Fighting the speakers’ corner

Freedom to stand up and speak one’s mind is safe guarded through Speakers’ Corners. Jonáš Jančařík speaks with Peter Bradley, director of the Speakers’ Corner Trust and explores the story behind this steadfast form of communication?

The words you are read­ing were edited. If you write something on the In­ternet, the government can block it. In the TV, it is pos­sible to take one’s words out of context. And even when you are making a phone call, your words are recorded. No way of communication is freer than a direct speech to the audience.

A paved corner of the Hyde Park in London was designated a free speech area in 1872 as a result of a struggle commenced by a se­ries of socialist demonstrations in the late 1860s. Since that time the so-called Speaker’s Corner symb­olises the right of free speech and citizens’ involvement. Speakers hailing from all social classes have been allowed to come and stand up before the crowd and speak up on any topic, limited only by the audi­ence’s mood and the weather.

Liberties like these helped cre­ate the atmosphere in which every­one’s opinion can be freely heard. Citizens of totalitarian states still remember the fear of punishment for speaking ones mind, however, all Londoners have to fear is stand­ing before a crowd. Emerging de­mocracies are up against a number of other problems. People with strong opinions may still be intim­idated by those in power and must fight against a culture where oth­ers simply do not listen. However vague this may sound, it is clearly visible by the lack of quality social magazines in some countries.

Totalitarian or non-demo­cratic states usually try to keep control over public gatherings because when the media are state controlled, speeches are the only guaranteed way to express opin­ions publicly. Václav Havel, one of the most important fighters for freedom in the Eastern block, knows very well what it means to be prosecuted for speaking up - and that is why he took patronage over the project of the Speaker’s Corner Trust (SCT).

Peter Bradley, a former MP, is one of the founding trustees of SCT. “We are working with the lo­cal authorities, trying to establish defined and protected places for public speeches in their cities. In Prague, the response of local poli­ticians was just great,” he says in an interview with The Liverpudlian. SCT launched a Speakers’ Corner at Prague’s Palackého square in 2004 as the model Corner for other cities to join the project. Currently SCT is taking care of another proj­ect in Nottingham, UK, and is co-operating with potential local SCT committees in other countries in­cluding Nigeria.

SCT renews the most basic form of public communication, which should not be forgotten, even in the age of multimedia. It is important for every democracy that freedom of speech is secured for absolutely everyone, regardless of how big the audience is. Whilst media corporations are run for profit or even motivated by hidden agendas, the individual speaker expresses himself more personally and directly to us, in a fashion we can both see and understand.

(The European Youth Parliament organised its own Speakers’ Corner during its conference and recorded events in a photo essay.)

Can you replicate London’s Speakers’ Corner?

England moves to create more of the free-speech ‘corners’ - with a little less spectacle and a little more substance. By Brendan O’Neill

Peter Alexander extends his mini-stepladder and plonks it down on the rain-dampened pavement. He looks heavenward.

“I hope that’s the last of the rain,” he says. “Rain makes people take refuge in coffee shops.”

He unravels a ball of string and ties homemade placards, laminated in rain-busting plastic, to his stepladder. One warns that the end of world is not only nigh, “it is happening RIGHT NOW.”

Mr. Alexander has been coming to this corner of London’s Hyde Park every Sunday for the past year. A video producer on weekdays and a “revealer of truths” weekends, he wants to alert people to the fact that “the world is ending as we speak.”

He adds: “You can see it in the freak weather incidents, the wars in the Middle East, the credit crunch…. And all of this is being orchestrated.”

By whom?

“By them.” He nods in toward central London.

Anyone overhearing might half-expect to turn and see “Matrix”-style men in black and shades ready to haul him away in a van with no-number plates. But there is only a smattering of tourists and Londoners, umbrellas at the ready, listening to speeches on everything from Greek democracy to fast food to Armageddon.

The clouds spit down some drizzle, and Alexander observes seriously that even though the US government experiments with weather control “I don’t think they’d deploy it just to keep me from speaking.”

