Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Two)

Big Brother has also failed in its duty of watchfulness in another respect, it was revealed last week. It appears that three persons who were confined to their homes under the terms of so-called 'control orders' have escaped. Control orders are a set of judicially sanctioned restrictions to certain individuals' liberties (effectively a form of house arrest). This measure is aimed at terrorist suspects, where there may not be enough hard and fast evidence to stand up in a court of law, but where the security forces are sufficiently concerned about individuals' activities to wish to impose forcible constraints upon them.

As a result of the escapes that were publicised last week, the Home Secretary (interior minister) John Reid stated that the UK might have to opt out of some of the clauses of European human rights legislation that limited the scope of control orders. He promised tougher anti-terrorist measures would be introduced before parliament by the end of June, when he and his boss Tony Blair step down. Tony Blair himself pitched into the fray yesterday (Sunday 27 May) by arguing in favour of a new police power to stop and interrogate suspects on the street. The prime minister stated, “We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong”. Well, that all depends on what qualifies you as a suspect, I suppose. And are the civil liberties of 'foreigners' any less important than those of UK subjects?

The control order regime, and the fact that it was sufficiently lax to allow these three suspects to escape, is another illustration of the British approach to dealing with radical intolerance, discussed in my last entry in connection with the Shilpa Shetty episode in Celebrity Big Brother. Control orders bear all the hallmarks of a process of suppressing and censoring people and ideas that are 'beyond tolerance', rather than dealing with them in a more publicly accountable way, or even in a more ruthless, systematic fashion that would definitely put them out of circulation. In this sense, control orders already do represent Britain's equivalent to Guantanamo Bay, a direction in which the Northern Ireland minister Peter Hain yesterday warned that the new proposed anti-terrorist measures were taking Britain.

Indeed, what more striking expression of the ambiguity of British 'zero tolerance' towards the radically intolerant could there be than control orders? Individuals are not locked up in a judicial limbo, like Guantanamo (which, to give him his 'credit', Tony Blair has argued that they should be); instead, they are 'politely' removed from the public domain and confined to the private realm of their homes. It is as if the intolerance exemplified by supposed terrorists – like the intolerance to which every citizen is prone to some extent – can be tolerated so long as it is confined to the privacy of the home and the individual's thoughts. And like any form of censorship – political or psychological – the setting up of control orders represents a means not just to suppress the individuals and ideas that are intolerable but also to censor the very mechanisms by which those persons and thoughts are suppressed: the process takes place in a sort of judicial no-man's land, outside of the normal operation of justice, where the facts of the case, the names of the individuals involved, and the values driving the activities of the 'suspects' are removed from the public domain.

In other words, control orders are a very British compromise between wanting / needing to act in a radically intolerant way towards those suspected of threatening the very tolerance upon which our liberal society rests, without having to admit that one is behaving in an intolerant manner. Because of this, control orders do preserve some elements of 'liberty' for those subjected to them: the liberties of private association, conscience and speech. We don't in fact seek to exercise mind control like the Orwellian Big Brother or, arguably, like the mental torturers of Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. The specific control order that applied to the three escapees must also have allowed them sufficient freedom to meet or communicate with each other to co-ordinate their flight. There is perhaps even an element of British fair play involved: we allow them a bit of slack, on the basis that our gut instinct is that what we're doing to them strictly isn't fair, and on the assumption that they might have the decency to play fair in their turn and not attempt to abscond – and then we get all indignant when they have the temerity to do a runner anyway!

There's an interesting parallel between the control-order evaders and the lack of editorial oversight on which the Shilpa Shetty furore has now been blamed. When what is involved is censorship of something intolerable rather than acknowledging it and attempting to deal with it openly (whether through honest discussion or due legal process), then what happens is that rather than watching the object of suspicion, it is all too easy to take one's eye off the ball: to stop looking at the real issue and the real danger. And then that real threat, which has escaped your attention because you thought you'd placed it under control and then stopped looking at, can elude you and come back to haunt you.

The evasion of the three control-order detainees represents the danger that their actions and ideas could once again impinge upon, invade, the public domain. But in a more profound sense, their evasion presents the threat of an invasion of our privacy. Our confinement of those suspects to 'their own' private space was a means to keep them away from ours. Our British society is a private society, where the individual jealously guards their right to freely pursue their own personal and professional goals (both ever more exclusively defined in the terms of the market society, or 'private enterprise') untrammelled by the claims that religious or ideological absolutism might wish to impose upon them. The 'terrorist' or the 'racist' extremist is a threat to this tolerance based on mutual respect and pursuit of each other's private goals. They must therefore be suppressed, and their intolerance (as is ours) must be relegated to its own private space: the control-order detainees' prison-from-prison that is their home, or the prison of the Big Brother House. If they should get out – even more importantly, if their intolerable ideas should get out and gain hold – then, like the 'racist' outbursts in Celebrity Big Brother, this would indeed be an unbearable invasion of privacy.

Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part One)

Channel Four got rapped on the knuckles this week. An Ofcom report on last January's Celebrity Big Brother criticised it for broadcasting some incidents of abusive behaviour towards the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty without setting them in context or providing any opportunity for the inappropriate conduct and remarks to be challenged or reprimanded. The consequence was that around 45,000 viewers telephoned in to complain, many of whom regarded the actions of the offensive housemates as tantamount to racist bullying.

This was not in fact racist behaviour, as I've argued in some previous blog entries on the subject. Indeed, the Ofcom report makes no judgement as to whether the actions in question were racist; nor does Channel Four – in the formal apology that it has been obliged to make by Ofcom – accept that it was racist.

