Freedom of speech

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

So, which country is putting health warnings and calorie counts on bottles of alcohol for the benefit of its citizens? Nope, not Canada or New Zealand. But you’re getting warm… It’s Ireland, the country that gave us Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills and, for those who like that kind of thing, Baileys. That’s right: a health warning just like for cigarettes. But instead of rotting lungs, presumably there’ll be a lovely picture of a liver with cirrhosis. What effect will it have on me? None, dear reader, none. I drink to forget this sort of thing. But that’s the way Ireland is going (actually has gone) for a generation: not so much

I’ve agreed to interview the author and journalist Andrew Doyle about his new book at the Conservative party conference – on stage, no less – so I thought I’d better read it. It’s about the inexorable rise of the social justice warriors, whom he regards as a danger to the survival of free speech and, by extension, the institutions and traditions that our liberal democracy depends on. My first reaction was one of irritation. The book is called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World and it’s annoyingly similar to the title of a book I’ve been working on – Salem 2.0:the Return of

Monday was the 150th anniversary of Speakers’ Corner and, in the hope of drumming up some publicity for the Free Speech Union, I went along to give a speech. Rather embarrassingly, I didn’t actually know where it was. I had been there once before, but that was about 40 years ago, and Google Maps wasn’t much help. Perhaps that was deliberate on the part of the censorious tech giant. You can imagine a group of woke nerds sitting around in Silicon Valley laughing at the prospect of a clueless culture warrior setting up his soapbox in the area they’ve wrongly identified as Speakers’ Corner, letting rip about illegal migrants, then

As the father of four children who will be entering higher education in the next few years, I’m worried that my home will shortly start to resemble a university campus. In other words, I’ll be forced to declare my preferred gender pronouns, the kitchen will be designated a ‘safe space’ and the collected works of J.K. Rowling will be burnt on the garden lawn. You may think I’m joking, but a new poll from the Higher Education Policy Institute lays bare just how thin-skinned today’s students are. For instance, 61 per cent of undergraduates say that ‘when in doubt’ their university ‘should ensure all students are protected from discrimination rather

I’ve never been keen on the idea of popularity. Courting disapproval has been a large part of my career and I find it bracing, like an early dip in a cold sea. I remember back in 2003 feeling put out because the Most Hated People In Britain list featured me at a mere 85, sandwiched between Damien Hirst and Richard Branson. So imagine my excitement this week on reading that the alleged comedian Stewart Lee had dispatched me into his New Year Pedal Bin, a list of his least-favourite people, alongside such chucklesome types as Ricky Gervais, John Cleese, Graham Linehan, Maureen Lipman and Dave Chappelle. I’ve always fancied myself

About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude and Archie Norman, on whether there was a free speech crisis at British universities. One panellist, Professor Jon Wilson of King’s College London, vigorously denied that any such problem existed. Various people pointed to examples of right-of-centre academics being no-platformed — Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Linda Gottfredson — but that was scarcely conclusive. It was anecdotal evidence, not hard data. The same cannot be said any more. This week, Policy Exchange published a paper by three academics — Remi Adekoya, Eric Kaufmann and Tom Simpson — which proves beyond reasonable

Why does the most important writer in English, J.K. Rowling, haunt the sewers of the Twittersphere? Why try to deal with the many complexities of transgenderism in a medium that has bizarrely reinvented the brevity of the telegram, but without its Victorian culture of complexity, courtesy and calm? Indeed, Twitter prizes a quite different Victorian moral order, namely that of Jack the Ripper, as the baying muezzins of social media hourly pronounce the end of someone’s reputation in the merciless perpetuity of the internet. This time three years ago, I was a well-known journalist in Ireland, with a modest profile in Britain. On the last weekend of July, on the

The printed press is not a natural ally of Facebook. Silicon Valley publishers have hoovered up so much advertising that they are seen by newspapers as a mortal enemy. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has ended up with more power over people’s attention than any press mogul. A slight change in his algorithms can direct millions towards any publication or argument. Facebook might not want to be seen as a publisher (especially one that did so much to enable Donald Trump, for instance) but it has ended up becoming the biggest player in the information wars. So when certain advertisers started to pull out of the social media platform — citing

When Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a University of Cambridge academic, tweeted ‘White lives don’t matter’ and ‘Abolish whiteness’ in response to a banner reading ‘White lives matter Burnley’ being flown over a Premier League match, it certainly provoked a response. Dr Gopal was quickly inundated with horrific personal and racial abuse, but she stuck to her position, arguing that she was appropriately addressing systemic racial inequality. It wasn’t long before the University of Cambridge weighed in with a strong statement defending Gopal, without explicitly mentioning her. ‘The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial, and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and