A charity boss cancelled for ‘Islamophobia’ has won an important victory

It sometimes feels as if there is never any good news in the fight to preserve freedom of speech in Britain. At the very moment, for example, when the United States has a president who is ripping up the shibboleths of what Suella Braverman memorably called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’, our deputy prime minister Angela Rayner is reportedly planning to set up a 16-person council to draw up an official definition of Islamophobia.

But it isn’t all gloom. Last week saw a small but potentially very significant legal victory for free speech when a charity trustee who had been blacklisted by the Charity Commission for posting thought crimes on social media won his appeal. 

The story is relatively straightforward. In 2023, Gary Mond, a trustee of the Jewish National Fund UK (JNF UK), one of the oldest and largest Jewish charities, was barred by the Charity Commission after it learned of a small number of posts which could be “perceived as anti-Islam” (as the appeal ruling put it).