He ascends his stepladder, and starts speaking. Before long, 20 people have gathered, some listen intently, others heckle wildly.

Since it was set up in 1872, Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park has been one of the world’s best-known forums for public debate - and public displays of intellectual eccentricity.

It’s big day is Sunday,and the likes of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and George Orwell have come to listen. Intended as a space for free and open discussion, anyone can turn up and speak on any topic - so long as they don’t swear excessively or incite hatred or violence. Police officers stroll through the corner every hour or so, to keep an eye - and an ear - on proceedings.

Now, a new charity - the Speakers’ Corner Trust, whose founding patron is Vaclav Havel, the playwright and human rights activist who was the first president of the post-Communist Czech Republic - wants to breathe life back into civil society in Britain by setting up many more corner-style spaces where citizens can engage in face-to-face debate.

“Our aim is to get people exchanging ideas,” says Peter Bradley, codirector of the trust.

“Rights are like muscles,” he says. “If you don’t exercise them, they become weak and flabby. And British people are not exercising their right to free speech. It’s the mark of democracy to have active debate - and we want to encourage people to discuss the big issues with each other.”

The trust tested a new Speakers’ Corner in Nottingham, England, earlier this year. Mr. Bradley says it generated “excellent debate about politics, climate change, family life.” A space is being paved and landscaped for a permanent Speakers’ Corner in Nottingham’s historic Market Square. It’s set to open for the business of loud and rowdy debate in the autumn.

The founding of the original Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is intimately bound with the birth of free speech and democracy in Britain. In 1866, the Reform League - which campaigned for the right of all men to vote, rather than just the posh and privileged - organized a public meeting in Hyde Park. Thousands turned up, broke through a 1,700-man police blockade, and took over the north-east corner of the park where they held impassioned discussions. This led to deliberation in Parliament about the right to free speech in Hyde Park - and in 1872, the Royal Parks and Gardens Regulation Act was passed, giving over that park corner to public speaking.

But in recent years, Speakers’ Corner has been more zany than serious. Tourists turn up to gawk in wide-eyed amusement at a lineup of eccentric speakers. Can the corner really be a model for re-energizing “active debate” about “big issues?”

The drizzle has eased. Kirkley Greenwell, a young Christian woman from Baltimore, Md., who lives in London, is debating with an Islamic speaker who is perched on a wooden crate. He’s arguing that the gnostic gospels should be included in the Christian canon; she argues articulately against it. “They say that women must become men to enter the Kingdom of God - and that’s nonsense!” she says with righteous fury. The speaker seems lost for words.

“I like coming to Speakers’ Corner,” Ms. Greenwell says. “I wouldn’t say it is enlightening, but it is certainly stimulating. I’ve heard debates on Africa, junk food, the monarchy, socialism, everything. And usually I get involved.”

Isaac Berling, a college student on holiday from Minnesota, is less impressed: “It’s more preachy than I thought it would be. The speakers are holding forth, but the audience is holding back. Except for that drunk guy.” He points to a man hysterically heckling an unfortunate speaker.

Others, unlike Mr. Berling, are enjoying themselves. There’s a debate about whether Hillary Clinton is ruining the Democrats’ chances of presidential victory by staying in the primary campaign for so long. “We could do with public debate like this in Washington,” says an American visitor in the audience.

“My view is that Speakers’ Corner has been hijacked by eccentrics,” says Dan Travis, founder of the Brighton Salon in Brighton, a bohemian enclave on the south coast of England with a large gay and lesbian community.

Mr. Travis, a sports educator by profession, set up the salon there last year to address people’s “frustration with the smallness of public discussion today.” He wanted a space where people could “debate the bigger issues of our time.” It is modeled, he says, on the discussion salons that sprung up in Europe at the end of the 18th century and hosted “the great thinkers of the time: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.” Travis believes that Speakers’ Corner is too much of a “free-for-all.”

He wants more structure: “People need time to consider the issues before entering a debate. Having a speaker deliver a talk and then take questions and points from the floor, where most of the audience members will have done some related reading beforehand … [that] allows for a detailed examination of an issue.”

