We’re facing a tsunami of censorship

It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the social justice left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, a tech company, a charity, a local authority or, indeed, Whitehall, you are at risk of being cancelled. How do I know? Because in February I set up the Free Speech Union to protect those being targeted in this way and in the past month we’ve been contacted by people in all of these fields who have either been fired, suspended or are ‘under investigation’ for having said or done something controversial, usually on Facebook or Twitter.

And by ‘controversial’ I don’t mean they’re guilty of hate speech. One person who asked for help was Mike McCulloch, a maths lecturer at Plymouth University, who was being investigated by his employer for having liked a tweet saying ‘All Lives Matter’. Then again, the definition of ‘hate speech’ is so nebulous and broad that it’s increasingly common for mainstream views to be labelled as such. For instance, another FSU member, the feminist campaigner Posie Parker, started a petition on Change.org asking the Oxford English Dictionary to keep its definition of ‘woman’ as ‘adult female human’, and the moderators took it down on the grounds it was ‘hate speech’. J.K. Rowling knows all about that, of course.

I thought it was bad when I set up the FSU, and it was. According to the Telegraph, the police in England and Wales have investigated and recorded 120,000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in the past five years. That’s more than 65 people a day being interviewed by the authorities for precisely the kind of thing Mike McCulloch was investigated for, e.g.