Monthly Newsletter

Apologies for the irregular form of this mini-newsletter, but I wanted to alert you to three petitions in defence of free speech.

The first is a petition expressing support for Bruce Gilley, a professor of political science at Portland State, who has been cancelled for the second time in three years. In 2017, the editors of Third World Quarterly, an academic journal, started getting death threats after publishing an essay by Professor Gilley called “The Case For Colonialism” and promptly deleted it from their website. Now, the same thing’s happened again. He has written a book about Sir Alan Burns, a post-war colonial governor who argued that Britain was decolonising too quickly, that was due to be published by Rowman & Littlefield this month. However, the publishers have now decided not to go ahead after a petition objecting to the book was started by Joshua Moufawad-Paul, a self-described “Maoist”. Even though the petition hasn’t even managed to scrape up 1,000 signatures, it was too much for the panty-waists at Rowman & Littlefield. Professor Gilley has written about the episode for the Wall St Journal. Please sign the petition to show your solidarity with him.

The second is a petition in support of Mark Crispin Miller, a professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication, who got into trouble for urging his students to review all the scientific studies on the effectiveness of wearing masks, including those suggesting they’re ineffective that Google has shadow-banned. This was for a class he teaches on propaganda. One of his students made a flurry of complaints, claiming he was endangering public health, and as a result the university has asked him not to teach his propaganda class next term. Please sign this petition to express your support for academic freedom.

Finally, a petition has been started urging The Hist, a society at Trinity College, Dublin, to reissue its invitation to the biologist Richard Dawkins after he was no-platformed last month. The College Historical Society – known as the Hist – recently disinvited Professor Richard Dawkins on the grounds that things he’d said on Twitter about Islam and sexual assault would make the members feel uncomfortable. I wrote a letter to the head of the Hist on 30th September, urging her to honour the original invitation, but so far she hasn’t replied. Please sign this petition, which makes the same request.

Kind regards,

Toby Young

Many of our members have asked us what to do if they find themselves at odds with their employers about how best to tackle prejudice and discrimination in the workplace. As I’m sure most of you will be aware, employers, as well as schools and universities, have introduced a raft of new “anti-racism” initiatives in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, from circulating suggested reading lists (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race) to introducing mandatory unconscious bias training. Is your company or university legally entitled to put your through a disciplinary process for expressing reservations about these initiatives – circulating an alternative reading list that includes Douglas Murray’s Madness of Crowds, for instance – or for refusing to undergo diversity training? Is there a way of expressing your reservations about these initiatives that means your employer cannot legally punish you for doing so? What are the legal limits on what an employer can do to force you to assent to the “woke” orthodoxy on this issue?

Because we were getting so many questions along those lines, and dealing with so many cases of people who are being punished for dissenting from the BLM narrative, we thought it would be helpful to publish some Frequently Asked Questions on this topic. You can read them here. These will be the first in a series of FAQs we intend to publish, with the next set being about the social media policies of companies and universities and what the law says about how far they can legitimately restrict what you can say on social media, even when you make it clear you’re speaking in a purely private capacity. If you have any suggestions about other topics we should cover, please email me here.

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Unconscious Bias Training: Social Lubricant or Snake Oil?Read More »

Cancel culture got a turbo boost from the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, but there have been some encouraging signs of a fightback in the past few weeks. A group of comedians, writers and academics from across the political spectrum, including several members of our Advisory Council, started the Don’t Divide Us campaign, which rejects race-obsessed identity politics and calls for a fact-based investigation into the roots of Britain’s social problems. In addition, Inaya Folarin Iman, one of the Directors of the Free Speech Union, has launched the Equiano Project which promotes freedom of speech on issues of race, culture and politics. The new group is named after Olaudah Equiano, a slave who bought his freedom in 1766 and became part of the British abolitionist movement.

But perhaps the most positive sign was the FSU’s successful campaign to get Nick Buckley his old job back. Nick, a member of the FSU, was fired as the Chief Executive of an award-winning charity called Mancunian Way after writing a critical blog post about the Black Lives Matter manifesto in June. A mob quickly formed up on social media demanding he lose his job and the trustees duly capitulated in spite of the fact that Nick had founded the charity. We started a counter-petition which got over 17,500 signatures and found him a top lawyer in the form of Keystone Law’s Geoffrey Davies, an expert in charity law. Geoffrey discovered the trustees hadn’t followed the correct procedure in their haste to get rid of Nick and when this was pointed out to them they agreed to resign. They were then replaced by a new group of trustees who immediately reappointed Nick as Chief Exec. It was a satisfying conclusion to an unpleasant episode – cancel culture at its worst. Nick set up the charity to help disadvantaged young people in Manchester and was awarded an MBE last year in recognition of his work. He didn’t deserve to be treated in this way and I’m glad the FSU was able to see justice done. You can read an account of the FSU’s role in getting Nick his job back on the Guido Fawkes website here, a larger piece about the whole affair in the Mail here, and an interview we did with Nick on YouTube here.

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The Counter-RevolutionRead More »

Apologies for not having written this newsletter sooner. I feel particularly remiss because more than 1,000 new members have joined since the last newsletter and those people won’t have received any communication from the Free Speech Union until now, save for a pro forma acknowledgement. Let me take this opportunity to apologise to those new members and assure them that their welcome packs and FSU lapel pins will be arriving soon.

The reason I haven’t been able to write to you before now is because the FSU has been absolutely deluged with cries for help in the past four weeks. It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the woke left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, a tech company, a charity, a local authority or, indeed, Whitehall, you are at risk of being cancelled. In the past month we’ve been contacted by people in all of these fields who have either been fired, suspended or who are “under investigation” for having said or done something controversial, usually on social media.