Yet Peter Bradley insists that the new corners will indeed be different from Hyde Park. “The original corner is our inspiration, but it’s not our model,” he says. “That corner is a destination - people, especially tourists, travel there especially to witness something out of the ordinary. It is away from the hustle and bustle of everyday London, and it has become a kind of show.

“In contrast, the new corners, like the one in Nottingham, will be in the heart of city centers. So they will attract people going about their daily business. You can go there during your lunch break, or on your way to work; they will be part of our daily lives.”

Mr. Bradley says the original Speakers’ Corner still shows the value of “face-to-face debate.”

“And in our era of ‘virtual debate’ - in online forums where many remain anonymous and sometimes become trite and offensive - that is worth celebrating. In face-to-face engagement, you have to account for your views; it can be a humanizing, civilizing, educating experience.”

The grey clouds have parted; the sun is peaking through. One of the most popular speakers of the day - a large, loud man wearing a hat with two red horns sticking out of it - won’t give his name, “because I come here to say what I think, not for glory.”

What’s his take on creating more Corners?

“You know, Speakers’ Corner is like a therapeutic institution,” he says. “People come here to get validation for their views, or to let off steam. It isn’t always pretty, but so what? If it helps people, that’s cool.”

© The Christian Science Monitor

Championing Free Speech for the Good of Communities…by Peter Bradley

Freedom of expression and the right of assembly lie at the heart of all our civil liberties and nowhere are those rights more potently symbolised than in a parcel of land in London’s Hyde Park, which has become a place of pilgrimage for people from all over the world.

Speakers’ Corner, where the right to free speech has been guaranteed by law for almost 150 years, was born out of the struggle for civil liberties in Victorian Britain. Today many in the UK take the rights it represents for granted. But for those who are still denied their basic freedoms and for those who even now are building democratic institutions of their own, it remains a powerful inspiration.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea behind the Speakers’ Corner initiative came from an industry founded on the power and purpose of communication. Back in 2003, Euan Edworthy, a British expat who runs one of Prague’s most successful PR companies, Best Communications, conceived it as his contribution to the burgeoning democracy of the new Czech Republic.

A year later, on the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution, the first Speakers’ Corner on mainland Europe was inaugurated by the Czech Foreign Minister, Britain’s Minister for Europe, representatives of Czech politics, press and the arts and over a thousand members of the public.

Free speech network

That experience and the interest it generated around the world led to the establishment of Speakers’ Corner Trust and the highly successful launch of our first UK project in Nottingham earlier this year. Now, subject to the sponsorship and funding we seek, SCT aims to establish a network of Speakers’ Corners both in the UK and overseas.

The project is based on the simple belief that association between citizens and the free, face-to-face exchange of ideas and opinions - with each other as well as with the decision-takers among them - is a key to rebuilding public confidence and participation in Britain’s civil society and embedding robust citizens’ rights in emerging democracies.

What’s more, none of the challenges we face anywhere in the world - from the threat of climate change to the risks and opportunities of modern technology - can be met without the kind of open public debate that is the lifeblood of healthy democracies.

What makes the Speakers’ Corner concept different is its emphasis on face-to-face exchange. The internet is a powerful medium but it has limitations too. It can connect us to people on the other side of the world but it can also isolate us from our neighbours; though it provides countless forums for comment and debate, its anonymity and unaccountability can also undermine genuine engagement.

Paths to mutual respect

So our initiative aims to get people, literally, to come back down their garden paths and engage with their neighbours in a free exchange of ideas and opinions about the issues that matter to them. That experience can be not only empowering and enjoyable but, in our view, it’s also the best way to develop the mutual respect which underpins successful communities.

The Speakers’ Corner model is based on partnership.  Wherever we promote projects, we start by setting up local Committees made up of representatives of the public, private and voluntary sectors which will ‘own’ and steer them.  Where appropriate - as in Prague and Nottingham - their work may include creating actual Speakers’ Corners as symbols of citizens’ rights, lively platforms for public debate and, not least, important new focuses for civic identity and pride.

