Freedom of speech

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at all the Hollywood celebrities rending their garments about Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech. In an ‘open letter’, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, among others, took the administration to task for browbeating ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show from the air after he falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk’s murderer was associated with the ‘MAGA gang’. ‘In an attempt to silence its critics, our government has resorted to threatening the livelihoods of journalists, talk-show hosts, artists, creatives and entertainers across the board,’ they wrote. ‘This runs counter to the values our nation was built upon,

The only holiday the Youngs had this summer was a week in Norfolk for the Hunstanton tennis tournament. I’m too hopeless to enter myself, but my friend Nell, who has a house nearby, organised a different competition that I was more suited to. It involved making an ‘elevator pitch’ for a policy that would fix broken Britain. What made it challenging was the panel of judges was chaired by Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary who is also Nell’s dad. The problem I focused on, needless to say, was the free speech crisis. My proposal was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and

Last week I took a day trip to Margate. Not to enjoy a swim in the sea, but in the hope of having a debate with a member of Thanet district council about its proposed ban on swearing. A few days before, when the ban was being discussed, a Labour councillor had challenged me to come to Margate, where he promised to give me a piece of his mind. ‘If you’d like to come down here and meet me I’d be more than happy to tell you exactly what I think of you and there might be the odd expletive in it,’ he said. Not sure that’s the best way

Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an amendment to Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill that would make it illegal in almost all circumstances for the police to collect or retain personal data relating to hate incidents where no laws have been broken. For those unfamiliar with this Orwellian concept, an NCHI is a record the police make when someone accuses you of

David McKelvey, a former detective chief inspector in the Met Police, has called for the prosecution of Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP forced to resign as a health minister last weekend for posting racist and sexist comments in a private WhatsApp group. ‘One rule for MPs, another for police officers?’ he asked on LinkedIn, pointing out that other officers have been prosecuted for sending less offensive messages. ‘The law must be applied fairly to all – no exceptions.’ The police have now recorded this as a ‘non-crime hate incident’ so as not to be seen playing favourites, but a better alternative would be not to penalise anyone for something said

One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be on the board of the Office for Students (OfS) in the autumn of 2017. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious position: the OfS was to be a new regulator of higher education in England and I would be one of 15 non-executive directors. But because it was a public appointment it would be made by the prime minister, which meant I was a political target. When it was announced on 1 January 2018, the offence archaeologists went to work, sifting through everything I’d said or written dating back 30 years in

Bishop did not wish to be associated with ‘someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain’ In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was ‘common sense’ and that ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really’. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ

An ex-copper who blogs as Dominic Adler – not his real name – came up with a good phrase this week to describe where Britain is heading under this increasingly authoritarian regime: ‘Like North Korea, but run by David Brent.’ It echoed my own attempts to sum up the atmosphere in Keir Starmer’s Britain in a WhatsApp exchange with Allison Pearson. I described Essex Police, who recently dispatched two hapless officers to the journalist’s door to question her about a year-old tweet, as ‘a cross between the Keystone Cops and the Stasi – Carry On Kafka’. The fact that our Brave New World is so laughable means people sometimes don’t

Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are struggling to remain in the second tier. Nevertheless, we managed to hold them to a goalless draw, which the visiting fans celebrated as if we’d just won the FA Cup. ‘Worth the trip,’ declared Charlie as we embarked on the four-hour train ride home. The cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful