Freedom of speech

The top students who are too lazy to argue

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_Nov_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student” startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks.  Brendan O’Neill writes this week’s cover piece on his encounters with ‘Stepford Students’ – a censorious mob who try to shut down debates that they don’t like. His comes out this week after some Stepfords managed to shut down a debate about abortion at Christ Church by threatening to disrupt it with ‘instruments’. The college cancelled the debate, between Brendan, who is pro-choice, and Tim Stanley, who is pro-life, because of ‘security and welfare issues’.

Brendan O’Neill

Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/8f1c0b97-698e-45c6-b50a-84e0e4b3773a/media.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student” startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks.  Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five

You’ll regret not having a Human Rights Act when Labour get back in

I’ve been thinking about the Conservative party’s proposal for a Bill of Rights and am finding it difficult to make up my mind. On the one hand, I like the idea of making the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom the ultimate guarantor of our human rights rather than the European Court. British judges are surely more reliable guardians of liberty than the jurists in Strasbourg. But on the other, I’m nervous about the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights becoming less sacrosanct, particularly Article 10, which deals with freedom of expression. I’ll explain what I mean by that a little bit further down. Let’s start with

Owen Jones is lying about Israel. Plain and simple.

Owen Jones’s column in the Guardian is headlined ‘Anti-Jewish hatred is rising – we must see it for what it is.’ Sadly the article falls well short of that headline’s aspiration. At one point in the piece Owen singles me out for criticism: ‘Take Douglas Murray, a writer with a particular obsession with Islam.’ (I suppose ‘obsession’, rather than ‘interest’, say, is intended to suggest something untoward. But I confess that I am indeed especially interested in one of the major stories of our day.) Owen goes on to say of me: ‘“Thousands of anti-Semites have today succeeded in bringing central London to an almost total standstill” was his reprehensible

Why is China tearing down church crosses? Because it’s terrified of religion

Since the beginning of this year, China has been engaged in a cruel and bizarre campaign against Christians in the south-eastern province of Zhejiang. Its main target is Wenzhou, a city known as ‘China’s Jerusalem’ because a million of its eight million residents are Christian. Wenzhou’s 2,000 churches display hundreds of crosses that illuminate the skyline (a pattern familiar to any visitor to South Korea, where even the smallest towns sprout neon crosses). Now China wants those crosses taken down, and fast. According to AP, at the end of July ‘200 congregants rushed to the Longgang Huai En Church in Wenzhou to protect their building – but to no avail. They ended

Nick Cohen

Anti-Semitic double standards: the arts and the Jews

‘Would you force anyone else to behave like this?’ the promoters of the UK Jewish Film Festival asked the artistic director of London’s Tricycle Theatre. Indhu Rubasingham and her colleagues dodged and hummed. They didn’t like the question and did not want to reply to it. The silence was an answer in itself. Of course the theatre would not hold others to the same standard: just Jews. Accusations of racism are made so often it is hard to see the real thing when it looks you in the eye. Let me spell it out for you. Racism consists of demanding behaviour from a minority you would never dream of demanding

Now that everyone’s a journalist, anyone can be sued

Trying to count posts on the web is like trying to number grains of sand on a beach. In June 2012, a data management company called Domo attempted the fool’s errand nevertheless. It calculated that, every minute, the then 2.1 billion users uploaded 48 hours of YouTube video, shared 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook, published 27,778 new posts on Tumblr and sent about 100,000 tweets. Its figures were not exhaustive and they were out of date in an instant, but for a moment they captured the explosion of self-expression the net has brought. As the European Court’s demand that Google hide writing that breaks no law shows, technological change

Rebekah Brooks takes her place in a perfect picture of modern Britain

What image comes to mind when we think of Britain today? I was moved to contemplate this question after reading the Prime Minister’s inspiring treatise on British values, which seemed to involve ‘being quite nice’ and not referring to other people as kaffir and then trying to blow them up. Fair enough. I suppose — as an image of Britain, Sonny and Cher jihadis bringing their arcane and vicious sandblown squabble to the streets of London is perhaps a more modernist take on John Major’s vision of an old maid cycling to morning communion through the early morning mist. I suppose cyclists should be somewhere in our new vision of

The Left’s blind spot with Islam: opposing bigotry does not mean liking a religion

I agree with something Owen Jones has written, a confluence of beliefs that will next occur on September 15, 2319. Addressing the subject of Christian persecution, he argues in the Guardian: ‘It is, unsurprisingly, the Middle East where the situation for Christians has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. One of the legacies of the invasion of Iraq has been the purging of a Christian community that has lived there for up to two millennia. It is a crime of historic proportions.’ Most people have rather ignored this crime, as they have other incidents of anti-Christian persecution across Africa and Asia, for as the French philosopher Regis Debray put it: ‘The

Britain is not alone in its mad attitude to Islamism

There is a tendency in Britain to think we are alone in our national madness. So I thought I would cheer everyone up on this lovely weekend by pointing out that one of the big stories in the Netherlands this week has been whether or not a pro-ISIS demonstration should be allowed in the Hague. The demonstration was planned to take place outside the Iraqi Embassy. There are of course some who are strongly pro-ISIS in the Netherlands. There are also some who are against. Most importantly there is also a political class which has been carefully weighing up the alleged undesirability of ISIS with the historic Dutch tradition of free speech. I

Since when has Steve Coogan stood against censorship?

