I’ve been amazed by the response to my decision to leave my band, Mumford & Sons. The article in which I explained why has now been read 700,000 times and has been republished by newspapers in the UK, the US and Germany. My main hope in publishing it was to restore my own sense of integrity — eroded, I felt, by an apology I made to an extreme but vociferous internet minority who took great exception to what I considered an innocuous tweet to Andy Ngo, the author of a bestselling book about the radicalised far-left. Just as I never anticipated the angry reaction to my unremarkable tweet, I could never have foreseen that my article about the ensuing fuss would have generated so many messages of gratitude. Gratitude for what? Not for leaving the band — although a few people may be glad. It seems as if, in explaining why I felt I could not carry on, I had articulated something that many people feel in their daily lives: self-censorship. In the current febrile political climate, many of us are just too scared to say what we think.
The messages came from an astonishing array of professions —fellow musicians, doctors, civil servants, actors, painters, politicians, think-tankers, comedians, vicars, teachers, students, beauty queens, lawyers, mothers, charity workers, cannabis activists, journalists, entrepreneurs. I found many of them very moving. I’m especially struck by how these represent the moderate free-thinking middle-ground. Not extremists. A theme that crops up again and again in these emails is a fear that speaking ‘the truth’ could prove too costly. So people stay quiet. They have rent or mortgages to pay. Their careers have taken decades to build up. They are accountable to colleagues who depend on them in turn to maintain their lives and their responsibilities.
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