Weekly Briefing

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Advertising boycott of GB News condemned

On the night of its launch, Andrew Neil vowed that GB News will “puncture the pomposity of our elites and politics, business, media and academia and expose their growing promotion of cancel culture for the threat to free speech and democracy that it is”. A review in the Times said GB News’ model of “unwoke TV may yet bite”. We certainly look forward to seeing it grow. The regular Woke Watch segment will be must-watch viewing. Allison Pearson in the Telegraph says the channel is a welcome new voice. Congratulations to Inaya Folarin Iman, our former director, on her Sunday night debut.

The new channel has already sparked fury among the perpetually-offended, with a campaign to pressure companies into withdrawing their ads. Kopparberg, Grolsch, Nivea, IKEA, the Open University and Pinterest have all pulled their adverts – although Vodafone seems to be having second thoughts. Top marks to the Co-op for refusing to go along with the boycott. It told a complainant on Twitter, “We will not seek to affect the editorial independence of publications or channels.”

The Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said to the Daily Mail, “One of the cornerstones of our liberties is our robust, free and diverse media and GB News is a welcome addition to that diversity. It is up to brands to advertise where they wish, but it would be worrying if they allow themselves to succumb to pressure groups.” Also in the Mail, Mick Hume said the meek submission of corporate giants to a small number of protestors and the “grossly misnamed lobbying group Stop Funding Hate” was the slow and painful death of free speech. But there’s plenty of fight left in free speech defenders. Tom Slater slammed IKEA’s hypocrisy in Spiked, pointing out that calls for inclusion “never seem to include those who just so happen to hold a different opinion to the great and good”. In ConservativeHome Charlotte Gill condemned the “appalling but unsurprising” attempt to cancel GB News – and criticism of the boycott kept on coming: Allister Heath in the Telegraph warned businesses to drop their woke campaigning or face a consumer backlash, and Jawad Iqbal in the Times said the sabotage was an exercise in “spineless stupidity”. Writing in the Express, Leo McKinstry said the boycott was simple bullying, amid a mood of “aggressive intolerance” sweeping across the UK.

We are writing to all the companies that have suspended their advertising on GB News urging them to reconsider.

Honours for free speech campaigners

Many congratulations to Professor Nigel Biggar, Chair of the FSU, who was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours, and Dr Arif Ahmed, who was made an MBE. We’re delighted for them both.

Report + Support shows why we need the new Free Speech Bill

We have written to the Russell Group of top universities about their use of ‘Report + Support’, an online system for reporting “microaggressions”, among other things. Almost all of these websites omit key safeguards set out in law for the protection of free speech. If you are a student or an academic at a Russell Group university and have been investigated as a result of Report + Support please get in touch by emailing [email protected]. Taxpayers have been unwittingly funding this sinister scheme.

FSU General Secretary Toby Young has written a piece for Politics.co.uk defending the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill and rebutting some of the misinformation and misconceptions being pushed about the proposed legislation.

We’d hoped to go one week without a case of censorship at Cambridge, but it wasn’t to be: Sir Noel Malcolm has accused the University of failing to publish a sympathetic article about Brexit on its website, despite including pro-Remain articles by other academics. Our Director Douglas Murray has written an eviscerating piece about Professor Stephen Toope, the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, in the Spectator.

Members and supporters will recall that we supported Dr Neil Thin in his battle against student witchfinders at Edinburgh. He was cleared after a stressful investigation, but the students who’ve abused him online have faced no action. He doesn’t want his student accusers punished, but he does want his university to acknowledge that their behaviour was unacceptable.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay on “obscene” cancel culture went viral this week. “We have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow,” she wrote. Definitely worth a read.

Meanwhile, Oxford academics have been told to “leave their personal political views at home” by Lord Wharton, Chair of the Office for Students, following the news that 150 dons and graduate students are refusing to teach undergraduates at Oriel College until it pulls down its statue of Cecil Rhodes.

While we welcome the Free Speech Bill, we’re not so keen on the Online Safety Bill. Ruth Smeeth of Index on Censorship writes in the Times that the legislation “creates tiers of free speech akin to an autocratic regime – giving special protections to politicos and journalists to speak freely, while the rest of us are censored”. Members attended our FSU In-Depth event on the Online Safety Bill this week – if you want to come along to our talks, sign-up as a member here. Students can join for as little as £2.49 a month.

History lessons condemned as “terrorism”

Prevent was set-up to counter terrorism – now it’s being used to rewrite the history curriculum because it’s too white and too male, according to the Telegraph. We’ve come across other examples of Prevent being misused in this way and are worried it’s becoming a serious problem. If you’ve experienced this, please contact us.

There is mounting evidence that British schools are becoming infected by the same ideological gobbledegook that has captured American high schools. Case in point: a call for primary school pupils to learn about “white privilege” as part of the religious studies curriculum.

The age of “no debate” is over

Maya Forstater has written about last week’s landmark court ruling in her favour in ConservativeHome. “The judgment states clearly that no one has the right to harass others at work and, importantly, protects everyone from discrimination based on their belief or lack of belief,” she wrote. “This means it protects people like me who think that the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ relate to sperm and eggs and the bodies built to deliver them. It also protects those who believe in innate-but-fluid gendered identities, and who prioritise ‘gender expression’ over anatomy.” Her lawyer, Peter Daly, was named lawyer of the week by the Times.

Murdo Fraser wrote about the Forstater case in the Scotsman, noting that “it was an important ruling for champions of free speech, and a serious blow to those who have maintained the extremist position that there is ‘no debate’ around the gender issue. In a time when we have seen feminists such as Germaine Greer and JK Rowling face ‘cancelling’ for stating their opinions, this is a very welcome development.” Iain Macwhirter also welcomed the judgment.

The fightback by gender critical feminists is in full-swing, write Rosa Freedman and Jo Phoenix in the Spectator. They were given a public apology by the University of Essex, which had no-platformed them for their gender critical views. Brian Monteith says our success in Lisa Keogh’s case is a “chink of light”. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are being sued by Natalie Bird, who was banned from the party office for 10 years and from standing as an MP for the LibDems because she wore a T-shirt saying: “Woman: Adult, Human, Female”.

Compelled speech isn’t free

Readers might laugh along with Liz Jones’s A-Z of woke in the Daily Mail, if only its ideology (and vocabulary) wasn’t enforced so vigilantly by our public bodies and institutions. NHS Scotland has been accused of Stasi-like behaviour for saying it will “monitor participation” in an LGBT Pride badge-wearing campaign. Not to be outdone, the National Trust is asking volunteers – many of them elderly – to wear rainbow face paint and glitter to celebrate Pride. Harry Miller reports on the National LGBT+ Police Network’s recent antics, which has told those who dissent from its nostrums, “We see you, we have reported you.” A welcome blast of common-sense then from Stephen Watson, the new Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, who says officers’ impartiality is being jeopardised by the police taking the knee or wearing rainbow shoelaces. “The public are getting a little bit fed up of virtue-signalling police officers when they’d really rather we just locked up burglars,” he told the Telegraph.

Priti Patel adopts the FSU’s position on “taking the knee”

The row over taking the knee continues to rumble on. Home Secretary Priti Patel says the England team is engaged in “gesture politics”, but that if players are allowed to take the knee then fans should be allowed to boo, echoing the FSU’s position on the issue. The Sun pointed out that we have defended a fan who was threatened with not being allowed back into the stadium of his local club after he booed. We explained: “He didn’t boo because he disapproves of BLM, but because he wants to keep politics out of football. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to express that view, provided he does so in a lawful and peaceful way?” It isn’t just an English phenomenon. France is divided on taking the knee, writes Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator. The campaign group Don’t Divide Us has written an open letter to the FA, urging it to tell players to stop indulging in this divisive virtue-signalling.

America

Composer Daniel Elder has been blacklisted for condemning arson during the BLM protests last summer. The classical music industry now won’t touch his work; he isn’t even allowed to sing in a choir.

North Korean defector Yeonmi Park has compared her time at Colombia University to her home country – and Colombia comes off worse. “I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying,” she writes.

State legislatures are banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.

The New York Times has retracted a claim that satire site Babylon Bee is a “far-right misinformation site” that “traffics in misinformation under the guise of satire.” It’s actually very funny.

New free speech platform

Members may be interested in Ariuum, “the first free speech video debate platform where you can create your own channel to share your ideas and opinions live with other Ariuum Citizens, while voting for the topics that you believe in”. The creators promise that Ariuum “will also be hosting live debates and discussions from the important guests that you want to hear from”. They write: “In this age of mass censorship and digital totalitarianism, it is important that we all stand for something. What do you stand for? Make your voice heard today only on Ariuum.”