But at the heart of each initiative will be a programme of events designed by the local Committee to reach every community in its area. They could include debates or consultations led by politicians, public services or local interest groups or discussions stimulated by experts or simple enthusiasts on subjects from the global to the local to the cultural and, so long as they get people talking, from the profound to the trivial.  

Inclusive, non-partisan and entertaining

The central principle in all these events is that they should be accessible to all, strictly non-partisan and non-adversarial, welcome diversity - and, as often as possible, entertain.

The support which the Speakers’ Corner concept has received from every quarter has far exceeded our expectations. In the space of one short year, we have won the backing of Government departments, international businesses such as Clifford Chance and Reuters, respected NGOs and think tanks, world statesmen such as Vaclav Havel, who has become our patron, leading politicians such as Jack Straw who chairs our distinguished all-party advisory council and even the global phenomenon Eddie Izzard who has been a passionate, persuasive and of course media-attracting advocate.

It seems that this is an idea whose time has come. But it is one which can only be realised through partnership - with public authorities, with local people and, not least, with businesses which recognise that strong and vibrant democracy, both home and abroad, is good not just for communities but also for commerce. Small wonder then that four of SCT’s five founding trustees have backgrounds in public relations.

  Speak for yourself…by Peter Bradley

The other evening I caught a snatch of a Five Live “debate” on the day’s affairs. The first caller excoriated Gordon Brown. He called the PM a liar for sending aid to Africa while claiming that protecting the UK economy was his top priority. He went on to compare him unfavourably with Robert Mugabe who, he claimed, at least had the guts to call an election.

Even the presenter seemed a little taken aback - though only a little. After all, strong opinions, even if nasty and irrational, make good radio.

Who’s to blame for the parlous state of debate in this country - the politicians whose parliamentary point-scoring sets such a poor standard, or the media for its obsession with trivia and conflict?

And how much blame should we, as citizens, bear for our diminishing interest in our own rights and growing impatience with the political system that guarantees them?

Surely a participative democracy is only as good as we make it. If we stop participating, society stops working. And given the challenges we face we need a functioning, consensus-based civil society more than ever.

From climate change to national identity, from terrorism to technology, none of the problems we need to tackle can be met without informed, rational and sustained public debate. But if citizens aren’t talking to each other, they’re hardly likely to be engaging with politicians.

The internet is part of the solution. But it’s part of the problem too. It can connect us to people on the other side of the world, but it can also isolate us from our neighbours; and while it provides countless forums for comment and opinion, its anonymity and unaccountability can also undermine genuine debate.

The Speakers’ Corner initiative aims to get people literally to come back down their garden paths and engage with their neighbours in a face-to-face exchange of ideas and opinions about the issues that matter to them. That experience can not only be empowering and often enriching but it’s also the best way to develop the respect for diversity and the sense of common purpose which underpin successful communities.

And when people come together to pool their ideas, experience and energies, there’s very little they can’t achieve. The success of our pilot in Nottingham - where work is under way on the first speakers’ corner in the UK since an act of parliament paved the way for the original in 1872 - provides the evidence. The enthusiasm of the volunteers who make up the project’s steering committee, the city council, which has supported them and the public who flocked to the six events we organised recently show that there is a real appetite for debate and participation if only opportunities can be created.

The rights of citizens to hold and express opinions lie at the heart of Britain’s democratic way of life. But if we allow those freedoms to fall into disuse or abuse and if the involvement of citizens in debating and developing a common vision for their society continues to decline, who - apart from Brown - will we have to blame for the consequences?

Boxing Clever

Last month Peter Bradley, the deposed MP for The Wrekin, saw his dream come alive with the creation of a Speakers’ Corner in Nottingham. It’s the first to be formed since the one in Hyde Park in 1872, and is what Bradley hopes will be the start of a national network of public debating places.

