The War on Sedition

"Anglosphere" allies crack down on speech in the name of fighting terror.

Matt Welch from the February 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

"We need not to worry so much about the loudmouths," the former Conservative cabinet member and cur�rent Lord Douglas Hurd told reporters, sounding very much like an American, "as about the quiet acts of subversion and training by dangerous people, up and down the country, who on the whole keep their mouths shut."

In Australia every major newspaper has squealed in outrage at Howard's sedition laws; the bipartisan Senate Constitutional Committee recommended in late November that they be excised from Howard's anti-terrorism package; and now the successful four-term prime minister faces a rare open revolt from within the ranks of his own party.

"There is no doubt," Constitutional Committee Chairwoman Marise Payne, a Liberal Party member, told the Australian Parliament, "that they are a very serious incursion into the way in which we currently expect to be able to live our lives in Australia."

In many unhappy ways, the free speech traditions of England and the Commonwealth are more in tune with the nervous, fussy bureaucrats of Europe (where wearing religious insignia to school, or insulting Islam, is frequently illegal) than with their loose-lipped cousins in the New World.

But the surprising opposition to November's bogus liberty-for-security trades suggests that there might be something to this "Anglosphere" stuff after all.