Debbie Hicks: handcuffed, arrested and charged after filming inside a hospital and posting the film on Facebook

Debbie Hicks, the anti-lockdown campaigner who was arrested after she filmed what appeared to be an empty hospital ward in December last year – and posted the film on Facebook – has been charged with a Public Order Offence. She is now raising funds for her defence. Whether you agree with Debbie’s views or not, this is an important free speech case – her legal team will be running an Article 10 defence – and she deserves our support.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Remember, all of our work depends on our members, we receive no public money: sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against the censors.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Lisa, Maya, Marion, Ann: fighting back against the silencing of women

After an investigation lasting two months, FSU member Lisa Keogh has been cleared by Abertay University. She will not be punished for saying that women have vaginas – but it should never have come to this. It shouldn’t have taken two months to dismiss the nonsensical complaints and Lisa should not have been subjected to this ordeal in the final weeks of her law degree. But this is an important victory and we’re delighted with the result. Lisa said: “No woman should face discrimination in the way I have because she believes in sex-based rights. I want to say a special thank you to the Free Speech Union for helping me through this stressful time, in particular Fraser Hudghton, the Case Management Director, who has been on hand at all hours to answer my calls and navigate me through this.” The news was widely reported in the Daily Mail, Times, Metro, Herald, Daily Record, Courier, and Christian Today. Our full response can be found in our press release.

The victory of Maya Forstater in the Employment Appeal Tribunal yesterday is a victory for free speech, albeit quite a small one. The ruling found that, contrary to the judgement of the Employment Tribunal, gender critical beliefs are deserving of respect in a democratic society and, as such, are entitled to protection under Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the judge made it clear that the expression of gender critical views in the workplace would, in some circumstances, still constitute “harassment”, as defined in s.26 of the Equality Act 2010. And even though Maya won her appeal, her case will now have to be heard again in the Employment Tribunal and a win is by no means guaranteed. The Employment Tribunal may conclude that her firm was right not to renew her contract because her expression of gender critical views did constitute harassment of trans and gender non-conforming people, and preventing that was more important than protecting her right to express her belief that transwomen aren’t women. What the judgement means is that henceforth employers will have to balance their obligation to protect trans and gender non-conforming people from harassment against their obligation not to discriminate against employees on the basis of their gender critical beliefs. And an employer may well decide that the former obligation trumps the latter – and if challenged about this decision in the ET, the ET may well side with the employer. So there is still a good deal of work to be done to protect free speech in the workplace – something we’re going to be campaigning for shortly. (You can read our response to the verdict here.) Nevertheless, the judgement does mean that employers won’t be able to persecute gender critical feminists with impunity – and for that we should thank Maya and her army of supporters. The full judgement can be found here. Her solicitor, Peter Daly, says the ruling means “the era of ‘No Debate’ around sex and gender, if it ever existed, is over”.

Meanwhile, in Scotland a feminist campaigner – Marion Millar – has been arrested and charged for supposedly “transphobic” tweets. Worryingly, a fundraiser to support her was removed by GoFundMe on the grounds that it was “prohibited”. But she later raised the funds simply by posting her PayPal details on Twitter. We will be monitoring this case closely and have reached out to Marion to offer our support.

And Marion isn’t the only Scotswoman under fire for her gender critical beliefs. The former rector of Edinburgh University, Ann Henderson, was “subjected to a sustained campaign of abuse and attempts to silence her after she called for a reasoned debate on gender recognition reforms”, the Times reports.

Stonewall has faced a new barrage of criticism this week over its attempts to silence dissent. Organisations continue to quit its diversity scheme, including Channel 4, the Ministry of Justice, UCL and the University of Winchester, while other government departments are keeping the scheme “under review”. Police forces have been threatened with legal action over their affiliation with Stonewall by Harry Miller’s Fair Cop pressure group on the grounds that the link breaches rules on political impartiality. FOI requests have revealed the extent to which Stonewall’s dogma on trans issues has permeated into public institutions – without any democratic oversight. In the Times Libby Purves says Stonewall “is now becoming the bully itself”. Likewise, the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley says the campaign organisation has gone too far and Celia Warden writes about the culture of fear that our institutions, including the NHS, are creating.

Snitching portals

We’ve written to all the Russell Group universities advising them that the reporting portals they’ve set up to enable students and staff to make complaints about “micro-aggressions”, among other things, may render them vulnerable to legal challenge, as reported in the Telegraph. The Mail says that more than 60 UK universities have paid to install the “Report + Support” tool on their websites and the company which developed the reporting system secured £1.35 million in funding from UUK, the group to which all university Vice-Chancellors belong. Meanwhile, Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope has beaten another retreat, withdrawing his University’s ‘Change the Culture’ campaign which was what led to the creation of the Cambridge snitching portal in the first place. Camilla Turner has the full story in the Telegraph. Our Director Douglas Murray says the victory at Cambridge is a template for victory elsewhere.

Not all Vice-Chancellors are woke. We welcome the excellent comments from the Provost of UCL, Dr Michael Spence, who said the idea that having to listen to opposing views make students “unsafe” is nonsense and it’s not the job of universities to make students “comfortable”, but rather to challenge them. As Adam Tomkins puts it in the Herald, “None of us has the right not to be offended by what each other says. Just because someone else’s speech upsets you – just because you find it offensive – does not mean they have no right to say it.”

A study has found, unsurprisingly, that there are significant generational divides when it comes to free speech, with older generations much more enthusiastic about it. To address this, we’re campaigning for the Department for Education to amend its guidance on the teaching of British values in schools so it encompasses the need to teach children about the importance of free speech. That would have been useful to point to in our recent defence of a trainee teacher at Manchester Metropolitan University who was placed under investigation – and threatened with referral to a Fitness to Practice panel – after he said he would be willing to show Mohammed cartoons in class if they had educational value. Gary Oliver has written about that case in the Conservative Woman. “Aided by Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, the student teacher is in the clear – at least for the moment. However, one wonders what sort of reference from MMU will follow him around and whether, when seeking a teaching post, he will find that the educational establishment has already marked his card,” he wrote.

Wisden goes woke

The hounding of cricketer Ollie Robinson for nine-year-old tweets has shown once again the need to pushback against the Witch-Finder Generals. That teenagers make off-colour jokes should surprise nobody, but in modern Britain it’s enough to destroy careers. Toby wrote about this for the Mail earlier this week. We’re pleased to see Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, and the Prime Minister defending Robinson and telling the England and Wales Cricket Board to “think again” over the decision to suspend him and place him under investigation – even though Robinson has already apologised. Matthew Syed in the Times writes that cancel culture “is like a virus that people catch, finding hitherto undiscovered wells of pleasure in the bringing down of people for past sins, stretching back into youthful adolescence. The idea of rehabilitation, still less forgiveness, is ruled out of court.”

Further players have been dragged into the storm since the offence archaeologists sifted through Robinson’s old tweets and even Wisden, the cricketing almanac, has joined in, prompting harsh criticism from fans. The sleuths at Wisden “discovered” one post made by a player when he was just 15. FSU director Douglas Murray says in the Sun that this whole affair demonstrates the “stupid, unforgiving and vengeful way in which we now treat people”. You can read Rod Liddle’s caustic take on the “controversy” here.

Meanwhile, the Greens have dropped their Batley and Spen by-election candidate – the rugby league international player Ross Peltier – for posts he made as a teenager. As long as this is considered an acceptable tactic for bringing people down we recommend all our members install Tweet Delete, an app that deletes everything you’ve ever said on Twitter that’s more than a week old. It’s a lot cheaper than hiring a “social media scrubber”.

Andrew Doyle – creator of Titania McGrath and a member of our Advisory Council – made the case against cancel culture for Reason. Former President Obama has again criticised cancel culture and its dangers, but the ACLU, once a great defender of the First Amendment, is split over whose speech it will actually defend. Like so many once great pro-free speech organisations, it’s been captured by the woke left.

Taking the knee

If football players continue to take the knee it’s inevitable that some fans are going to boo – not because they’re racist, but because they object to the intrusion of politics into our national game. If politics is to be kept out of football, then that rule should be applied to all political organisations, equally – the FA shouldn’t make an exception of BLM because it’s fashionable. But if the FA is going to insist on defending players’ right to take the knee, then fans should be permitted to react as they see fit, whether by applauding or booing. It cannot be free speech for the players but not the fans. That’s our view on the ongoing controversy, expressed in a letter to the FA, and reported in the Mail. Scott Benton MP says it’s time for players to stop taking the knee, and that the gesture is not an uncontroversial gesture of support for the moral cause of anti-racism but a statement of support for the Black Lives Matter organisation and its views. Writing in ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman says “the nation’s best-attended sport faces the possibility, to put it no more strongly, of crowds balkanising before football matches on political lines, if not quite ethnic ones”. This is the critical point: when our national team competes in the Euros it’s an opportunity for people to put their differences aside and come together, which is why politics should be kept out of football. The England players should follow the example of Scotland’s players who have decided to stand together and link arms to express their support for the cause of anti-racism. If the England players do that at the first match against Croatia on Sunday instead of taking the knee, not a single fan will boo.

Librarian suspended for criticising China’s human rights record

We are supporting Maureen O’Bern, the librarian suspended and placed under investigation by Wigan Council for criticising the Council’s decision to enter into a contract with a Chinese state company, given China’s persecution of Muslims. We have written to the Council on her behalf and will offer her whatever support she needs to ensure she is reinstated.

