The enemies of liberty are hunting in packs. That is why we must band together and fight for free speech
ADISABLED grandfather in Dewsbury was fired from his job at Asda last year for posting a clip on Facebook of Billy Connolly mocking religion. No one objected to the comedian’s rude remarks about Catholicism but because he’d referred to suicide bombers, the clip was deemed ‘Islamophobic’ and 54-year-old Brian Leach had to go.
Last March, actress Seyi Omooba was fired from the lead role in a West End production of The Color Purple after someone dug up a four-year-old Facebook post which said that, as a Christian, she disapproved of homosexuality. And in January last year, a businessman from Lincoln received a visit from Humberside police for daring to ‘like’ a comic verse about transgender people on Twitter.
The officer who thought it proper to question 53-year-old Harry Miller said ‘I’m here to check your thinking’ before telling the married father-of-four he’d committed a ‘non-crime hate incident’.
It is bad enough that any of these things could happen in a country that prides itself on the right to free speech, but in today’s Britain such episodes are frighteningly common. Scarcely a week passes without yet another attempt to silence those whose views are different or in some way inconvenient.
And that’s why I am launching a Free Speech Union – a non-partisan, mass-membership organisation that stands up for the right of its members to tell the truth in all circumstances, even if that means causing offence to some.
If someone at work writes to your boss to complain about something you’ve said, we’ll write to them, too, and explain the importance of intellectual tolerance and viewpoint diversity. If self-righteous social media bullies pick on you, we’ll return fire. If someone launches an online petition calling for you to be sacked, we’ll launch a counter-petition.
ONE of the benefits of full membership will be access to legal assistance: if we think you’ve got good grounds for a lawsuit, we’ll help you fight it and, if it looks as if it’s going to be expensive, we’ll help you crowdfund so you can pay your legal costs. The enemies of free speech hunt in packs; its defenders must band together too. Whatever it takes, we’ll defend your right to speak your mind without fear of being persecuted.
Why do I care so passionately about this issue? In part, because the situation is now so serious. Over the past five years, the police have investigated a staggering 120,000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in England and Wales, an average of 66 such incidents per day. Shouldn’t officers be policing the streets, currently blighted by a knife crime epidemic? Why are they interrogating our tweets instead?
Even in the arts, supposedly the realm of free expression, censorship is rife. Research published last week showed that more than 80 per cent of people working in the arts believe that voicing controversial opinions would result in them being professionally ostracised.
Some of the most serious attacks on free speech have taken place at our universities, the very places where intellectual exploration should flourish.
Almost anyone is vulnerable, including women’s rights specialists and members of the progressive Left.
Radical feminist Julie Bindel, the Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray, and Germaine Greer, pioneering author of The Female Eunuch, have all been ‘no-platformed’, which is to say they have been prevented from speaking in public by selfappointed morality cops.
The gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has been ‘no-platformed’ by a group of students at Canterbury Christ Church University because he signed a letter to a newspaper opposing the policy of… ‘no-platforming’. Even idle chitchat has been picked out in the searchlights of the woke gauleiters.
Ann Francke, the Chief Executive of the Chartered Management Institute, an industry body that promotes professional training, has said she wants to stop men discussing football at work because, she claims, talking about last night’s game can exclude women from the conversation and form a ‘gateway to more laddish behaviour’.
I have a more personal motive for defending free speech, too. In 2018, I was targeted by socialmedia activists following my appointment by Theresa May to the board of a new higher education regulator. It wasn’t a paid job, but it was a public position, one the then Prime Minister thought I was suited for because, in addition to being a journalist for more than 30 years, I’ve helped set up four free schools and worked with a number of education charities.
As a Brexit-supporting, middleaged, white, heterosexual, Conservative male, I wasn’t exactly a popular choice with the university sector. Sure enough, the ‘archaeologists’ of offensiveness soon went to work, digging up and sifting through everything I’d ever written or said since 1987.
They found, for instance, that I’d written an article for the Spectator magazine in 2001 humorously praising a TV show on an obscure satellite channel called Men and Motors because it featured topless girls draping themselves over fast cars.
As a joke, the magazine gave it the headline ‘Confessions of a porn addict’. I thought it was funny, too, until 17 years later when it came back to bite me.
Someone put a screen grab of the article on the internet and within minutes, London’s Evening Standard had printed the headline ‘New pressure on Theresa May to sack “porn addict” Toby Young from watchdog role’.
Yes, there were more things I’d said on social media late at night after several glasses of wine many years ago, some of them silly. But the result was this: seven days after the appointment was announced, my suitability for the job had been debated in Parliament; more than 220,000 people had signed an online petition demanding I be sacked; and a pack of journalists was stationed at the end of my drive. I resigned from the board of the regulator and apologised for my juvenile scribblings, imagining that would draw a line under the affair.
Some hope. I had to stand down from the board of the free school chain I’d helped set up.
I felt obliged to resign as a member of the Fulbright Commission, which oversees scholarships to English and American students. I had to abandon my fellowship at Buckingham University and give up my full-time job as the head of an education charity.
PUBLICLY shamed, cast out, ‘cancelled’ by a digital mob, I lost five positions almost overnight because I’d said the ‘wrong’ thing several years earlier. George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, wrote: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
Free speech isn’t some luxury we can afford to live without, it’s the key freedom on which all the other freedoms depend. It is how knowledge is developed and shared at universities – or should be. Our understanding of the world should be tested, retested and refined in open inquiry and discussion.
Robust debate, appealing to reason and evidence rather than the prevailing orthodoxy, is the only way to resolve the most important questions facing mankind without descending to violence or intimidation. It is also the most effective bulwark against abuse of power. Time and again, history has shown that restricting people’s right to air their views is an ominous precursor to the removal of other freedoms.
Many good men and women died fighting for the right to speak our minds without being persecuted. This is our precious inheritance and we owe it to them, as well as our children, to come to its defence.
There can be no compromising with the enemies of free speech. As Churchill said: ‘An appeaser is someone who keeps feeding the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last.’
Join me in the Free Speech Union and together we can defeat the authoritarianism and intolerance that are once again threatening to destroy our liberty.
To join the Free Speech Union, go to freespeechunion.org or email toby@freespeechunion.org.