursued by the kind of people I am discussing, and this may be helpful in attaining some sort of precision. 1 mean occupations like those university, college and school teachers, perhaps the lower ranks of the civil service, journalists, industrial scientists, librarians, G.P.'s, some of the clergy (predominantly the non-conformist sects?) and the various brands of literary and artistic, or arty intellectual." (Page 2.)

 There you have it. It will be seen that the groups he mentions all depend for a livelihood upon selling their mental and physical energies, just as John Smith the mechanic does, or Bill Jones, the fish porter. In fact they are all members of the working class. But this prosaic fact would take the self-imposed gilt off the scholarship boy produced by the “lower middle class." A pity he didn’t go further in his precision. We would be interested to know what group he would designate as the “middle middle-class" and the “upper middle-class."

All through the pamphlet Mr. Amis sets his group apart from the rest of society as a group that has no interest to defend. This is how he puts it on page 6:

“Anyway, by his station in society the member of the intelligentsia really has no political interests to defend, except the very general one (the one he most often forgets) of not finding himself bossed around by a totalitarian government. But compared with, say, a steelworker or a banker, he is politically in a void. Furthermore, he belongs to no social group which might lend him stability.”

This is the sort of rubbish that comes from the attitude of superiority; an attitude that has belonged to the Fabian Society from its inception. How does Mr. Amis think the teachers have reached their present status except by the struggles of the past? And how do they get their jobs except by setting forth their qualifications to their employers and hoping they will be the applicants chosen? In other words they act in a similar way to that of other members of the working class, and if they don’t come up to the required standard they get the sack—pardon us Mr. Amis—are asked to resign! Teachers, civil servants, etc., have “no interests to defend” and yet, like other members of the working class, they strike, or threaten to strike, for higher pay or better conditions, or to resist a worsening of conditions, even the G.P.’s are in that position at the moment.

Here are some specimens of the political outlook of Mr. Amis:

"Marxism, however, has a second attraction not offered by the Church: It involves violence." (Page 6.)

There is no evidence offered for this nonsensical view. In his ignorance Mr. Amis apparently blindly accepts Russian Communism as Marxist without investigation.

“One feels that a progressive party should have this reform [reform of the laws relating to homosexuality] on its programme." (Page 10.)

This gives an idea of the kind of question that looms large in Mr. Amis’s intellectual mind.

“Until very recently there has been only one political issue of anything like the same proportions and of the same kind as the Abyssinias and the Spains of the Thirties: I mean, of course, Cyprus. There, at any rate, is something which potentially unites the romantic with the practical man. But what gets done about it? Compare what does get done about it with what would have got done about it in the Thirties." (Page 11.)

We have compared, and, in both cases found the answer to be—nothing that fundamentally matters! Of course there has been an issue of political importance, both then and now, that reduces the ones he mentions to insignificance, but Mr. Amis hasn’t seen it. That issue is the ownership of the means of production by a privileged section of society which compels the mass of society to occupy a subject position beset by insecurity and want of the means to live a comfortable care-free life.

Here is a specimen of his idea of what moves some of his fellow intellectuals to action:

“Violence has a good deal of charm for some sections of the intelligentsia (as the cult of bullfighting shows) or, at any rate, the thought of violence is attractive. It provides a way of getting one’s own back by proxy on one’s parents and one’s old headmaster; one can work off the guilt of having been to a public school, and so on, by chatting about blowing up the class one was born into; one can compensate with some dash for one’s thwarted desire for power, which is often obversive in these circles. Quite soon it becomes natural to write airily about political murders and read about them with appreciation." (Page 6.)

We presume that Mr. Amis knows what he is talking about as he is referring to members of a group to which he keeps insisting he belongs. However, if the idea were not so absurd, and if we were not convinced he was romancing, we would be inclined to ask: “What kind of lunatics are these who masquerade as intellectuals?”

Now let us give a final quotation:

"I may have shown a certain animus towards Orwell, and I have not had occasion to do more than mention some of his many fine qualities. But animus remains, and the reason for it is this. He was the man above all others who was qualified to become the candid friend the Labour Party needed so much in the years after I945. But what he did was to become a right wing propagandist by negation, or, at any rate, a supremely powerful—though unconscious—advocate of political quietism." (Page 8.)

This seems to sum up the real reason for writing the pamphlet—to express his spleen against those of his fellow “intellectuals,” like Orwell, Auden, Koestler, Spender, and Day Lewis, whom he felt had let him down. On the other hand, of course, it may have been to “work off the guilt of having been to a public school!”

For the rest Mr. Amis's pamphlet has no value as a contribution to clearing the vision on the cause of social subjection and its removal. He evidently has no glimmering of the answers. What he has done is taken the opportunity to jibe at those of his fellow “intellectuals” who have deserted the Labour Party, make the usual clever remarks of this kind, and, with his tongue in his cheek, lump himself in with his impotent fellows. He displays the usual impudence of his fellows in straying into a field of which he is ignorant and giving his patronising opinions. If he had looked at facts instead of stratifying groups he might have got somewhere.

There is something about Left and Right wings in the pamphlet. Mr. Amis should take to his wings, fly out of discussions that are out of his depth, and get back to “best sellers.”

Gilmac.