Covid censorship

Free speech isn’t the only thing harmed by censorship. Writing in the Sunday Times, Jamie Metzl argues that stifling scientific and political debate will make another pandemic more likely. In the Telegraph, the indefatigable Douglas Murray criticises the media for failing to report on anti-lockdown protests, and social media companies who arrogantly decided they “knew” where the virus originated: something which is now the subject of intense debate. Brian Monteith challenges Ofcom’s stifling of debate about Covid-19 – all the more troubling as the Online Safety Bill is set to give the broadcast regulator huge new powers. As long-standing members will know, we tried and failed to challenge Ofcom’s censorious coronavirus guidance in the High Court, but at last people are beginning to wake up to the role Ofcom has played in inhibiting debate about the government’s handling of the pandemic. We would encourage all our members to write to their MPs about it. Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

Arts and advertising

The Advertising Standards Authority is imposing a woke worldview on the public, writes Len Shackleton in Spiked. No-one will touch Morrissey, writes James Hall in the Telegraph, while comedian Nick Dixon, who is on our Advisory Council and was on the roster for one of our FSU comedy nights, has said he was overlooked for a gig because he’s a white male.

GB News

“The original meaning of woke was somebody who was aware of social justice issues and who can complain about that?” said Andrew Neil, ahead of the launch of GB News. But the insidious spread of cancel culture now “stands against everything we have stood for since the enlightenment onwards and that is why it is serious”. Neil will have a Woke Watch segment on his new TV show and he told the Evening Standard that “there are so many delicious issues around cancel culture that it is hard to decide what to pick”. Sadly true. We’re looking forward to the debut of GB News this weekend.

Debbie Hicks: handcuffed, arrested and charged after filming inside a hospital and posting the film on Facebook

Debbie Hicks, the anti-lockdown campaigner who was arrested after she filmed what appeared to be an empty hospital ward in December last year – and posted the film on Facebook – has been charged with a Public Order Offence. She is now raising funds for her defence. Whether you agree with Debbie’s views or not, this is an important free speech case – her legal team will be running an Article 10 defence – and she deserves our support.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Remember, all of our work depends on our members, we receive no public money: sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against the censors.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Free speech victories

We’ve achieved another victory this week. Dr Neil Thin was suspended from teaching and placed under investigation by the University of Edinburgh after students labelled him “problematic” because he objected to the renaming of the David Hume tower. He was abused online and subjected to a gruelling, eight-week investigation. We’ve supported him throughout and he has now been cleared and will face no further action. But as we’ve seen so many times, the process is the punishment. Following his exoneration, Dr Thin says he wants to promote “a campus climate that fosters core academic values such as considerate debate, curiosity, intellectual honesty [and] freedom of expression”.

Since our founding last year, the FSU has won some dramatic victories, writes Dan Hitchens in the Critic. “Britain’s free speech advocates have faced a frustrating puzzle. They seem to have the public on their side… The government, too, seems sympathetic… yet, on the ground – in workplaces, in universities, even in how people relate to their neighbours – there’s never been more fear of expressing an honest opinion.” But with the help of our members, we’re starting to turn the tide.

Readers will know of our intervention last week over Cambridge University’s “microaggression” reporting website. In response to this latest episode, Dr Alan Hearne has written to the Times with what sounds like a good suggestion: “Across the country many universities, led by Vice-Chancellors with more academic than management experience, are veering away from sensible policies concerning free speech and debate, often under pressure from loud minorities. Perhaps it is time for the Chancellors of these universities to help steer their academic colleagues on to a path that is more acceptable to society at large.”

Stonewall crumbling after stifling gender critical dissenters

Stonewall has been in the news constantly since the report commissioned by Essex University exposed its misleading guidance on free speech – which was used to no-platform feminists concerned about the erosion of sex-based rights. The LGBT campaigning organisation is being sued by Allison Bailey, a lesbian lawyer, who alleges that Stonewall tried to stifle her opposition to its stance on transgender rights. Stonewall is backing a legal attempt to remove the LGB Alliance’s charitable status, the gender critical group Bailey co-founded. An effort that Debbie Hayton in the Spectator says should be laughed out of court.

Equalities Minister Liz Truss is urging Government departments to pull out of Stonewall’s “champions” scheme, whereby they have to pay the charity to audit their diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and calls are mounting in the legal profession for law firms and chambers to withdraw from the scheme on the grounds that it is stifling free expression. The Telegraph says the organisation has lost touch with reality, as more and more people who dissent from Stonewall’s increasingly whacky agenda are smeared and abused. In a recent interview, the CEO of Stonewall compared gender critical beliefs to anti-Semitism!

One of its founder members, Simon Fanshawe, has been cancelled by the organisation for disagreeing with its stance on trans issues. “How bitterly ironic that the only freedom Stonewall won’t embrace is the freedom to disagree,” he wrote in the Mail.

Labour MP Dawn Butler launched a poll on Twitter asking her followers who they trusted more, Stonewall or Liz Truss? The Equalities Minister won 69.5%. It isn’t our business what Stonewall wants to campaign for, but it should not try to promote its agenda by stifling dissent, shaming its opponents and handing out inaccurate legal guidance, all of which threatens free speech.

Ollie Robinson attacked for tweets he sent as a teenager

Cricketer Ollie Robinson was forced to apologise after his test match debut for tweets posted almost a decade ago, when he was 18. Nobody’s career should be destroyed for things they said as teenagers, no matter how foolish they might be. We will be monitoring the situation – especially if Robinson faces further sanctions. In the meantime, we would advise all our members with Twitter accounts to install ‘Tweet Delete’, an app that deletes any tweets more than a week old.

King’s College London apologises for sending “harmful” photo of Prince Philip to staff

King’s College London issued an apology after a staff member sent colleagues a 2002 photograph of Prince Philip opening a university library with the Queen. KCL, of which the Prince had been a governor since 1955, said, “Through feedback and subsequent conversations, we have come to realise the harm that this caused members of our community, because of his history of racist and sexist comments. We are sorry to have caused this harm.” This apology has been widely ridiculed.

Wuhan lab leak theory

Writing in the Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs takes on the huge pressure not to challenge “the Science” that meant the lab leak theory about the origins of Covid-19 was effectively suppressed until a few weeks ago. “The West has found no definitive antidote against everyday impulses of conformism, snobbery and intellectual laziness,” she writes.

Freddie Sayers in UnHerd says that Facebook’s crackdown on “misinformation” about the lab leak hypothesis – a theory now regarded as quite plausible – shows how powerful Big Tech has become.

FSU writes to Met Police over arrest of evangelical preacher

The Free Speech Union has written to Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, following the recent arrest of the evangelical Christian preacher Hatun Tash in Hyde Park. Ms Tash often criticises Islamic doctrine and the Koran, and large groups of protestors, mostly Muslim men, often try to prevent her from speaking. On several occasions the police have responded to this by forcibly removing Ms Tash from Hyde Park, even though she is not the aggressor in these situations. In her latest arrest, property was taken from her by the police and not returned, even though she was released without charge. We’ve asked the police to urgently commit to protecting Tash’s right to free speech, and to provide training for officers so that they understand the right to free expression.

Does the culture war even exist? (Yes)

Our Director Douglas Murray rejects the idea that the culture war is a right-wing fantasy, a claim we frequently hear. Gareth Roberts, also writing in UnHerd, says that far from the culture war being an invention of the Conservative Party, it has taken years “to drag the hopelessly naive and unaware Tories, kicking and screaming” into debates about gender ideology and critical race theory.

Jonathan Ross has spoken out against cancel culture. During an appearance on Loose Women, he said, “You see people being stopped from speaking at universities because they are expressing things that students don’t want to hear… or there’s this new thing called ‘safetyism’, when people are saying, ‘I don’t feel safe at work in this environment because people hold different opinions to me.’ I think that’s dangerous and I think that’s wrong, and that’s an area I would kind of push back on.” His comments were endorsed by Spiked.

Elsewhere, Charles Bremner interviewed Sonia Mabrouk, the combative opponent of woke politics in France, for the Times.

Financial censorship

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has reported on the phenomenon of financial cancelling, where banks or other financial institutions abruptly close accounts of lobby groups and campaign organisations because they disapprove of their politics: “When a handful of online payment services can dictate who has access to financial services, they can also determine which people and which services get to exist in our increasingly digital world. While tech giants like Google and Facebook have come under fire for their content moderation practices and wrongfully banning accounts, financial services haven’t gotten the same level of scrutiny.”

Event: The Online Safety Bill’s Threat to Free Speech

Date and time: Wednesday 16 June 2021, 7-8.30pm on Zoom. 

Join us for the FSU’s first Online In-Depth, an opportunity to ask the experts, get up to speed on a free speech issue and share your views with fellow FSU members. Our experts for the evening are the FSU’s Director of Research Dr Radomir Tylecote and Matthew Lesh, Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute. Rado and Matthew are co-authors of the FSU’s briefing “You’re On Mute: The Online Safety Bill and what the Government should do instead”, a critical assessment of the Government’s Online Safety Bill. Will the Bill make the UK “the safest place in the world to go online” or will it restrict online free speech to a degree almost unprecedented in any democracy? The evening will be hosted by Claire Fox, Director of the Academy of Ideas and a member of the FSU’s Advisory Council. 

