Mr Mason and others who share his stance that GB News needs to be taken off air have clearly failed to understand not only democracy but the liberalism that underlies it.
I am pretty damn left and I suspect that about 90% of contributors to GB News are to the right of me, some of them quite far to the right. Consequently, I have often disagreed very strongly with views I’ve heard expressed on the platform. This is why I have accepted every invitation I’ve had to speak on it.
If the paragraph above confuses you or seems inconsistent to you, you should probably not try to speak about democracy in a UK context until you have familiarised yourself sufficiently with the liberal philosophy underlying it not to make a total tit of yourself.
Start with John Stuart Mill (On Liberty):
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.”
As a liberal leftist, there is always value in me speaking to others on the left (and if the illiberal factions of the left would ever agree to do that, that would be especially valuable) but there is even more value in being able to make my case to those on the right with whom I have the most profound disagreements. Surely the reasons for this should be clear to anybody who accepts that humans have their own minds and that those minds have the capacity to evaluate and be influenced by information and arguments? If you do not accept this, why are you arguing for democracy and not the rule of philosopher kings who will decide what is best for everybody? Are you not, in fact, arguing for the latter?
A ‘militant democracy’ would be one that had a zero tolerance policy for people trying to shut down or limit the ability of people to make their arguments in their most ‘plausible and persuasive’ form to people who are sceptical of them in the hope of convincing them and the ability of people to listen to those arguments they most disagree with so they can counter them as they genuinely are.
N.B. If this liberal democratic ‘marketplace of ideas’ stance was both legally protected and a social expectation, GB News would probably not have needed to form in the first place. Think about this if you are one of the people who would like to shut it down. Censorship simply does not work.