And by “controversial” I don’t mean they’re guilty of hate speech. One person who asked for our help was Mike McCulloch, a maths lecturer at Plymouth University, who was being investigated by his employer for having liked a tweet saying “All Lives Matter”. Then again, the definition of “hate speech” is so nebulous and broad that it’s increasingly common for mainstream views to be labelled as such. For instance, another FSU member, the feminist campaigner Posie Parker, started a petition on Change.org asking the Oxford English Dictionary to keep its definition of “woman” as “adult female human”, and the moderators took it down on the grounds that it was “hate speech”. JK Rowling knows all about that, of course. In addition to helping Posie, we’re also helping a best-selling children’s author called Gillian Philip who was sacked by her publisher after adding the hashtag #IStandWithJKRowling to her Twitter account. And we’ve written to the editor of the Morning Star on behalf of another of our members, the cartoonist Stella Perrett, who was cancelled by the communist newspaper. Her sin was to draw a gender-critical cartoon (see below) which the Morning Star published and which then caused outrage among trans “allies” who demanded she be thrown under a bus. The editor, Ben Chacko, duly obliged, publishing a grovelling apology in which he compared the cartoon to a “transphobic hate crime”.

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Victims of the Cultural RevolutionRead More »

This is our third FSU newsletter. In case you missed the first one – or hadn’t signed up at that point – we’re archiving the newsletters on our website here. You may have to log in to view them since that page is only visible to members. (Your login details were sent to you when you first signed up.)

At the end of March, when the UK went into lockdown, rights that the British people have taken for granted for hundreds of years were suspended, some dating back to the 12th Century. As the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption says, it has been the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history – and that includes wartime. The right to free speech was not suspended on March 23rd, but it has often felt as if it was, particularly for those who dissent from the official coronavirus narrative. In the past nine weeks, our members have been kicked out of Facebook groups, suspended by Twitter and had their videos removed by YouTube, all for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy about the pandemic and how the Government should respond to it. We’ve been doing what we can to defend them, but it’s not easy in the current climate in which any form of dissent is seen as “dangerous”. The pandemic seems to have created an army of petty martinets, ready with their red pens to censor anyone who doesn’t subscribe to Covid orthodoxy.

Ofcom

Among the cases we’ve taken up is that of Eamonn Holmes, reprimanded by the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom for supposedly undermining public confidence in the Government’s social distancing rules. Holmes’s sin, according to the regulator, was to say on ITV’s This Morning that the theory linking 5G masts and the symptoms ascribed to coronavirus deserved to be discussed in the mainstream media, even though he agreed with his co-presenter that it was “not true and incredibly stupid”. Ofcom said this view – the view that the theory deserved a public hearing, not that it was plausible – was “ill-judged and risked undermining viewers’ trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence” and could lead to “significant harm to the public”.

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Get ready to rumbleRead More »

This is our second FSU newsletter. In case you missed the first one – or hadn’t signed up at that point – we’re archiving the newsletters on our website here. You may have to log in to view them since that page is only visible to members. (Your log in details were sent to you when you first signed up.)

The Free Speech Union now has six members of staff, including me. You can see who we are and what we do by clicking here and scrolling down to the “Company Staff” section. We’re all working part-time and we don’t have an office or any office overheads – which is just as well, given that we wouldn’t be able to go to the office even if we had one. Incredibly, the Government doesn’t regard free speech activists as “key workers”.

Silencing Doctors in Wuhan

That’s not at all incredible, obviously. Defending free speech isn’t considered a priority during the coronavirus crisis when people’s lives are at risk, but when it’s over and the post-mortem begins there will be an important story to tell about how the suppression of free speech by the Chinese authorities led to the pandemic. After all, if the doctors who first raised the alarm in Wuhan had been allowed to air their concerns in public, as opposed to being arrested and forced to confess to “spreading rumours” and “making untrue comments”, the outbreak could have been nipped in the bud. Researchers at Southampton University have concluded that if the Chinese authorities had introduced a range of interventions (early detection, case isolation and travel restrictions) three weeks earlier than it did, cases would have been reduced by 95%. In this instance, the suppression of free speech has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – possibly millions – as well as catastrophic damage to the global economy. You can be sure the Free Speech Union will underline this connection when the crisis is over.

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Holding their feet to the fireRead More »

Thank you for supporting the Free Speech Union.

We held our launch party on Wednesday, 26th February. You can see the speeches that were made and some other footage from the party on our YouTube channel. Some members have asked why they weren’t invited. Unfortunately, the venue wasn’t big enough. But we are in the process of organizing our first event and will be in touch about that soon.

Trevor Phillips

One of the speakers at the launch was Trevor Phillips, the anti-racism campaigner and former Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. (You can watch his speech on our YouTube channel here.) Today brings news that Trevor has been suspended from the Labour Party for “Islamophobia”. This is a ridiculous allegation. He is one of a handful of public figures to express concern about the sexual abuse of children in northern towns by gangs largely made up of Pakistani Muslim men, as well as the sympathy shown by a substantial proportion of British Muslims towards the motives of the Charlie Hebdo killers. Drawing attention to these issues isn’t a form of “hate speech” and it doesn’t constitute “Islamophobia”. On the contrary, we need to have an honest conversation about the failure of a minority of religious people to fully embrace British values, whether some conservative Muslims or some ultra-Orthodox Jews, if people of all faiths are going to work out how to get along together in a multi-faith society. I’ve started a petition calling on the Labour Party to drop these trumped-up charges, apologise to Trevor Phillips and fully reinstate his membership. He should be applauded for his bravery, not punished for “crossing a line”. Please sign the petition here.

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Defend Trevor Phillips’ Right to SpeakRead More »