You can register here for this members’ only event.

Event: The Great American Race Game

The UK premiere of Martin Durkin’s provocative documentary film on the politics of race in America will be held on 1 July and followed by an interview with the director, with an opportunity for audience members to ask questions. Tickets can be obtained here.

Date and time: Thursday 1 July 2021, 7-10:30pm

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Remember, all of our work depends on our members, we receive no public money: sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against the censors.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Batley teacher allowed to return

The Batley teacher will be able to return to the classroom – a welcome result that should never have been in doubt – but the Batley Multi-Academy Trust appears to have capitulated to the mob demanding Islamic blasphemy codes be enforced in schools. The Trust has said it is “committed to ensuring that offence is not caused”. Few have dared to voice their support for the teacher, but the local branch of a trade union for rubbish collectors tabled an excellent motion in his support. As Brendan O’Neill puts it in the Spectator, “If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions.” It’s the binmen who’ve shown true solidarity.

Following a controversy at Allerton Grange School in Leeds about pupils displaying the Palestinian flag, Madeline Grant writes in the Telegraph about the growing number of culture war episodes playing-out in schools, including Batley.

We have written to the Education Secretary asking him to investigate the shoddy treatment of Dr Bernard Randall, the former chaplain of Trent College in Nottingham, who lost his job after delivering a sermon in which he told the pupils they were free to make up their own minds about LGBT issues and didn’t have to accept the prevailing orthodoxy. You can read that letter here.

If you are a sixth form or secondary school teacher and would like to book a speaker to talk about the importance of freedom of speech and expression, please contact the Free Speech Champions.

Higher education

Much of our recent case work has come from Scottish universities, and there are now calls for Scotland to introduce free speech legislation of its own to mirror England’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill. Writing in Spiked, Jamie Gillies argues that “Scottish ministers would be wise to adopt the priorities of their counterparts down south” with respect to free speech. Magnus Linklater says in the Times that the state must step in if universities can’t be trusted to stop the muzzling of dissenting views. Free Speech Champion Rob Lownie calls on students to defend the right to free speech in Areo, citing the case of Dr Neil Thin, the Edinburgh academic we are supporting.

The Institute of Economic Affairs published research this week arguing that lack of competition between universities is a key driver behind the campus free speech crisis, the solution being to make it easier to set up private universities. Noah Carl wrote in Quillette about the petulant and absurd campaign against our Advisory Council member Professor Eric Kaufmann, which, luckily, seems to have fizzled out. A welcome statement from the Provost of UCL set out his position on the importance of universities remaining neutral arenas for public debate, facilitating free speech rather than taking a stance as an organisation; in stark contrast to the position taken by actors’ union Equity on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Meanwhile, the universities of San Diego and Rhode Island have dropped investigations into academics following an intervention by the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Police Scotland targeting gender critical feminists for stickers and tweets

We have offered our support to Marion Millar, a feminist campaigner north of the border who has been left unable to sleep by the stress of a police investigation over comments made on social media about transgender rights. Police Scotland have also put out a much-ridiculed call for the public to come forward if they see “controversial stickers” being put up by gender critical feminists. Erasing the rights of women is not an acceptable price to pay for trans rights, says Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph.

Following the extraordinary report commissioned by the University of Essex that found Stonewall gave it “misleading” advice, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has withdrawn from the Stonewall diversity scheme.

The waning power of cancel culture?

Alexander Larman asks in the Critic whether cancel culture is starting to lose its power, a theme explored by Louis Wise in the Sunday Times. But Jonathan Goldsmith warns that while the Higher Education Bill promises more robust protections for free speech in universities, countless other workplaces and professions will lack the same protections.

Kenan Malik argues in the Guardian that cancel culture comes from both the left and the right, but the preponderance of our case work involves a certain type of authoritarian progressive – the woke – censoring dissenters. Although there are instances of the right cancelling people, as Tom Slater points out in Spiked. He argues for the importance of defending the principle of free speech consistently, regardless of whose voice is being silenced.

Who fights in the culture war?

A new study claims to demonstrate limited public awareness of terms like “cancel culture”, “woke”, and “trigger warnings”, but fringe ideas can spread into workplaces, schools and universities with incredible speed, as we have seen in the last 12 months. Meanwhile, the National Trust is embroiled in an anti-woke rebellion after members forced the resignation of the Chairman, with calls now for the departure of the Director-General. This follows the National Trust’s publication of a report last year about the links between its historical properties and the slave trade.

Harpsichords face imminent “decolonisation” after the Royal Academy of Music pledged to review its collection of rare instruments in the wake of George Floyd’s death. It is unclear what connects historical instruments to events in Minnesota, a point made by our Director Douglas Murray in the Spectator.

Businesses have been advised not to invest in unconscious bias training, the Telegraph reports, which leaves white men feeling that they’re “being told off for who they are”.

“The best way to defend freedom of speech may be to abandon the defensive position and instead turn the tables on utopians, by offering them a platform to explain their own beliefs so that they will be forced to face the inherent failings of utopianism itself: a generous and ironic strategy.” That’s the suggestion of Ewan Morrison, in his long read on the perils of utopian thinking in Areo.

Ofcom, social media and censorship

Dominic Cummings made a series of bombshell revelations about the government’s cack-handed response to the coronavirus crisis in the House of Commons on Wednesday. But why hadn’t we heard about these scandals before? One reason, says our founder Toby Young in the Mail, is because of Ofcom’s coronavirus guidance, warning broadcasters to exercise extreme caution when broadcasting material that could undermine public confidence in the Covid advice being pumped out by authorities. As long-standing members and supporters will recall, we tried to persuade the High Court to declare the guidance unlawful in December but were unsuccessful.

The battle for the control of Ofcom is more important than ever, given how powerful the regulator will be if the ill-conceived and chilling Online Safety Bill becomes law. The legislation would hand huge powers to Ofcom to police social media. As per our briefing on the Bill, the sections empowering Ofcom to punish social media companies for refusing to censor “misinformation” should be scrapped – and the reason that is so wrong-headed is illustrated by the fate of the lab leak theory about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. 12 months ago, it was dismissed as “misinformation” and anyone posting about it on Facebook risked being banned. This week, Joe Biden called for it to be properly investigated and, like clockwork, Facebook lifted its ban. You can read another piece by Toby in the Mail about that.

Nick Buckley, whose case we successfully fought last year, wrote about the “cruel mistress of shallow pleasure” that is social media, suggesting that it will be another decade before we know whether it has done more harm than good.

A leak of Facebook documents has shown how it goes about censoring anti-vaxxers, with the social network using an algorithm to calculate a “vaccine hesitancy score” and demoting comments, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

The future of game shows…

Educational Liberty Alliance

US readers (and others) may be interested in this free event:

The Impact of “Safe Speech” Codes in K-12 Schools

Wednesday 2^nd June, 4-5 pm (Central).

To register, please click here.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Remember, all of our work depends on our members, we receive no public money: sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against the censors.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Help people like FSU member Lisa Keogh

Lisa Keogh is a 29-year-old law student at Abertay University and a member of the Free Speech Union. She is being put through a disciplinary procedure for defining a woman as “someone born with reproductive organs and who can menstruate” in the course of a classroom discussion, and this week the university has escalated its investigation into her. Lisa spoke to Woman’s Hour about the ordeal of facing an official investigation, with the risk of expulsion, while sitting her final exams; she is just days away from finishing her degree. She described to Spiked the feeling of having a target on her back. The case exposes the falsehood of those who claim that campus censorship is a myth, writes Tom Slater in the Spectator.

The enforcement of trans orthodoxy across UK universities, backed up by disciplinary codes, means it’s no longer safe to state what most would consider biological facts without risking serious consequences. Lisa’s case was raised by Joanna Cherry QC MP during the debate on the Queen’s Speech last week, in which she spoke up in support of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.

We’re backing our member in full and hoping the university will conclude that Lisa has no case to answer. But if the university tries to withhold her degree, the case will probably end up in court and we will back Lisa all the way. (See our press release about the case here.) To keep helping people like Lisa we need new members. Membership starts at just £2.49 a month. Take a stand for free speech and join us today if you haven’t already. If you are a member, spread the word: invite a friend or family member to sign-up.

FSU backs trainee teacher over career-threatening referral for supporting the right to show Mohammed cartoons in class

The fallout from Batley Grammar School continues to spread: a trainee teacher at Manchester Metropolitan University faced a serious hearing, threatening his future career, after he asked his course leaders to support the right of teachers to show cartoons of Mohammed. The decision has prompted widespread outrage. He is a member of the FSU and we have been supporting him. The result of the hearing is expected soon.

The teacher at the heart of the Batley affair is still in hiding nearly two months on, with the location of the safe house kept secret even from his relatives. The Mail on Sunday reported that an imam at the centre of the affair may have broken hate crime laws after he called Muslim MPs who defended free speech “coconuts”. Free Speech Champion Daniel James Sharp wrote about the Rushdie affair in Areo, an event which has been a grim prototype for the enforcement of Islamic blasphemy norms in the West ever since.

