Banning Boycotts

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2016

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How far should you be allowed to express your moral and political beliefs through boycotts? There have been high profile boycott campaigns on everything from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, and tobacco products to economic and academic boycotts of Israel. Now the government is planning a law to make it illegal for local councils, public bodies and even some university student unions to carry out boycotts. Under the plan all publicly funded institutions will lose the freedom to refuse to buy goods and services as part of a political campaign. It's said that any public bodies that continue to pursue boycotts will face "severe penalties." The government believes cracking down on town-hall boycotts is justified because they undermine good community relations, poison and polarise debate and fuel anti-Semitism. Beyond the narrow principle of what tax payers money should be spent on, what is wrong with a group of citizens organising to express their moral, philosophical or political objection to a company or country through their economic, intellectual or cultural power? Such boycotts have in the past been very effective. If every pound we spend can on some level be seen as an expression of our individual moral codes, why should we not have a say on where money is spent on our behalf? Are boycotts misguided empty political gestures more designed to make us feel self-righteous? And even if they are is outlawing them justified? Banning the boycott - the Moral Maze. Chaired by Michael Buerk with Melanie Phillips, Matthew Taylor, Claire Fox and Jill Kirby.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.
0:03.6	Good evening. Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. Probably wasn't very nice, but still it was bad luck to become forever infamous because there wasn't a word in the language for what happened to him.
0:14.1	He was an English land agent, shunned by his local community at the height of the agricultural and political crisis that gripped the West of Ireland
0:20.9	in Victorian times.
0:22.6	His name's become a verb and a noun to describe a form of protest now extremely fashionable.
0:27.8	There are hundreds of boycotts of companies, goods and even people over everything
0:31.8	from Israeli settlements in the West Bank to using kangaroo skin for football boots.
0:37.4	The government says it's concerned about public bodies, local authorities, for instance,
0:41.7	joining these boycotts.
0:43.2	It's gesture politics, the government says, that can even undermine national security.
0:49.2	Locally imposed boycotts are to be made illegal, enforced by severe penalties.
0:54.3	A government minister is expected to announce the details while on a trip to Israel,
0:58.4	the target of many boycotts over the Palestinian issue.
1:01.3	Boycotts some see as a modern form of anti-Semitism.
1:05.0	Critics are incensed at what they see as an anti-democratic crackdown that they say makes ethics illegal.
1:11.8	So should councils and other public bodies take ethical stands,
1:16.2	some would say play political games, with our money?
1:19.3	Why the question?
1:20.5	A boycott's a good and moral way to express disapproval
1:23.2	or a self-indulgent substitute for argument.
1:25.7	That's our moral maze tonight.
1:27.0	Our panel, Menly Phillips, social commentator on the Times, Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, the political analyst Jill Kirby, and Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA. Jill Kirby boycotts democracy in action or gesture politics. What do they call it these days? Virtue signalling? Well, yes, and it can be virtue signalling.
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