Jesus ‘could not speak on campus in new climate of censorship’
Student demand for ‘safe spaces’ and anti-radicalisation rules are slicing away free speech, says expert on Communist regimes
JESUS CHRIST would be banned from preaching on university campuses if he were alive today, because the country has grown “too feeble” in standing up for free speech, a prominent academic has said.
Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University and an expert on East European Communism and its secret police, said that the trend for “so-called safe spaces” had eroded freedom of expression, with even students insisting on silencing one another.
Warning that universities must “hold the line”, he said it was time for the public to stand up against creeping legislation and self-censorship.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, sponsored by The Daily Telegraph, Prof Garton Ash said he had identified four key areas of threat to free speech, including an increasing fear of violence against those who voice their opinions.
Home Office legislation, he added, meant that universities were now encouraged to block even non-violent extremists, in a definition that could include leading thinkers of the past.
He told a festival audience: “Some of you may know that in the new counterterrorism legislation, the securocrats in the Home Office are trying to impose on universities a so-called ‘prevent duty’, which would call on us to prevent non-violent extremists speaking on campus.
“Now, non-violent extremists? That’s Karl Marx, Rousseau, Charles Darwin, Hegel, and most clearly Jesus Christ, who was definitely a non-violent extremist. The Home Office wouldn’t want him preaching on campus.”
Prof Garton Ash, author of Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, also warned that he had noticed an increasing trend for a small number of offended individuals to be able to shut debate down.
“It’s not just the state saying, ‘that’s offensive’,” he said. “It’s a subjective veto act in which one person or a small group of people can say ‘I’m offended’ and that’s held to be sufficient reason to not show that thing. We have a big problem at the moment in our universities, because on the one hand we’re under attack from our government, like I said. And on the other hand there’s a certain push from below from our own students demanding so-called safe spaces. You have to no-platform, for example, Germaine Greer [following comments about transgender people]”.
He continued: “It’s not just someone like me saying ‘I don’t want to hear Germaine Greer’, because you don’t have to hear Germaine Greer.
“What this is, is actually a group of students saying to another group of students who want to hear Germaine Greer, ‘no you can’t do that’.”
He added: “We as universities really have to hold the line. Our free speech in Britain is gradually being salamisliced away. This country, which in a way invented the modern version of free speech in the 17th century, is in my view much too feeble when it comes to standing up for free speech.”
‘Jesus Christ was a nonviolent extremist. The Home Office wouldn’t want him preaching on campus’