Stonewall’s silencing of gender critical views exposed

The University of Essex has issued a rare and welcome apology for cancelling talks by two academics because of their gender critical views. An investigation into the events, commissioned by the University, concluded that Stonewall, the LGBT charity which had helped draft the University’s Trans and Non Binary Staff Policy, had undermined the “university’s obligations to uphold freedom of expression”, given an “incorrect summary of the law” and provided “misleading policies”, according to Kristina Murkett writing in UnHerd. In the Spectator Julie Bindel called the report a “game-changer”. The full report and apology can be read here.

Meanwhile, Lady Falkner, the new head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has defended the right of women to question trans ideology.

Is the tide turning in universities?

The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is critical to the fightback against cancel culture and campus censors. We’ve been campaigning for stronger free speech protections in universities, so this Bill is very welcome. The Free Speech Union has dealt with more than 100 university free speech cases since its launch in February 2020. You can read our press release about the Bill here. Several academics, including our Chair, Professor Nigel Biggar, and our Advisory Council member, Professor Eric Kaufmann, wrote to the Times defending the proposed legislation after it was dismissed as unnecessary by Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein.

The University College Union (UCU) has produced a survey designed to discredit the Bill, encouraging respondents to describe cancel culture as “overblown rhetoric” – not exactly an impartial way of gathering views. But the censorious behaviour of university authorities continues to make the case for the Bill even as its critics claim everything’s rosy in the garden.

In the past week alone, Exeter University faced accusations of a Soviet-style culture on campuses, with academic staff told their courses won’t be accredited if they don’t “move away… [from a] white, Eurocentric” curriculum; our Advisory Council member Zoe Strimpel drew attention to the roll out across the higher education sector of mandatory unconscious bias training, leaving many academics “terrified to speak their minds”; and Cambridge has just unveiled a new bias reporting hotline, encouraging students to report students and academic staff for such crimes as raising their eyebrows when a student of colour is speaking, referring to a woman as a “girl” or failing to use a trans person’s preferred gender pronouns. One beleaguered Cambridge academic told the Telegraph: “Heated disagreement on many academic subjects are likely to become impossible. They have effectively laid out the pitchforks, and it is now up to the woke mob to pick them up.”

We continue to support our member Dr Neil Thin, an anthropology lecturer at Edinburgh University. This week the Times reported that no action will be taken against the students who abused him as a “rape apologist”, “crusty old man”, and “scumbag”. In the Herald, Stuart Waiton says freedom of speech is doomed unless people stand up for it.

Meanwhile, our founder Toby Young welcomed the surprise decision by Oriel College, Oxford not to pull down its statue of Cecil Rhodes, calling it a “victory for common sense over the woke Taliban”.

Chaplain deemed to be extremist for telling school students they were free to question LGTB policies

Dr Bernard Randall was referred to the Prevent programme by his school – a CofE independent boarding school – after he gave a sermon in which he defended students’ right to form their own philosophical views about LGBT issues and shouldn’t feel under pressure to conform with fashionable orthodoxy. He ended up losing his job and has now begun a legal battle in the Employment Tribunal. He is a member of the FSU and we are writing to the school to complain about his treatment, as well as to the Education Secretary to complain about the school.

Cancel culture and intolerance

An especially absurd case of cancel culture came our way last week – an art historian was suspended by the Arts Society for an off-the-cuff comment about the aftermath of Harry and Meghan’s Oprah Winfrey interview. “You couldn’t turn the television on without some person of a colourful disposition having a moan about something,” she said – the word “colourful” landing her with a suspension from the approved list of speakers and compulsory “diversity training”. We’re backing her.

Professor Rima Azar is the latest Canadian victim of cancel culture. She has been suspended without pay because she challenged a student who said Canada was afflicted by “systemic racism”. Professor Azar is raising funds to mount a legal defence. You can donate here.

Developments at Pimlico Academy don’t bode well for the future of free speech: the headteacher resigned after his insistence on flying the Union flag and on other “utterly unremarkable” policies triggered a massive backlash, according to the Spectator. There was no sign of tolerance either from Bangor’s new “agender” mayor, one of the surprise victors in this month’s local elections. Peter Franklin has written an optimistic piece for UnHerd arguing that the new wave of Maoist intolerance sweeping the land won’t triumph in the end. Maybe not, but only if good people band together to resist it. That was the view of Janet Daley in her Telegraph column this week.

Prince Harry baffled by free speech

The Duke of Sussex attracted ridicule after he said he found the First Amendment “baffling”. As Toby pointed out in the Mail, free speech doesn’t just protect people at the fringes of society, it protects people like him and Meghan too: “I’m hopeful that if we do more to defend mavericks and dissenters – by introducing the equivalent of the First Amendment in the UK, for instance – we will revive our democratic tradition and learn to appreciate open debate again. In the meantime, Prince Harry would do well to remember that free speech protects everyone, including him, not just the enemies of the woke Left.”

Our director Douglas Murray likewise wrote in the Telegraph that the UK could do with a First Amendment of its own: if we did, perhaps police wouldn’t record “non-crime hate incidents” against people for making perfectly lawful remarks.

Elsewhere in America, a Space Force officer was relieved of his command for comments criticising diversity and inclusion programmes in the military.

Tech and online “safety”

Kenan Malik criticises the Government’s new Online Safety Bill in the Guardian, while Paul Coleman in Spiked says the legislation rests on a “very dangerous” approach. You can read our briefing about the Bill, written by Radomir Tylecote, our Director of Research, the day after it was published, here.

Google is to “help” users by prompting gender neutral language within its Google Docs app, the Times reports. While Twitter temporarily suspended a Spanish politician after he tweeted that a “man cannot get pregnant”.

New Zealand FSU up and running

Our sister organisation in New Zealand has launched successfully and has already taken up the fight for free speech. You can follow its efforts here.

Help defend London’s Polish-language newspaper

A Polish-language newspaper is facing ruin following a libel case and a string of judicial errors. Help defend free speech and journalistic freedom by contributing to its crowd-funder.

Video of FSU’s ‘speakeasy’ with Quentin Letts

For those of you who missed the FSU’s first ‘speakeasy’, in which Toby interviewed the journalist Quentin Letts about his new book Stop Bloody Bossing Me About, you can watch it on video here.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Remember, all of our work depends on our members, we receive no public money: sign-up today or encourage a friend to join and help us turn the tide against the censors.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Trainee teacher faces career-threatening referral for supporting the right to show Mohammed cartoons in class

The fallout from Batley Grammar School continues to spread: a trainee teacher at Manchester Metropolitan University faced a serious hearing, threatening his future career, after he asked his course leaders to support the right of teachers to show cartoons of Mohammed. The decision has prompted widespread outrage. He is a member of the FSU and we have been supporting him. The result of the hearing is expected soon.

The teacher at the heart of the Batley affair is still in hiding six weeks on, with the location of the safe house kept secret even from his relatives.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill strikes a blow for free speech on campuses

The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is critical to the fightback against cancel culture and campus censors. We’ve been campaigning for stronger free speech protections in universities, so this Bill is very welcome. The Free Speech Union has dealt with more than 100 university free speech cases in a year. Our press release about the Bill is here.

The legislation is absolutely necessary to win the battle for free speech on campuses, but there also needs to be a wholesale culture change. Dr Michael Spence, Provost of University College London, says core intellectual skills have atrophied and universities need to teach students how to discuss controversial topics without abusing each other. Academics and students also need additional legal protection from “capricious dismissal for politically unorthodox speech”, writes Adam King in UnHerd.

Amid the hounding of Edinburgh academic Dr Neil Thin – who is an FSU member and whom we’re supporting – calls have come for the resignation of the University’s Principal for allowing an “intolerant and illiberal” culture to develop, according to the Mail. Meanwhile Dr Thin’s student accusers are reportedly under investigation by the University themselves for the torrent of abuse they have directed at him.

It’s not surprising that after years of being treated in this way dissenting academics felt the need to set up the Journal of Controversial Ideas, says its co-editor Peter Singer.

Online Safety Bill

Unfortunately, the Government has taken a rather uneven approach to free speech, writes Lizzie Troughton in the Critic. The Queen’s Speech included the new university free speech legislation, but also the Online Safety Bill – legislation that threatens to stifle online debate. We’ve joined with other campaigners to warn of the danger this Bill poses, both to freedom of the press and to ordinary social media users. The Culture Secretary says the legislation will not be a “woke charter” but we’ve been warning of the threat these proposals pose to free speech for some time. You can see the recent report we published on the Government’s plans for internet regulation here and our response to the Bill here. Guido Fawkes has set out the eye-watering cost of this ill-conceived piece of legislation.

Law student facing expulsion for defining the word “woman” – FSU case raised in Parliament

One of our members is being put through a disciplinary procedure for defining a woman as “someone born with reproductive organs and who can menstruate”. To many readers, this may sound like a biological fact, but with the enforcement of trans orthodoxy across UK universities, backed up by disciplinary codes, it’s no longer safe to say it. The member in question is a final year law student at a Scottish university with two young children, and the case was raised by Joanna Cherry QC MP during the debate on the Queen’s Speech this week, in which she spoke up in support of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill. We’re backing our member in full and hoping the university will drop the investigation.

