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Brendan O’Neill writes this week’s cover piece on his encounters with ‘Stepford Students’ – a censorious mob who try to shut down debates that they don’t like. His comes out this week after some Stepfords managed to shut down a debate about abortion at Christ Church by threatening to disrupt it with ‘instruments’. The college cancelled the debate, between Brendan, who is pro-choice, and Tim Stanley, who is pro-life, because of ‘security and welfare issues’.
You can read the full piece here, or listen to Brendan debate Harriet Brown from Oxford University in our podcast here. Another member of the group who succeeded in shutting down the debate, Niamh McIntyre, wrote about why she did it for the Independent here, while Tim Squirrell, president of the Cambridge Union, has set out ‘what freedom of speech really means’ in a piece for the Tab here.
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