For essential liberties, cowers before the mob
for appointing him in the first place, an appointment that supposedly caused “hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief”.
That is so characteristic of our enfeebled establishment.
Instead of standing up for essential liberties, officialdom now cowers before the mob and colludes with the agitators.
In another outrageous case, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Professor Sir Tim Hunt was forced out of his posts at University College London, the Royal Society and the European Research Council after he was accused of making a joke about female colleagues at an event in Seoul in 2015, even though he strongly denied the charge.
“Sir Tim was crucified by ideological fanatics,” said his fellow scientist Sir Andre Geim of the University of Manchester.
No one is safe from this destructive form of socialist puritanism.
Last year, disabled Asda worker Brian Leach was sacked for sharing an online clip of a Billy Connolly routine that mocked religion, though Leach was later reinstated after a public outcry. In yet another indicator of the authorities’ submission to the new doctrine, the police are estimated to have investigated no fewer than 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” over the past five years, an incredible rate of 66 a day.
The Free Speech Union, recently founded by the energetic journalist Toby Young to uphold Britain’s tattered traditions, says that it now receives half a dozen requests for help every day.
The fact that such an organisation is required represents a severe indictment of the growing institutional disdain for freedom of expression.
THE AUTOCRATIC impulse has always existed on the Left, as shown by this passage written in 1999 by the broadcaster Andrew Marr, a key member of the metropolitan elite: “I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain ‘natural beliefs’ for long enough and you can almost kill them off.”
That outlook has become even stronger over the subsequent two decades.
In progressive circles, free speech is seen, not as a pillar of democracy, but as a vehicle for spreading dangerously reactionary arguments. In the warped mentality of the witch-hunters, the problem with the “cancel culture” is that it is insufficiently expansive or effective.
This narrow attitude was perfectly captured last week by the singer Billy Bragg, who wrote that whenever he hears Orwell’s defence of liberty, he wants to “cringe” because the words are “a defence of licence”, allowing those in power “to abuse and marginalise others”.
When he was asked on social media if he supported the dismissal of people simply for an opinion, he declared, “If their opinion amounts to delegitimising the rights of a minority, I believe that employers have the right to act in such circumstances.”
In effect, Bragg appears to believe in the thought police and ideological purity tests, a shameful stance from a man who once pretended to be democrat.
But his outlook is a common one.
One of the performers on the deeply unfunny BBC satire The Mash Report even stated that “free speech is basically a way adult people can say racist stuff without consequences”. Left-wingers love to trumpet the joys of diversity, yet they loathe diversity of thought.
All their apparatus of repression, such as “safe spaces” and wails about “micro-aggressions”, are geared towards the enforcement of their code.
Even when people are not directly threatened with losing their livelihoods, they become scared to express their views on any controversial topic.
The atmosphere of self-censorship is thereby strengthened. The absurdity of this approach is that free speech is the ally, not the enemy, of progress, enlightenment and human rights.
Without such a liberty, discussion and protest are impossible, while power becomes entrenched, as the Soviet Union proved.
An irrefutable case for free speech was made in 2009, when the BBC invited the BNP leader Nick Griffin to participate in an edition of the flagship show Question Time.
The BNP was riding high at that moment, having won almost one million votes in the European elections and secured two seats in the European Parliament.
There was tremendous outrage at the BBC’S invitation, yet Griffin’s disastrous appearance turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the BNP.
Sweating, nervous and incoherent, he was exposed as “a fantasising conspiracy theorist with some very unpleasant views”, in the words of his fellow panelist, the distinguished Labour politician Jack Straw.
Even BNP activists were dismayed. “Maybe some coaching should have been done,” said one.
Question Time triggered a chain of events that soon led to the collapse of the BNP, amid debts and plummeting popularity.
The “cancel culture” would have worked in Griffin’s favour.
As it was, he choked on the oxygen of publicity.
That is the lesson we have to learn today. Fortunately there are the glimmers of a fightback against the authoritarians. JK Rowling has stood firm.
Comedy star Ricky Gervais has stood up for free speech, denouncing its opponents as weird.
Only last week, a letter was sent to Harper’s Magazine by 153 mainly liberal philosophers, writers and intellectuals – among them giants su Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky – who denounced the “intolerant climate” of public discourse.
“The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away,” they wrote.
That is absolutely correct and has long been the British way.
For the sake of our future, the extremists must not be allowed to prevail.