If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite society for having blasphemed against a trendy new orthodoxy.
No, it’s the binmen you want to turn to. It’s the nation’s fine refuse collectors who will back you up when your liberty to speak is being pummelled.
Consider the case of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher who was suspended for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad during a religious studies lesson. Alarmingly, that teacher is still in hiding, fearing for his life. He has received death threats simply for doing what all good teachers should do: challenge their students to consider difficult moral questions.
The supposedly liberal establishment behaved shamefully in response to the demonisation and harassment of the teacher.
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