In the past 12 months a curious thing has happened: student politics, for decades the most irrelevant, cut-off sphere of public life, has become headline news. The explosion of campus censorship – the primary means through which twentysomething politicos vent their political passions today – is followed, reported on and critiqued by greying commentators on a daily basis.
The shock-horror headlines about the rise of ‘no platforming’ and the sclerotic growth of speech-policing ‘safe spaces’ seem a little strange. Not least because the No Platform policy – introduced by the National Union of Students in 1974 – is about as old as some of the commentators currently filling column inches with their castigations of the illiberal yoof. But, while ban-happy students aren’t a new phenomenon, they have been outdoing themselves of late.
Political correctness on campus has gone categorically insane. Today, spiked – the magazine I work for – launched the 2016 findings of our Free
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