A sad day when free speech costs so much

IT SHOULD be as much a part of being British as queuing, rained off Bank Holidays and instantly apologising when it was actually someone else’s fault for bumping into you but make no mistake, the very principle of free speech is under attack in a way this nation has never before seen.

But when you realise this seemingly unstoppable wave of wokeness has everyone in their sights from Harry Potter creator JK Rowling to Basil Fawlty and Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones to the creator of the Boy Scouts movement Lord Baden Powell, the sinister side of “cancel culture” becomes evident.

People’s livelihoods can be wrecked and reputations tarnished because they are deemed to have committed “wrong think” of some form or another. Respected authors and professors are “de-platformed” by university student unions because they have dared to express support for causes this narrowminded group of young people with little or no life experience have decided are wrong, or vice versa, they’ve had the audacity to oppose the students’ view that something is beyond reprehensible.

On pages 14 and 15 of today’s Sunday Express, Leo Mckinstry sets out a powerful argument about the challenges facing free speech in this country and reminds us of that peerless quote from 70 years ago from George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Ironically, one of the places where these words can be found on display in the biggest and boldest way imaginable is as you enter the BBC’S New Broadcasting House London headquarters and while it might be what it says above the door, it’s certainly not what’s happening in reality.

Although its relevance is dimming courtesy of social media – and more about that too often vile a forum to come – it still has enormous clout as the national broadcaster and candidly, since Brexit it has spectacularly lost its way. This has been adroitly picked up by someone who should know: former Beeb veteran John Humphrys, who worked for the corporation for more than 50 years.

He says in his autobiography published late last year it “badly failed” to read the public mood “and simply could not grasp” why the nation had voted to head for the exit door from the EU. He said of the morning after the historic decision: “Leave had won – and this was not what the BBC had expected. Nor what it wanted. No nods and smiles when the big bosses appeared. No attempt to pretend this was anything other than a disaster.”

Quite how a news organisation with an annual budget of more than £350million and more than 5,000 staff across the

■ nation could have got Brexit so wrong is baffling, but the dogged determination to tell us we were all knuckle-dragging oafs continued until Boris Johnson’s thumping election win in December. Until then, they had been firmly in the grip of fashionable pressure groups, always from the Left, and it’s little coincidence that is the political home for most of the staff.

From news to comedy the picture seems equally bleak. Comedian Ricky Gervais has said his hit show The Office, which won multiple Baftas and Golden Globes, would struggle to get to air today as “the BBC have got more and more careful... so would worry about some of the subjects and jokes” and it would fall foul of “outrage mobs”. Along with other noted authors he has signed a letter criticising “cancel culture” and labelled this new ultra-sensitivity and attempt to rewrite certain history “a weird sort of fascism”. It is also backed by JK Rowling, who knows a thing or two about social media storms after her views on women being called “people who menstruate”.

Back to Brexit, and it uncorked a vicious anger in which anyone could be called a racist simply for having a different view, often on social media by people enjoying total anonymity, and that unique British tolerance was lost.

But that was politics. That this movement has now spread to comedy shows of more than half a century ago, that reflect a different Britain, is no laughing matter.

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REMEMBER how it was allowed to slip out that Prince Harry and Meghan might be about to venture on to the lucrative US speaking circuit, presumably to whet the appetite of an expectant world?

Just your luck if you’ve the misfortune to endure a speech from Meghan.

Last week she addressed the Girl Up Leadership Summit (no, me neither) and chose to quote the Dalai Lama saying “compassion is the radicalisation of our time”.

Of course it is... just go back to being the voice of an elephant for Disney.

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UPON being told she would have to stay in prison until her trial starts in July next year, Ghislaine Maxwell broke down in tears.

Having pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges, a Newyork judge decreed she was a flight risk and bail was denied.

While I’ve little, if any, sympathy for this shady socialite, how come Prince Andrew seems to manage to continue not to help American police with their inquiries?

TO BE seen in a mask, or not to be seen in a mask, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to don a tiny piece of cloth or paper in the belief it will help you stave off a virus that has killed 585,000 people worldwide has now had some form of resolution in as much as everyone has to do it as of Friday. Unless you’re in an office. Or unless you find it “distressing”. Or you’re picking up a takeaway coffee, to which Cabinet colleagues Michael Gove and Liz Truss had radically different approaches last week. Only a fool would envy the Government trying to tackle this crisis, but as we’ve gone from masks having “little medical or scientific value” to being mandated to us all in the space of a few weeks, a shred of continuity would be so valuable right now.