We’ll laugh at these ‘sensitive’ students... until they lock us up

IENJOY being banned, or demonstrated against, by intolerant students. In some ways, I wish it happened to me more often. So should we worry much about the Policy Exchange report showing that a huge number of today’s students are either against fully free speech, or too easily persuaded to give up on it, on the grounds of ‘sensitivity’?

So far, the problem seems trivial. Many universities still hold to proper free speech. When they don’t, it is usually quite easy to make them look foolish and crabby. It’s even possible to get round it with a bit of ingenuity. I did this once by holding the meeting in the open air.

And it’s not new. The first time it happened to me was at a student conference in Blackpool 20 years ago. Even then, I was still trying to argue against the mad policy of legalising marijuana. Some jackin-office switched off my microphone and ordered me from the stage because I had been falsely denounced by a screeching group of zealots – who reminded me all too much of my own Trotskyist days in the 1970s. My fellowspeaker and fierce opponent, the convicted drug-smuggler Howard Marks, responded like a proper British gentleman by declaring in his lovely rumbling voice: ‘If he’s going, I’m going too.’

He then put his arm round my shoulder and marched beside me through the protesters. I almost wept. Much as I disagreed with Howard, I ever afterwards regarded him as a fundamentally decent person, however much I differed with him about drugs. He placed liberty of thought and speech above practically every other possession of our civilisation, and instinctively defended it.

So no-platforming can be fun. But I am also frightened by it. Slowly, it is winning. When these mini-censors begin to fan out into the law, the media, the Civil Service, the legal profession and schools, they will be a real threat. Unlike Howard Marks, they have never been taught to value their liberty. They genuinely think their own opinions are so virtuous that they are entitled to silence others. I have read the attacks on me that have been circulated in these seats of learning, and they are enough to make the blood run cold. They look like charge sheets in some revolutionary show trial – a trial which I increasingly fear I may one day face in reality. Someone has usually spent days looking for things that I have said in the past, and then twisted them to give a false impression to the ill-informed.

The people involved clearly think they are doing a good thing. They sincerely feel that I should not be allowed to say the things I say, or write what I have written here. Many of them, I am sure, would like to see me punished for having said them, preferably after a public confession of wrongdoing. Interestingly, many of the passages they have twisted come from some years back, when speech in this country, especially on the sexual revolution, was undoubtedly freer than it is now.

And that scares me too. How much that we can freely say now will be regarded as borderline illegal ten years hence?

And I suspect my opponents do not have any objections to prosecuting people for things which were legal when they did them, but are not now. And when they come hammering on my door, I fear there’ll be no Howard Marks to take the side of liberty.

IN A few short words the diaries of the deceased old gossip Kenneth Rose have said far more about David Cameron than his breezeblock of a biography ever will. ‘I am deeply disturbed by the conduct of David Cameron, the PM, who has declared a planning freefor-all in the construction industry, apparently in return for huge donations to the Conservative Party. He is not a true Tory at heart but a spivvy Etonian entrepreneur.’ I think the concreting over of so much of our countryside will be Mr Cameron’s main memorial, remembered with a bitter sense of irrecoverable loss long after all the rest is forgotten.