What we need, he says, is not smaller government but big citizenship: Speakers’ Corners and similar initiatives to help engender greater public participatuiion and debate. ‘If citizens are not engaging with each other, they’re hardly likely to be engaging with politicians.’

The idea has secured the backing of Justice Secretary Jack Straw and free-thinking comedian Eddie Izzard - and several other councils are interested in copying Nottingham’s experiment.

Says Mr Bradley: ‘Political cynicism, mutual distrust, public disengagement…We read about it everyday: it’s time to stop agonising and do something about it.’

Nottingham’s new speakers’ corner 

It’s an age-old problem… what can politicians do about the democratic deficit and declining public participation in the running of councils and communities? 

But a former MP has a new and surprising solution - politicians shouldn’t blame themselves over the issue, but demand more debate from the population.

So believes Peter Bradley, former MP for The Wrekin (Shropshire), whose dream of a national network of public debating places became real earlier this month with the launch of a speakers’ corner, in Nottingham. 

‘Politicians cannot tackle challenges we face on their own, and pretending otherwise simply leads to failed expectations and public disillusion, Mr Bradley says. 

‘There can be no effective response to climate change which doesn’t involve action by individual consumers. We cannot confront terrorism without broad agreement about the proper balance between scrutiny and liberty.’

What we need, says Mr Bradley, is not smaller government but ‘big’ citizenship - initiatives such as speakers’ corners to help engender greater public participation and debate. ‘If citizens are not engaging with each other, they are hardly likely to be engaging with politicians,’ he says.

Mr Bradley spent eight months nurturing his ideas in Nottingham, and on 22 February, with support, in particular, from the city council, a speakers’ corner was born. 

The idea has the backing of justice secretary, Jack Straw, and free-thinking comedian, Eddie Izzard, and it’s the first speakers’ corner to be formed since the one in London’s Hyde Park in 1872. 

Why Nottingham? The city has a free-thinking tradition, In the 18th century, it was a rallying point for campaigns for working people’s rights, and in 1847 it returned the country’s only Chartist MP, Feargus O’Connor. 

It’s other challengers to convention - in addition to Robin Hood - have included poet Lord Byron, author D H Lawrence and, of course, football manager Brian Clough. 

‘If this was my country, you would all be arrested,’ said Adrian Lunga, a Zimbabwean human rights campaigner, when speaking at the platform’s official opening.

Free speech was like muscles, he reminded the audience of around 200. If you didn’t exercise them, they would become weak and ineffectual.

But the biggest applause was for local community activist, Jackie Morris, who seemed to hit Nottingham’s raw nerve. ‘If people use this platform, perhaps there would be less violence in the city. Let’s start talking to one another.’

Also seizing the opportunity provided by the new public platform were a poet and protesters opposed to an EU Constitution, supermarkets, and foie gras. 

The audience - still new to the experience - listened politely, without heckling. But there was plenty of support among them. ‘I like a good debate,’ said John Coates, aged 75. ‘It’s no good just talking to yourself. You’ve got to take things to a higher level.’ And Jenny Grant, 48, who wants to tell the Government where she believes it is going wrong in its support for young people, adds: ‘I am going to get up there as soon as I can.’

Away from the speakers’ corner - not in a ‘corner’, but just off the city’s Market Square - the day included six organised debates. The subjects and venues were chosen to attract people who, traditionally, would not participate in political discussion, such as young people and single mothers.

More than 40 people participated in a lively two-hour discussion on the future of football; half-a-dozen women attended ‘Listening to mothers’, which concluded with the setting up of a self-help group; and people from 11 different religions met in a synagogue, to share the common ground between their respective faiths.

‘Some people warned us that we would not be able to attract people,’ says Mr Bradley. ‘It took time and effort, but I am delighted that we proved them wrong.’

Mr Bradley looks back on his parliamentary days with scepticism. ‘Much of it was about point-scoring rather than finding common ground,’ he says.

But he still puts a high value on parliament’s face-to-face approach to debate. Indeed, he dismisses the contribution he believes the Internet can make to public participation and debate, saying ‘it may transcend distances, but it slams doors on neighbours rather than encouraging them to go down their garden paths.’