The issue that I am mainly interested in here is not a debate on what constitutes racism, or whether racism still has deep roots in British society. Rather, the whole episode casts a fascinating and somewhat dark light on what might lie behind the much-vaunted British value and national characteristic of tolerance; and on how we react to those who attack and threaten the socio-economic system we have built up around it. The question it raises is, how do we – as a nation – tolerate those who are intolerant: those who question the whole liberal basis of our tolerance and who may even seek to overthrow it altogether?

The British solution is not to seek to take on and eradicate intolerant movements and their representatives through direct political action, repressive measures or draconian laws. Such an approach would itself violate the principles of tolerance for the freedoms of others, even – within reason – those who portray themselves as the enemies of our own freedoms. The British method is to suppress and mute intolerance: to censor it and remove from the public domain into the private realm. In this way, we act towards the intolerance of others as we do to our own: we wall it up in the privacy of our thoughts, hearts and homes, and do not allow it to voice and manifest itself in our interactions with others – at least, if we want to be thought reasonable and respectable.

In the case of Big Brother, a group of private individuals are indeed locked away into a sort of home. But here, the reverse process seems to be at work: the people concerned are confined in the Big Brother House in order to be exposed in the public domain, not hidden from it. However, precisely because of the intense public scrutiny to which the housemates are subjected, along with the dictatorial rules that are imposed on them, the participants are placed in a situation where they do in fact have to suppress and hide away their intolerant reactions to one another, along with their self-seeking stratagems and tactics to take advantage of one another and enhance their chances of winning the game. Often, of course, within the intimacy of the 'Diary Room', the contestants will 'open up' and express their irritation or prejudices towards one or other of their co-residents, thereby covering up an attempt to damage the chances of their rivals under the guise of an all too understandable private exasperation at someone they cannot stand – a feeling that they must suppress within the 'public' domain of their interactions with other contestants inside the house.

The whole 'premise' of the Big Brother House is that it blurs the distinctions between the public and private realms in this way. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the model of confinement within a private space being designed to at once suppress and expose in the public domain individuals' private thoughts and feelings is complicated still further. In this case, the contestants are already well known to the public. Their sojourn in the BB House therefore appeals to the audience's curiosity to peer through celebrities' public personae and catch a glimpse of their private selves (and even their 'private parts', let's be honest). By contrast, the appeal for the participants themselves is almost the opposite: that the show offers them some further 'exposure', puts them in front of the public eye and offers them a chance to present an attractive public persona, thereby potentially revitalising or relaunching a flagging career.

In this sense, the Shilpa Shetty episode clearly delivered on Celebrity Big Brother's dual selling point: exposing normally suppressed intolerant and aggressive attitudes to the public view; and providing an avenue for a fading Bollywood star to launch her career as a Western movie actress and celebrity. However, the programme has now been adjudged guilty of being too honest and realistic: too much 'reality TV', in fact, and not enough mindless entertainment. Indeed, you could say that the show failed to be sufficiently Big-Brother with regard to the naked hostility that was shown towards Shilpa, expressed and justified – in the eyes of those responsible – in the terms of cultural prejudice and stereotype.

The original Big Brother – the Orwellian one, in the novel 1984 – did not merely seek to watch over the private actions and intimate thoughts of citizens; but, where these were ideologically intolerable, the state sought to transform those thoughts from within by inventing a new form of language – Double Speak – that represented a sort of knowing lie that the individual came to believe because the old honest language came gradually to be forgotten. In the case of Celebrity Big Brother, the show failed to make the outbursts of Jade Goody and others 'acceptable' by presenting them within an editorial context that allowed a politically correct spin to be placed on them and appropriate sanctions on the offending individuals to be imposed. In other words, the programme merely exposed the private prejudices and intolerant reactions of its contestants but did not – unlike its Orwellian predecessor – seek to transform them by making the transgressors publicly confess to their 'crimes' and commit themselves to not 're-offending' in the same way.

Celebrity Big Brother got its brief wrong: its purpose is not merely to expose the ugly face of hidden intolerance but, in fact, to participate in society's attempt to suppress it, in part by narrativising a process whereby individuals come to recognise their faults, reform their ways and reconcile their differences. The object of Big Brother's systematic surveillance, in fact, is precisely not to watch intolerance but to censor it from the public domain. The editorial failings of the programme boiled down to the fact that viewers were indeed forced to watch a spectacle of intolerance. Big Brother may well have been watching the housemates, but it wasn't vigilant: it didn't see what was going wrong early enough in order to prevent it from escalating almost to the status of a crime.

And now, in order to prevent a recurrence, the ordinary, non-Celebrity version of the programme that is once again starting up will itself be watched over. The author of the Ofcom report stated: “I . . . welcome the measures that they have taken to ensure proper and rigorous oversight. We will be watching very closely to ensure that these have the desired effect”. The Commission for Racial Equality also said it would be “keeping a close eye” on the new series of Big Brother: “We will be monitoring it carefully to ensure that such disgraceful behaviour is not repeated”, a spokesman said. And so we now have the 'spectacle' of the watchdogs of the media and of political correctness watching over Big Brother in order to ensure that as Big Brother watches the show's contestants, it keeps a watchful eye over what it is acceptable or not for its viewers to watch. More a case of 'Big Brother, you're being watched' than 'Big Brother is watching you'.

But the one thing we won't be watching, if the regulators get their way, is any all too realistic scenes of unacceptable intolerance.