Dozens of women have faced disciplinary action at work for expressing gender critical views, sometimes just for asking questions during equality training. The chilling of private opinions by employers has been taken up by Andrew Tettenborn, a member of our Legal Advisory Council, in the Critic. If you’ve faced a similar sanction, contact us at [email protected].

Chaplain deemed to be extremist for telling school students they were free to question LGTB policies

Dr Bernard Randall was referred to the Prevent programme by his school after he gave a sermon in which he defended students’ right to form and express their own philosophical views, including about LGBT issues. He ended up losing his job and has now begun a legal battle in the Employment Tribunal. He is a member of the FSU and we are supporting him. Meanwhile a preacher in Finland is facing prosecution for her view that homosexuality is sinful.

How woke conquered the world

Joanna Williams, who sits on our Advisory Council, explores the “intolerance and authoritarianism” of woke activists in a paper for her think tank Cieo. “Those interested in seeing genuine social change need to push back against the elitist, censorious, anti-democratic and authoritarian instincts enshrined within the woke outlook”, she writes.

The Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs has said the UK would become ungovernable if “rigid identity groups which refuse to accept the validity of differing points of view” triumph. To win this battle they have launched an “anti-woke manifesto”. In the publishing world the woke have already succeeded, leaving the industry in crisis, writes our Director Douglas Murray in UnHerd.

Also in UnHerd, Mary Harrington analyses the economic precarity that underlies the woke movement. Myke Bartlett says the culture war and cancel culture are rooted in American puritanism.

The ludicrous heights of cancel culture

An especially absurd case of cancel culture came our way this week – an art historian was suspended by the Arts Society for an off-the-cuff comment about Meghan Markle. “You couldn’t turn the television on without some person of a colourful disposition having a moan about something,” she said – the word “colourful” landing her with a suspension from the approved list of speakers and compulsory “diversity training”.

Professor Rima Azar is the latest Canadian victim of cancel culture. She has been suspended without pay because she challenged a student who said Canada was afflicted by “systemic racism”. Professor Azar is raising funds to mount a legal defence. You can donate here.

Free Speech Champions Drop-in event with ex-New York Times journalist Bari Weiss

FSU members are welcome to register for the next Free Speech Champions online ‘Drop-In’ event on Wednesday 19th May, “Can Truth Survive the New Journalism?” A panel of four eminent speakers will consider the current state of journalism and its implications for democracy and the pursuit of truth: Bari Weiss, Helen Lewis, Mick Hume and Katie Herzog. The evening will be chaired by Inaya Folarin Iman, one of the founding directors of the FSU. You can register for a free ticket via Eventbrite here.

Supporters may also be interested in this public meeting on Friday 14^th May on the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.

New Zealand FSU up and running

Our sister organisation in New Zealand has launched and has already taken up the fight for free speech. You can follow their efforts here.

Help defend London’s Polish-language newspaper

A Polish-language newspaper is facing ruin following a libel case and a string of judicial errors. Help defend free speech and journalistic freedom by contributing to their crowd-funder.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Edinburgh University is becoming “an embarrassment to Scotland”

Transgender people “do not need to be treated with such reverence that we cannot be questioned or challenged”, writes Debbie Hayton in UnHerd, following the publication by Edinburgh University of a list of banned words – microinsults – that are deemed offensive. The University is “becoming an embarrassment to Scotland”, writes Stuart Waiton in the Herald. Dr Neil Thin, also of Edinburgh University, has been suspended from teaching duties and is under investigation after a student mob targeted him for challenging woke orthodoxy. The students in question have been described as “entitled, but not very bright, lecture-hall fillers”. We are supporting him in full.

“If this government is serious about restoring free speech in our country, it should start by doing away with legislation that is actively curtailing freedom of expression”, writes Emily Carver in ConservativeHome.

Blasphemy and religious hatred

The Government has been urged to step in to the investigation at Batley Grammar School amid concerns that local imams may be able to influence the process, all but guaranteeing a guilty verdict for the teacher that showed his class one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed. Readers will know that we wrote to the headteacher of the school criticising his decision to suspend the teacher, who is still in hiding with his wife and young children, and to the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, urging the Government to introduce a duty on schools to promote freedom of speech.

Ivan Hare QC warned of the dangers of the new hate crime laws that have been proposed in Northern Ireland, England and Wales in this fascinating lecture, explaining that the law against ‘stirring up’ hatred – which would be significantly expanded under the proposed changes, just as it has been in Scotland – has become a de facto law against blasphemy. His lecture can also be read here.

Ever-expanding hate crime

The public are being pushed-aside by special interest groups, the Telegraph warns, as reform of hate crime heads in one direction: towards eroding free speech. We’re campaigning against some of the anti-free speech proposals of the Law Commission of England and Wales, but we’re anticipating more chilling recommendations from them after they’ve concluded their consultation about these reforms. Charles Wide, a former judge at the Old Bailey, has warned that left-wing lobby groups have too much influence over the Law Commission.

Among the most sinister aspect of hate crime policing in the UK is the recording of non-crime hate incidents against innocent people. Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd joined calls for police to scrap this practice. We are backing ex-policeman Harry Miller, who is trying to persuade the Court of Appeal to declare this practice unlawful. You can contribute to our fundraiser, which we’ll be using to help him pay his court costs if he’s unsuccessful, here.

Former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, now the Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, took up the case of Maya Forstater in the Times, rejecting the notion that gender critical views are in any way comparable to racism. Maya Forstater is the ex-employee of a think tank who was fired after saying on Twitter that she didn’t think transwomen were women. She took her employer to an Employment Tribunal, but the panel ruled against her, with the judge saying that her views weren’t deserving of respect in a democratic society. Maya has appealed that verdict and is awaiting the outcome of her appeal. You can read about her ongoing case here and contribute to her fundraiser here.

The Times gave a pre-election overview of recent free speech battles fought in Scotland, including the unsuccessful battle against the new Hate Crime and Public Order Act. The paper also reports on Nicola Sturgeon’s failure to understand the tension between women’s rights and trans rights, and the attempt by trans activists to silence gender critical feminists. We cannot win the gender wars by relying on evidence and reason, writes Mary Harrington in UnHerd, as the intellectual foundations of the Enlightenment have been demolished.

The Welsh Government wants to stamp out micro-aggressions with a set of ‘anti-racist’ proposals that risk making normal workplace interactions a minefield, warns Professor Andrew Tettenborn of our Legal Advisory Council in Conservative Home. He also wrote to First Minister Mark Drakeford about these proposals on our behalf last week. You can read that letter here.

Christian Today reports on Pastor John Sherwood, arrested in Uxbridge for a sermon deemed to be homophobic. We are writing to the Metropolitan Police to protest about his arrest. Happily, Sherwood is now preaching again.

Trump ban to continue – for now

Facebook’s Oversight Board has ordered the company to justify its ban on Donald Trump within the next six months, finding that the decision to suspend him was “indeterminate and standardless” and that the platform’s rules must be apply to all users in a consistent way. The former president has launched a new platform of his own. Florida is ready to enact legislation that would impose severe fines on social media companies that permanently remove the accounts of political candidates.

Speech online

A judicial review has begun to make the Government enforce age verification checks on pornographic websites, a measure introduced in the Digital Economy Act but never acted on.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is considering using private firms to monitor extremist chatter online, reports CNN – censorship by algorithm.

India’s continued suppression of online criticism of its government has attracted fresh criticism.

Harry Potter quiz cancelled                                           

A Harry Potter quiz was cancelled by a book festival in New Zealand because of J.K. Rowling’s views on trans issues. Our General Secretary Toby Young told the Mail on Sunday: “J.K. Rowling is one of Britain’s most influential and respectable contemporary writers. This is why the decision by the Wairarapa book festival to cancel a children’s Harry Potter quiz because of comments J.K. Rowling made during an important debate on women’s only spaces is chilling. If the creator of our most successful export since James Bond can be declared persona non grata, anyone can.” Our affiliate in New Zealand launched this week – the first of many, we hope.

Hong Kong clampdown

Former Green Party leader Baroness Bennett has written a piece in the Independent about the clampdown on free speech in Hong Kong, reporting that journalists are living in fear and feel compelled to self-censor.

Political speech should never be compelled

Freedom to speak your mind is essential in a democracy, but free speech also means “the right not to be legally forced to engage in political speech”, argues Spencer Case in Arc Digital. In universities, corporations and organisations of all types, people now feel compelled to sign petitions they don’t agree with, and, in some cases, sign loyalty oaths that are far more draconian than the ones people were forced to sign during the McCarthy era.

The roots of cancel culture

Historian Tom Holland argues that Christian ideals remain at the heart of modern culture war battles, while journalist Malcolm Gladwell says a failure to understand and offer forgiveness is at the heart of modern cancel culture: “Cancel culture is what happens when you have a generation of people who are not raised with a Christian ethic of forgiveness.” Christopher Schelin compares the phenomenon to “old-fashioned church discipline”. It’s certainly not new, writes Raymond Keene in the Article, comparing modern woke witch-hunts to purges carried out by the Romans and ancient Chinese.

