To woke students, even moderate Tories are extremists
Personally, I think it’s time we started no-platforming students. Increasingly, I find their views distressing, offensive and, worst of all, different from mine. And these days, apparently, that’s reason enough. I don’t mean all students. Obviously we have a responsibility to protect the marginalised and under-represented groups among them, such as the sane and the intelligent. Left-wing students at Oxford, however, should all be cancelled at the earliest opportunity.
Take the members of the Unwomen Oxford UK Society. On Thursday night they no-platformed Amber Rudd, the former Conservative minister – precisely half an hour before she was due to address them on the subject of women’s rights.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me why they did it. In a mysterious statement, the Society announced that it was “deeply sorry for all and any hurt caused to our members and other wom*n and non-binary people in Oxford over this event”.
I must confess I hadn’t encountered the word “wom*n” before, and didn’t know what it meant, or even how to pronounce it, so I texted a female friend to ask. She replied: “Sounds like b ****** s.” But that can’t be right.
The two words contain completely different letters.
Whatever the reason, the rest of us are now left with no alternative but to contemplate the news that there are people in the world who apparently consider Amber Rudd to be a terrifying extremist, and believe that merely permitting her to open her mouth in public would provoke an unstoppable nationwide eruption of farright hate crime.
You and I, of course, may think that Ms Rudd is a personable Tory moderate who is about as outspoken as Sooty. But then, maybe you and I are terrifying extremists, too. Maybe everyone is, these days, except the Unwomen of Oxford. Perhaps, once they have finished noplatforming everyone they have invited to come and speak to them, they will start going door to door across the country, noplatforming the rest of the population one by one.
Still, there may yet be a way to prevent this. Ms Rudd described the students’ decision as “badly judged and rude”. Perhaps, if enough of us complain, we can get the society banned. This would, of course, be wildly disproportionate, childishly self-righteous, and undermine freedom of speech. So presumably the students would support it. Then again, perhaps they will simply no-platform themselves. Sooner or later one of them is bound to decide that “Unwomen” sounds like a term of transphobic abuse.
In a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus, the Premier League authorities have forbidden footballers from shaking hands before a match. Obviously, the players will still be tackling each other, rolling around in the mud together, spitting on the pitch, kissing and hugging after they score a goal, and spending 90 minutes in close proximity to a tightly packed crowd of 60,000 people. But as long as the players don’t shake hands, everyone should be fine.
Presumably, the same injunction will soon be extended to the rest of us. But if we can’t shake hands, how else are we to greet each other? It’s hard to imagine many people over the age of 15 being willing to bump fists, waggle elbows, kick each other’s shoes, or any of the other eccentric new greetings that have been proposed.
The issue has already prompted lively debate on this newspaper’s letters page. On Wednesday, Major John Urquhart (retd) of Bury St Edmunds wrote to suggest that everyone salute each other. Regrettably, however, I fear that this would be a risky move. The novice saluter could easily end up touching his or her own face by mistake.
In my view, only one form of greeting is guaranteed to preserve both health and dignity. It’s time to bring back bowing. Bowing for men, and curtseying for women.
The science is unignorable. In the Victorian age, gentlemen would always bow to ladies. And not one of them was ever diagnosed with Covid-19.
Something to ponder.
Small boys can be remarkably stubborn. Almost any time you want them to try something new, they refuse to do it. Then, of course, when you eventually manage to make them do it, they find they actually enjoy it. And then they refuse to stop doing it.
It was like this last weekend, at my son’s sixth birthday party. We’d taken him and his school friends go-karting. He had never been go-karting before. And inevitably, he refused, pointblank, to try. Wouldn’t even sit in one.
Eventually, however, after a combination of parental reassurance, encouragement, and darkly muttered threats, we managed to coax him into a go-kart. Cautiously, he set off round the track – and discovered that he loved it. After which, we couldn’t get him out of the thing.
Not that it’s his fault. That’s just how small boys are. It’s the same at bathtime. “No! I don’t want a bath!” Half an hour later: “No! I don’t want to get out of the bath!”
Anyway, he ended up having the best time in that go-kart. At the end of the party, the organiser presented him with a little trophy marked “Best Driver”. A cynic would say he was always a strong favourite for this trophy, seeing as his parents had paid for it, but it was the first he’d ever won in his life, and he was absolutely pink with pride. When we got home, I put it on a shelf in his bedroom. But later, very quietly, he lifted the trophy down, carried it into the living room, and, reaching up gingerly on his tiptoes, placed it in the middle of the mantelpiece, for all to see.
Obviously, when he’s grown up he won’t remember that little go-kart trophy at all. But I will. follow Michael Deacon on Twitter @Michaelpdeacon; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion