Instead of standing up officialdom today just
Free speech is under threat like never before. In this blistering essay, columnist explains why the fightback must begin now
BRITAIN has long been renowned for its attachment to liberty. Ours is the country that introduced Magna Carta, pioneered Parliamentary democracy and defeated Nazi tyranny. But today the flag of freedom is flying low. A sinister new cult of dogmatic intolerance casts its shadow across our land, silencing debate, imposing conformity, whipping up hysteria, and crushing dissent.
In the wholly un-british climate of intimidation, opinions are ruthlessly censored and careers destroyed.
On a terrifying scale, the ingredients of alien despotism are now creeping into our public life.
There is an echo of the Soviet eastern bloc in the demand for absolute submission to the ruling orthodoxy, while the vicious mood of 1950s Mccarthyism is mirrored in endless character assassinations and witch-hunts.
Similarly, the kind of determination to root out heresy that once drove the Spanish Inquisition can now be found in corporate Britain, from workplaces to Whitehall.
All this is the very antithesis of a free society, which should value openness, compromise and pluralism.
That great patriot George Orwell famously wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Tragically, instead of being guided by those wise words, the cultural commissars seem to be inspired by Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984, which painted a dark picture of Britain under totalitarian rule, complete with thought crimes, hate sessions, group think and hectoring propaganda.
Orwell meant his book to be a warning, but the new ideologues see it as a blueprint.
The vanguard of this revolution hails from the authoritarian Left, which uses the bogus language of compassion to justify its oppression.
In their doctrinal obsessions and frenzied divisiveness, these bullies are utterly divorced from the mainstream British public, yet they are able to wield excessive power through their stranglehold on the internet and civic institutions.
In their brutish hands, social media is both an instrument of fear and an arena for show trials.
Nothing illustrates the nastiness of the online lynch mob more graphically than the transformation of the best-selling author JK Rowling from cherished icon into enemy of the people.
Her thought crime is her willingness to challenge the fashionable transgender ideology, which she sees as a threat both to women’s rights and childhood innocence.
For her courage, she has been subjected to horrendous misogynistic abuse.
Staff at her publishing house have tried to boycott her work.
Authors have left the literary agency that represents her.
A sculptural tribute to her in Edinburgh, comprising the imprints of her hands, was daubed with blood-red paint.
Ms Rowling is such a global figure that she can withstand a battering from the advocates of the “cancel culture,” as it has become known because its impulse is to “cancel” out dissenters.
Others have been less lucky.
The Scottish children’s author Gillian Philip says she was fired from her post by her publishers after she tweeted: “I stand with JK Rowling.”
As Ms Philip commented, her professionalism “counted for nothing in the face of an abusive mob of anonymous Twitter trolls”. The same hardline trans lobby also recently hounded out Baroness Nicholson from her position as the patron of the Booker Literary prize for showing insufficient obeisance to the new creed, a fate that also happened to tax expert Maya Forstater who was dismissed from her job at an anti-poverty think tank after she tweeted that “men cannot change into women”.
Left-wingers used to campaign to protect jobs.
Now they campaign to get people removed from them, simply for having “unacceptable” opinions.
Typical is the case of Nick Buckley, who set up a highly successful charity for vulnerable young people in Manchester. But in the eyes of the new zealots he committed the sin of criticising the aims of the radical Black Lives Matter protest group.
“We will do everything in our power to have you removed from your position,” said one activist. The warning was prophetic, as Buckley was kicked out of the charity he established.
Disturbingly, this is just part of a wider trend.
At Cambridge University, which has regularly made empty noises about its commitment to academic freedom, the philosopher Jordan Peterson had his offer of a visiting fellowship withdrawn after protests from the Students’ Union about the politically incorrect nature of his work.
IN THE SAME cowardly vein, Cambridge sacked sociologist Noah Carl over the unsubstantiated claims that he might use his position as a researcher to “promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred”. So pathetically supine was the university that it even apologised to its students