Freedom of speech

With only a few days of his Office remaining the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury took the opportunity yesterday to ask God to help people honour and preserve freedom of speech.

Rowan Williams was one of the few establishment figures who had not already given his opinion on the Leveson Inquiry report but he used a service of thanks for the 80th anniversary of the BBC World Service (or Empire Service as it was in 1932) at St Martins-in-the-Fields in London to do so. Dr Williams did not enter the controversy over whether the British press should be regulated by law or by self-discipline but he clearly saw the BBC World Service as a model of free speaking.

He praised particularly the way in which it had resisted the attempts by China and Russia to silence it in the 1990s.
Never one to use ten words when twenty will do, the Archbishop offered this definition of freedom of speech: “The freedom to step aside from tribal and local partisanship for the sake of a wider human sympathy, the freedom to listen patiently and passionately for the voices that are being silenced by violence or injustice, the freedom to speak to and for the dignity of all.” More briefly he described the World Service as “One of the modern age's great symbols of the freedom of speech.” Spot on.