Wherever it comes from, cancel culture sucks, says Suzanne Harrington in the Irish Examiner. Musician Glenn Danzig warns that it will stop another “punk explosion”. He told NME, “There won’t be any new bands coming out like that. Now, they will immediately get cancelled.”

Petition: Protect employees’ free speech

A petition calling on the Government to amend the law to protect the rights of employees to speak freely outside of the workplace has been launched. We flagged it up a few weeks ago, but we thought we’d give it another plug. You can sign it here. This is something the FSU will be campaigning about in due course.

Free Speech Champions Drop-in event with ex-New York Times journalist Bari Weiss

FSU members are welcome to register for the next Free Speech Champions online ‘Drop-In’ event, “Can Truth Survive the New Journalism?” A panel of four eminent speakers will consider the current state of journalism and its implications for democracy and the pursuit of truth: Bari Weiss, Helen Lewis, Mick Hume and Katie Herzog. The evening will be chaired by Inaya Folarin Iman, one of the founding directors of the FSU. You can register for a free ticket via Eventbrite here.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Online Safety Bill

This week we published You’re On Mute, our report into the serious danger posed to free speech by the Government’s forthcoming Online Safety Bill. The report was written by our Research Director Dr Radomir Tylecote, as well as Victoria Hewson from the Institute of Economic Affairs, Matthew Lesh from the Adam Smith Institute and Dr Bryn Harris, our Chief Legal Counsel.

Dr Tylecote warned in The Critic that the legislation would “restrict free speech online to a degree almost unprecedented in a democracy” and the Free Speech Union was quoted in the Express warning that the bill would inevitably be used to enforce woke political views and stifle free expression.

Matthew Lesh demolished the proposals in CapX, slamming social media giants for “both excessive and inconsistent censorship and under moderation of genuinely unlawful speech… These censorship issues will only get worse when the Government gives the power to Ofcom to dictate how private companies moderate their platforms. It will also fail to address the very real harms happening on the internet.”

Meanwhile Ofcom was blasted by ex-BBC journalist Robin Aitken in the Telegraph for the enlarged “hate speech” section in its new “censor’s charter”. The updated version of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code forbids broadcasters from airing anything which incites hate on the grounds of “disability, ethnicity, social origin, gender, sex, gender reassignment, nationality, race, religion or belief, colour, genetic features, language, political or any other opinion”.

Equity accused of “tone policing” theatre critics over race, age and gender

The actors’ trade union Equity has told theatre critics to “challenge their own biases” and “avoid referring to immutable characteristics such as age, race, gender and appearance”. Our General Secretary Toby Young, who used to be a drama critic, took Equity to task in the Spectator over its new guidelines, launched as part of its anti-racism campaign. Ben Lawrence in the Telegraph was similarly scathing, writing that Equity was ultimately threatening “the freedom of artists of all backgrounds, and freedom of thought”.

Maya Forstater appeals Employment Tribunal verdict over her dismissal for gender critical views

Maya Forstater was sacked from an international think tank for criticising transgender ideology after a Twitter storm in 2018. She took her case to an Employment Tribunal and was told, incredibly, that her view that “male people are not women” was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Her appeal was heard this week and she told the Telegraph she was “fighting for the right to say men can never be women”. This is a landmark free speech case so if you feel like contributing to Maya’s fundraiser, please do.

Rebecca Lowe of pro-free speech group Radical wrote in ConservativeHome: “Until recently, it would’ve been funny to hear someone claim it controversial to state that only ‘adult human females’ are women. You could even imagine this being used as an example, back then, of ‘something we all believe to be the case’. It’s not so funny any more.”

No political party in Scotland is brave enough to enter the debate on the legal meaning of “woman”, says feminist Susan Dalgety. Any argument against gender self-identification is screamed down as ‘transphobic’, and the co-leader of the Scottish Greens compared gender critical feminists to racists. Jamie Gillies takes up this argument in Spiked, asking where the free speech defenders are in Scottish politics.

The push to let people “tailor their own reality to personal preference – and to use the law’s coercive force to compel public compliance” is only likely to get worse, argues Mary Harrington in UnHerd, following a Canadian legal decision about polyamory. Jordan Peterson was right, she says, that social justice legislation is resulting in compelled speech.

Pastor arrested for ‘offensive’ preaching

A 71-year-old pastor was arrested in Uxbridge for preaching about the Bible, which police said was homophobic. Pastor John Sherwood said, “I wasn’t making any homophobic comments, I was just defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. I was only saying what the Bible says – I wasn’t wanting to hurt anyone or cause offence.”

His fellow preacher, Pastor Peter Simpson, said, “Anyone who cares about liberty should be concerned about what happened in Uxbridge.”

Pastor Sherwood has been released, but the police have passed details of his case to the Crown Prosecution Service. If he’s charged with an offence, the Free Speech Union will be joining with Christian Concern to come to his defence.

Blasphemy

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan continues his campaign for a global blasphemy law, threatening trade boycotts with countries where “incidents” of blasphemy against the Islamic prophet Mohammed occur. Khan promises his campaign will be effective, but as Gavin Mortimer points out in the Spectator we already have “an unofficial blasphemy law” across much of the Continent “and those who challenge it – such as the French teacher Samuel Paty or the Yorkshire teacher in Batley – lose either their life or their livelihood”.

Two Iranians have been handed the death penalty for insulting Mohammed, and an Algerian researcher is facing prison for ‘blasphemy’ in his home country.

Meanwhile, Sarah Ditum argues in the Times that Western atheists are increasingly behaving like the fundamentalists they oppose, censoring blasphemy against the woke creed.

Welcome to the Journal of Controversial Ideas

The Journal of Controversial Ideas has finally launched, having been talked about for at least two years. It is billed as “the first open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal specifically created to promote free inquiry on controversial topics”.

“Freedom of thought and discussion in the universities is no longer a universally-held value, even among academics,” its editors say in the Times.

An article from the new journal was discussed in UnHerd, exploring whether universities should host flat-earthers, concluding that “to protect students from every wrong idea isn’t just infantilising, it is enfeebling”.

No rest for the censors in UK universities

A “stellar” academic at the University of Edinburgh has been relieved of his teaching duties and now faces an investigation, the Times reports. Students circulated a template letter and links to online complaint forms to encourage people to accuse Dr Neil Thin of being a racist. His sin was to oppose the renaming of the University’s David Hume Tower and speak out against a campus event – ‘Resisting Whiteness’ – which featured a segregated area for non-white students. Dr Thin is a member of the Free Speech Union and we will be providing him with our full range of assistance, up to and including legal support.

Our Chief Legal Counsel, Dr Bryn Harris, has written a piece for the Critic arguing in favour of the Government’s forthcoming academic free speech bill. “If we want a culture of free speech at our universities, we must force open a space in which students and academics can let that culture grow,” he says. “That can only be achieved if there is an enforceable right to push back against institutions that try to close down that space.”

Dr Michael Spence, Provost of University College London, has said universities have a responsibility to “teach students how to disagree well across really sometimes quite profound barriers of disagreement”. This has to be part of the answer to opposing cancel culture.

Covid free speech threat

Paul Dolan argues in the Telegraph in defence of academic inquiry and empirical investigation, warning of groupthink and conformity when it comes to lockdowns and other measures to contain COVID-19. Mark Changizi, co-founder of a pro-free speech group called FreeX, agrees, arguing in the Federalist that that free expression shouldn’t be a casualty of Covid. To illustrate the point, Twitter has censored tweets that are critical of India’s handling of its epidemic. A Twitter spokesman confirmed to the BBC that it had blocked material from being seen in India.

Cancel culture

The new biography of Philip Roth is to be pulped after author Blake Bailey was accused of sexual misconduct. The book is to be taken out of print less than a month after its release, even though Bailey has denied all of the allegations. Funnily enough, no woke mobs have sprung up to demand that Michel Foucault’s books be burnt following revelations that he sexually abused children in Tunisia.

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s book deal looks like the next to be targeted by woke publishing staff, with hundreds of Simon & Schuster employees demanding that his two-book deal be cancelled.

Seth Barron asks what happens next for the victims of cancel culture, while Katya Sedgwick writes, “The woke know exactly how to break their victims down.”

Back in the UK, a supermarket worker has won an appeal for unfair dismissal after he showed a Lidl colleague his swastika tattoo. The judge said a warning would have been a more proportionate response.

Social media

The EU is becoming the policeman of the internet, writes Edward Lucas, while Gilad Edelman argues American-style free speech is already dead on social media. In Cyprus a British mother is facing a £3,500 fine for criticising a politician on Facebook.

Stop bloody bossing us about!

Join us for the Free Speech Union’s first Online Speakeasy on Wednesday 5th May, 7 – 8.30pm, on Zoom.

All members are invited to this free event in which FSU General Secretary Toby Young will be joined by journalist, parliamentary sketch-writer, theatre critic and author Quentin Letts for an evening of seriously irreverent conversation about free speech. Members will be able to join in with a live Q and A.

