Wise words that capture the very essence of free speech

FREE speech is in danger nowadays because so many people – especially on the modern Left – do not really believe in it. In an astonishing article in last Friday’s Guardian, the radical singer and songwriter Billy Bragg claimed to be an admirer of the liberty- loving socialist author George Orwell.

But he said he ‘cringed’ when he read Orwell’s famous declaration in his book Animal Farm (published 75 years ago next month) that ‘ if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’.

Describing the words as ‘ a snappy slogan that fits neatly into a tweet’, he then attacked them as a ‘demand for licence’ rather than a defence of free speech. And he claimed: ‘Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary Right.’

How the woke campaigners, whose pursuit of cancel culture has at last been met by major protest, must have thanked Mr Bragg for writing these words. When they want freedom it is liberty. When others seek it, it is dismissed as mere licence. They set a subjective limit to what may be freely said. Views that are not Left-wing are ‘ reactionary’ and so suspect. Statements with which the politically correct do not agree are classified as ‘inflammatory’.

This is clearly a blueprint for censorship. Orwell’s whole point was that free speech was bound to upset some of those who heard it. He knew that many of his supposed friends on the Left had more than once wanted to censor him for exposing its failings. And he understood that the more infuriating your opponent is, the more you must defend his freedom to annoy you. Debate, not the censor’s gag, is the method by which free men resolve their differences.