Banning students from banning speakers is beyond stupid

So, the government has finally come up with a solution to the scourge of yellow-bellied censoriousness that has swept university campuses in recent years: it is going to ban it. Yes, it is going to ban banning. It is going to No Platform the No Platformers. It is going to force universities to be pro-free speech. Which is such a contradiction in terms it makes my head hurt. You cannot use authoritarianism to tackle authoritarianism. This is a really bad thinking.

The thinking comes from the universities minister, Sam Gyimah, a politician I normally have time for. Bright, young and absolutely right about the problem of campus censorship — he says it is ‘chilling’ that some students and academics think little about ‘stopping someone [from] expressing their views on campus simply because they are unfashionable or unpopular’ — Mr Gyimah will, I hope, go far. But his proposal, outlined today, to use government clout to get ‘tough’ on university banners strikes me as worse than useless.