Monday was the 150th anniversary of Speakers’ Corner and, in the hope of drumming up some publicity for the Free Speech Union, I went along to give a speech. Rather embarrassingly, I didn’t actually know where it was. I had been there once before, but that was about 40 years ago, and Google Maps wasn’t much help. Perhaps that was deliberate on the part of the censorious tech giant. You can imagine a group of woke nerds sitting around in Silicon Valley laughing at the prospect of a clueless culture warrior setting up his soapbox in the area they’ve wrongly identified as Speakers’ Corner, letting rip about illegal migrants, then getting hauled away by the Metropolitan Police.
Not that being in the right location offers you much protection these days. On Sunday, the Met arrested the evangelical Christian preacher Hatun Tash at Speakers’ Corner, strip searched her, kept her in a cell overnight, then released her without charge.
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