Quentin’s latest book, Stop Bloody Bossing Me About: Why We Need to Stop Being Told What to Do, is a spirited rant against the bossy-boots, the fear-mongers and the finger-waggers who seem to dominate civic and cultural life. 

Members can register for their free ticket here. If you have any queries about this event, please email [email protected].

Quote of the week

“Freedom of speech used to be okay – what’s happened?”

 – Van Morrison, interviewed in the Times

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer

Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.

Richard Dawkins cancelled (again)

Richard Dawkins has incurred the wrath of the American Humanist Association for his latest act of blasphemy, this time a tweet questioning why it is frowned-upon to identify as a different race, but not as a different gender. As punishment, Professor Dawkins has been stripped of his Humanist of the Year award, given to him in 1996. He claimed he’d never added the award to his CV.

“Once a staunch enemy of religious zealots of every stripe, the association has been captured by the woke cult, a hard-Left ideological movement that is every bit as dogmatic and intolerant as fundamentalist Christians and Islamists,” writes our founder Toby Young in the Mail. Likewise, Debbie Hayton in the Spectator complains of the new “quasi-religious ideologies… taking root in spaces that the churches have vacated”.

Top universities in denial over free speech crisis

While the Guardian and Independent continue to see the free speech crisis as a right-wing invention, or a distraction invented by the Government to “pursue a culture war agenda”, universities have claimed that in 2020 just six events were cancelled. The vast amount of case work we have from students, academics and university employees paints a very different picture. This figure also does nothing to acknowledge the climate of self-censorship that now pervades British campuses.

The Russell Group of elite universities has vowed to protect “core values” of “free speech and academic freedom” and we’re working hard to ensure they actually uphold their legal obligation to do so. Some heartening news: according to one recent study, 81% of students think “freedom of expression is more important than ever”.

Meanwhile, Iain Duncan Smith says British universities “risk becoming mouthpieces for the CCP” because they are so financially dependent on China.

Parliament’s mandatory diversity training mocked by Lord Hannan

“Every new British lawmaker is required to take one obligatory course. Can you guess what it is about? How to move an amendment, maybe? Correct etiquette in the chamber? The proper registration of your financial interests? Election law? Of course not. The sole mandatory training course is called ‘Valuing Everyone Equally’,” writes the Conservative peer Dan Hannan in the Washington Examiner.

Hannan compares the spread of anti-discrimination workshops and Unconscious Bias Training in the UK to the Test Acts which barred individuals from holding public office in England in the 17^th century unless they professed faith in the established religion.

There is “growing evidence that the diversity-industrial complex is not [just] a waste of time and money but an active source of the very problem it purports to tackle. Who will challenge the racket?” Well we’re fighting back. Read our briefing on Unconscious Bias Training and contact us if you need help.

Stop bloody bossing us about!

Join us for the Free Speech Union’s first Online Speakeasy on Wednesday 5th May, 7 – 8.30pm, on Zoom.

While live events are still unlocking, we thought we’d get things moving with our first Online Speakeasy. All members are invited to this free event in which FSU General Secretary Toby Young will be joined by journalist, parliamentary sketch-writer, theatre critic and author Quentin Letts for an evening of seriously irreverent conversation about free speech, why it matters and how it’s threatened today. Members will be able to join in with a live Q and A.

Quentin’s latest book, Stop Bloody Bossing Me About: Why We Need to Stop Being Told What to Do, is a spirited rant against the bossy-boots, the fear-mongers and the finger-waggers who seem to dominate civic and cultural life. 

Quentin Letts is parliamentary sketch-writer for the Times and theatre critic for the Sunday Times. He has been a Fleet Street journalist since the mid-1980s and has been, variously, a diarist, foreign correspondent and a columnist on the Telegraph, Mail and Times. He started writing parliamentary sketches when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister and is now on his seventh PM – and, journalistically, on his ninth life following various attempted ‘cancellations’. Quentin is also the author of Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain and Patronising Bastards.

You can register for your free ticket here. If you have any queries about this event, please email [email protected].

“Cancel culture kills”

While cancel culture has claimed many victims’ livelihoods, jobs, and reputations, has it now taken the life of Liam Scarlett, the choreographer who died suddenly last weekend? That’s the claim in the Telegraph, after Scarlett’s production of Frankenstein was axed by the Royal Danish Theatre. Russian ballet star Alexei Ratmansky said, “After allegations of inappropriate behaviour less than two years ago, companies that he worked for removed his ballets from the rep and cancelled all his future contracts. I did hear one director saying: ‘I can’t programme his ballets, I’ll be eaten alive.’ Liam knew he [had] no future as a choreographer. That killed him. It should not have happened. This cancel culture is killing.” Writing in the Spectator Graham Watts argues that “our institutions appear little more interested in due process than a medieval court in the dunking of a witch. Western society is now riven with a cancel culture that has its risk-averse meter set to max.”

Carla Bruni has blasted the rise of cancel culture, saying, “Little by little and without warning, do-gooders and censorship have taken control. Obsessed by their image of upholders of morality, a whole load of people without culture, without experience and without courage are trying to impose their narrow-minded ideas on us. Their sterile, uniform and puerile ideas are seeking to invade humanity.”

Dan Hannan, this time writing in the Express, says people have “had enough” of cancel culture and it is a “debilitating problem” in the British education system. While Dan Kovalik bemoans that the left once fought for the right to free speech, only for “self-proclaimed progressives [to] cheer on the censorship of their political opponents”. He sets out the left-wing case against censorship and cancel culture in Spiked.

The food critic Jonathan Meades took a stand for “cultural appropriation” in food and literature alike, saying in an interview that banning the mixing of cultures was “an order to shut down the imagination”.

Noel Yaxley asks where the late Christopher Hitchens would have stood on the culture war. While we can’t know for sure where he’d stand on every issue, there was no doubting his commitment to free speech, Yaxley writes.

Do you need to be “woke-washed”?

According to the Financial Times people are paying up to $150,000 a month to purge their online profile and social media pages of anything remotely embarrassing. This “woke-washing” is one answer to cancel culture, but why not stand-up for free speech instead? (With membership of the FSU starting from £2.49 a month it’s certainly a lot cheaper).

Petition: Amend employment law to protect employees’ right to free-speech

A new petition has been launched calling on the Government to amend employment law to protect free speech for employees beyond the workplace. A huge amount of our case work involves helping people facing disciplinary action or dismissal for things they’ve said outside of work, often on their own personal social media accounts.

What did the Ancient Greeks understand by ‘free speech’?

Two concepts of free speech existed in Ancient Greece, writes Professor James Kierstead in Antigone, a new online Classics magazine. The first, isēgoriā, is “equality of public speech”. The second, parrhēsiā, is “the license to say whatever you want”. The no-platformers interpret isēgoriā to mean that marginalised or minority groups must be afforded equal space in public forums, while free speech campaigners argue primarily for parrhēsiā.

Kierstead argues that it is “parrhēsiā that we will ultimately need to defend if we want to keep free speech alive, within the academy and in society as a whole”. He says that while “universities should look to encourage civility as a soft norm”, they must also “protect free speech via hard rules (for example, against scholars being sacked for ordinary political expression)”. This is a duty the Free Speech Union is constantly reminding universities to uphold.

Pandemic curbs on free speech

The Washington Post reports on the vast violations of free speech that have taken place globally since the beginning of the pandemic. Citing research from Human Rights Watch and PEN America, the Post notes that 83 governments have violated the rights of their citizens to “free speech and peaceful assembly”, while in 2020 “at least 273 writers, academics and public intellectuals in 35 countries were in prison or unjustly held in detention in connection with their writing, their work or related activism.”

Big Tech censorship

Facebook and Twitter have been implicated in another case of censorship, this time for suppressing revelations about a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

Following the latest Dawkins cancellation, Michael Deacon in the Telegraph compares Twitter to a Chinese app which lets people report citizens who have expressed “mistaken opinions”.

While in the Times a call is made to get MPs off Twitter to cool down the culture war: “It does not help that politicians seem unable to distinguish between abuse and disagreement… while some MPs have suffered abhorrent abuse it is also true that citizens are mostly just disagreeing.”

“Woke weaning” captures US schools

Meanwhile a “sledgehammer approach to race and equality” has left parents in the US scared to question the woke gobbledegook their children are being taught in school. “Imagine your little boy coming home from school and announcing that he is ‘bad’ because he is white, ‘and that makes him racist and an oppressor’. Imagine a school where white teachers are told, as part of their strident Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) programme, that they have been guilty of ‘spirit-murdering’ black children.” Of course, those of you with children of school age – in the UK as well as the United States – won’t have to imagine it.

Quote of the week

“Reason requires that a diverse range of ideas be expressed and debated openly, including ones that some people find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. To demonize a writer rather than address the writer’s arguments is a confession that one has no rational response to them.”

 – Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, protesting against the AHA’s cancellation of Richard Dawkins.

Sharing the Newsletter

We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on a few different platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.

If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Best wishes,

Benjamin Jones

Case Officer