Inherit the Wind

"This is another allegorical tale, about a preacher who is against the teaching of evolution. He thinks it is a sin. The preacher’s power comes from his ability to control what people think, and this is done by controlling what they are allowed to know. When a young schoolteacher, Bert Cates, reads Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species to his students he’s locked up. The play focuses on his trial. One of the most interesting characters in the play is a newspaper reporter named Hornbeck, based on the wonderfully acerbic HL Mencken who covered the Scopes trial. I’ve always loved Mencken’s work and he’s a journalistic role model for me. Yes, and the play is about the ability of people to communicate ideas without persecution or obstruction. The way the Reverend Brown uses censorship and suppression maintains his position at the top of society. He actively stops people from thinking differently in order to maintain the status quo – the point being that by controlling information you control people. Mostly I encountered relentless obstruction from the authorities. They would not give an inch, and whenever I won in court they would appeal. The whole process took approximately five years, but when the material was eventually published it had the most profound impact on British society. Never again would people blindly trust authority. “Once principles are cast aside, however, it is a short way towards becoming exactly the thing one fought against” Along with the expenses scandal, I wrote about many of the double standards that existed between citizens and the British state in The Silent State , and in May 2010 a new government was elected on a platform of greater transparency. That gave me a tremendous sense of achievement and it does show that sometimes one person can make a difference. Oh God no! I was disappointed with parliamentary officials and politicians because I felt they were short-sighted. By fighting so hard against a changing tide in society, where people want more information from their leaders, they gave energy to the story. Parliament was very much stuck in the past, not wanting to share information at all. Rather than reform gradually they tried to shut the portcullis – which only made the scandal that much more catastrophic when it finally broke. Because they were so resistant it went on to become a huge scandal. But I was also surprised at other journalists. Many times I would be interviewed, on BBC Radio 4 for example, and the journalist would defer to the status quo – not asking MPs why they were so secretive but asking me why I thought I had a right to know. “Why are you so interested in what an MP spends on a pint of milk?”, that sort of thing. I would reply, “If an MP is so miserly as to charge the taxpayer for a pint of milk, why shouldn’t the public know? It’s our money.” There was an assumption held by most mainstream journalists at the time that it wasn’t the done thing to ask these rude questions to the right honourable gentlemen."