Freedom of speech

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

Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff back into the Online Safety Act. Now, Yvette Cooper has said trying to get the police to record fewer ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) was a dreadful mistake. A non-crime hate incident was recorded against a man for whistling the Bob the Builder tune To grasp just how potty this is, you need to understand what

The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle. Earlier this month, the CCDH held an ‘emergency’ meeting to discuss the role of social media in fuelling the public disorder that followed the murder of three girls in Southport, and on Tuesday it published the policy recommendations that emerged from that meeting. The difficulty is that ‘hate speech’ is often used by

As I sat down to write this column, an old friend let me know he’d just been ‘debanked’. That is, he’d received a letter from his high-street bank notifying him it was closing his accounts. ‘Following a review, we’ve made the decision that you will not be able to bank with us any longer,’ it said, not even bothering to put the word ‘difficult’ before ‘decision’. It contained no detail about this ‘review’ or why, on completing it, the bank had decided to close his accounts. The only thing he can think of is that he used to be a high-ranking member of the Brexit party. He was told he