Of the future, he is more positive, and already several other councils have expressed interest in replicating Nottingham’s experiment. ‘What I am doing is potentially far more significant than what I could have done as a backbench MP or junior minister,’ he says. ‘Citizens should be enabled and perhaps even required to do more, and politicians should be more honest about their limits.’

Public opinion turns to a new corner

Robert Bullard

Tony Benn once announced that he was leaving parliament “to devote more time to politics”, and now another parliamentarian is continuing in the same vein. Last Friday, Peter Bradley, the former Labour MP for The Wrekin, Shropshire, saw a similar dream come alive with the creation of a new speakers’ corner - based on the one in Hyde Park, London, which was established in 1872. It is the start, Bradley hopes, of a string of fresh public debating forums.

“Politicians cannot tackle the challenges we face on their own, and pretending otherwise simply leads to failed expectations and public disillusion,” Bradley says. “There can be no effective response to climate change which doesn’t involve action by individual consumers; we cannot confront terrorism without broad agreement about the proper balance between scrutiny and liberty.”

What we need, says Bradley, is not smaller government but “big” citizenship - initiatives just like speakers’ corners to help generate greater public participation and debate. “If citizens are not engaging with each other they are hardly likely to be engaging with politicians,” he says.

To test public interest in a new speakers’ corner, Bradley spent eight months nurturing his ideas in Nottingham, and last Friday, with support from the city council, England’s new speakers’ corner was born.

Seizing the opportunity for a public platform at the launch were a poet and protesters against the EU constitution, supermarkets and foie gras. The audience listened politely rather than heckled.

“If this was my country, you would all be arrested,” said Adrian Lunga, a Zimbabwean human rights campaigner at the official opening. Free speech is like muscles, he reminded the audience of around 200, if you don’t exercise them, they become weak and ineffectual.

But the biggest applause was for local community activist Jackie Morris, who seemed to hit Nottingham’s raw nerve: “If people use this platform, perhaps there would be less violence in the city. Let’s start talking to one another.”

With interest from several other councils, Bradley is excited about replicating Nottingham’s experiment elsewhere. His ideas may not pull in the size of crowds attracted by Benn yet, but he shares his viewpoint, saying: “I think what I am doing is potentially far more significant than what I could have done as a backbench MP or junior minister.”

Peter Bradley on Speakers’ Corner in Nottingham

When people come together to pool their ideas, experience and energies in a common cause, there’s very little they can’t achieve.

The Nottingham Speakers’ Corner which we launched just a few days ago in Old Market Square is testament to that. The city holds some very good memories for me: I was here when England beat Germany 5-1! But nothing prepared me for the enthusiasm, commitment and goodwill I’ve encountered over the eight months we’ve worked on this.

It’s precisely that spirit of optimism and adventure that the Speakers’ Corner initiative is designed to support. We live in an age in which our sense of community seems so much weaker than in previous generations and we worry about that. And while the internet can connect us to people on the other side of the world, we’re beginning to realise that it can separate us from our neighbours.

Yet if we’re to deal effectively with the modern world’s demands, we need more than ever to be talking to each other and strengthening our capacity for understanding and cooperation from street to global level.

After all, politicians can’t tackle the challenges we face on their own: there can be no effective response to climate change which doesn’t involve us all as consumers; we can’t confront terrorism without a broad agreement about the proper balance between security and liberty; we won’t be able to harness the promise nor avoid the risks of scientific progress if we can’t get beyond headlines about Frankenstein’s monsters. None of these challenges can be met without the kind of open public debate which is the lifeblood of healthy democracies.

That’s why it’s so important to find new ways to encourage people literally to come back down their garden paths and engage with their neighbours in a face-to-face exchange of ideas and opinions about the issues that matter most.

We hope that Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner will stand in the heart of the city centre as a powerful symbol of citizens’ rights, a platform for public debate and a new focus for civic pride. But the project is much broader than the space at the bottom of King Street where it will stand alongside Brian Clough’s statue when the works are completed in the autumn.

Last Friday, hundreds of Nottingham people also came together to join in debates across the city on topics ranging from the common ground between the generations to the future of football. From the comments I heard, they really enjoyed the experience: some learned something new: some met old friends or made new ones; others seized the opportunity to get over their own point of view or hear someone else’s. No one told me they wouldn’t want to do it again!

And as the dust settles on the launch, the conversations will continue because Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner Committee, made up of representatives of the city’s public, private and voluntary sectors and its communities, will shortly begin organising a long term programme of debates. These won’t just be at the Speakers’ Corner but in meeting places around the city, building on Nottingham’s great reputation for pioneering ideas and strong opinions.

It’s because of Nottingham’s proud freethinking tradition that we chose the city for our pilot project. So last Friday, when we came together to launch the UK’s first Speakers’ Corner for almost 150 years, we were not only paying tribute to the city’s great heritage but also, we hope, creating a model for the future which other towns and cities will come to imitate.

What a bonus then, that on that day, one influential national newspaper devoted an editorial to the city’s historic strengths, commenting that it had “fittingly been chosen to pilot a brave new adventure in free speech”. The piece was aptly entitled, In Praise of Nottingham.

In praise of … Nottingham

The capital of the east Midlands has been in the news for the wrong reason more often than the right one in the past couple of years. But Nottingham’s history is mightier than its more recent reputation as the heartland of youthful binge drinkers. The city that brought us the genius of Lord Byron and DH Lawrence, the legend of Robin Hood and the wit of Brian Clough (”I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business, but I was in the top one”), not to mention the immortal Raleigh Chopper, has fittingly been chosen to pilot a brave adventure in free speech. Today - in a space in the market square almost at the feet of a new statue of the late, great Nottingham Forest manager - work will start on a new Speakers’ Corner, the first in Britain since the original in Hyde Park, London. An eclectic lineup in the first “day for debate” teams Eddie Izzard with the Zimbabwean human rights campaigner Adrian Lunga in what the promoters, the newly formed Speakers’ Corner Trust, hope will lead to a national revival of public debate. And by debate, they promise, they mean debate in person. They also say it will be non-adversarial, although the home of HP Sauce surely suggests otherwise. Recently voted the best British city to live in, one of its many famous literary sons (not Robert Harris but Alan Sillitoe) wrote once that Nottingham was “the magnet of the east Midlands”, with “a self-confidence no one could fault”. No Saturday Night, Sunday Morning flash in the pan, then, this latest honour.

Izzard Backs New Speakers’ Corners

Comedian Eddie Izzard has praised plans for a nationwide network of Speakers’ Corner.

The stand-up star, speaking on BBC One’s The Politics Show, welcomed Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner - which will be launched on Friday - the first to be created in the UK since the Hyde Park original 150 years ago.

Now he hoped other cities would follow Nottingham’s lead.

The site in Nottingham will be pedestrianised and landscaped during the summer months and is set to be inaugurated as the first modern-day Speakers’ Corner in the UK this Autumn.

Speakers’ Corner Trust, the charity behind the initiative, hopes to create a nationwide network of Speakers’ Corners following the Nottingham launch.

The charity hopes the corner will provide “a powerful symbol of citizens’ rights, a focus for civic pride and a platform for free public exchange in the midst of Nottingham’s daily hustle and bustle.”

Izzard said: “Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing and it matters because I think the strength of Britain is based on it. It’s good that Nottingham is doing this and I think other towns should do it too. It’s a great thing.”

The Speakers’ Corner will be launched at a ceremony in the city’s Market Square. It will feature a speech by video-link from Izzard.

Peter Bradley, director of Speakers’ Corner Trust, said: “We’re all really thrilled by Eddie’s support. I’ve always wanted to involve him somehow in this project. He’s not only just about the country’s freest thinker but he’s also living proof that ideas can be fun as well as serious and they can take you on unpredictable and sometimes amazing journeys -and, what’s more, sharing them brings people together.”