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_19_June_2014.mp3″ title=”Paul Staines from Guido Fawkes and Evan Harris of Hacked Off debating Steve Coogan’s involvement with Index” startat=1508] Listen [/audioplayer]I have looked everywhere. I have Googled, and asked around. But I can find no evidence that Steve Coogan has ever taken the trouble to defend freedom of speech at home or abroad. I promised myself I would never again mock ‘luvvies’ in politics after I saw Tim Minchin, Dave Gorman, Robin Ince and Dara Ó Briain give up their time to help Index on Censorship’s campaign against Britain’s repressive libel laws. Steve Coogan did not stand alongside them. I have heard Sir Ian McKellen and Sienna Miller protest

Pakistan’s ISI accused of subverting media freedom

Media freedom is under attack in Pakistan, declared Hamid Mir, one of Pakistan’s most prominent journalists. He had six bullets pumped into him by bike riders in Karachi on 19 April. TV anchor, Raza Rumi, was similarly attacked in Lahore in late March. In May 2011, investigative reporter Saleem Shahzad was murdered following his allegations of links between the Pakistani military and al-Qaeda. These are just three of the many Pakistani journalists who’ve been victims of a wave of threats and violence in recent months and years. Even foreign journalists covering Pakistan from inside the country dare not write about certain issues for fear of being killed, or that their

Let Evangelical Protestants be Evangelical Protestants

Pastor James McConnell of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast has gone and done it. He declared in a sermon that: “Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell”. Golly. Not since the Rev Ian Paisley got the boot into the pope as Old Redsocks and indeed as the Scarlet Woman herself have we heard anything quite so robust in the way of religious rhetoric. (Oddly enough, there was something almost lyrical about it; he had lovely cadences.) But the anti-popery tradition is precisely the context these remarks should be seen in. Evangelical Protestantism has a thing about false prophets; it also has a thing about

Abu Hamza embodies Britain’s self-destructive madness

A jury in the US has taken less than two days to find Abu Hamza guilty on multiple terrorism charges. He can now expect to spend the rest of his life in prison. During the 1990s and later, Abu Hamza was one of a number of extremist clerics given apparent free-reign to operate in the UK. The effects of that teaching are still being felt. One of the killers of Lee Rigby asked in court to be called ‘Mujaahid Abu Hamza’. But even if we can now ignore the man himself, the Abu Hamza story deserves to be remembered because of what it tells us about our society. If anyone is

Yorkshire village bans Nazis. Why didn’t Neville Chamberlain think of that?

D-Day would have been effected with far less trouble if, at the time, we had insisted on the same rules that pertain in Haworth’s annual commemoration of the event. The Yorkshire village holds what is now called a “1940s Weekend” – don’t mention the war – and people who wear Nazi uniforms, or the SS insignia, have been told that they are not welcome. This is because the uniforms “give offence”. Previously, people turned up dressed as Nazi soldiers and others as allied soldiers – much as actually happened the first time the event was staged, on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. But some people complained about the uniforms

America’s Left is just as ‘eccentric’ as its Right

Rory Sutherland writes in this week’s magazine that the Mozilla/Brendan Eich affair has finally put him off his dream of moving to the United States, quoting Andrew Sullivan that ‘The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.’ The issue of gay marriage has changed politics in the English-speaking world in a way that perhaps people didn’t expect – breaking the liberal-Left’s final link with the ideal of John Locke that permitting something did not mean approving of it. This notion has been coming under pressure for some years, especially with discrimination laws, but SSM has snapped it. (Brendan O’Neill has

Hurrah! A setback for the enemies of free speech

This has been a bad month for those who want to shut down free speech in Britain. First there was the wholesale failure of Fiyaz Mughal (whose ‘work’ I have written about before). Readers will recall that Mr Mughal – whose website, Tell Mama, claims to record and counter ‘Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred’ – used the immediate aftermath of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby to claim hysterically that, ‘The scale of the backlash is astounding… there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice’. He also used the opportunity to attack the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy. All this before Drummer Rigby – who some people may remember was killed

Nick Cohen

How to be a traitor

No one is as hated as deeply as the apostate. Ordinary opponents are nothing in comparison. They are unbelievers, who know no better. It is not their fault if the light has not fallen on them. The apostate, by contrast, has known the truth and rejected it. There can be no excuses for his treachery, no defence of ignorance the law. The Devil must have seduced him, or to translate old superstitions into language of a secular age, he must have “sold out”. For all the apparent differences between left and right, they share a complacent assumption that only corruption can explain why a believer could reject them, when they

Are you fit to be a Liberal Democrat? (A response to Nick Cohen)

My colleague Nick Cohen has a piece asking ‘Are you fit to be British? Take the UKIP test.’ In it he cites a number of horrible and silly and things said by people in UKIP before he himself descends into rudeness.  Stuart Wheeler is apparently a ‘cadaverous gambling tycoon’. ‘Cadaverous’? As in old? I suppose it must come to us all. But it is Nick’s conclusion that spurs me to respond. He finishes, ‘The scandals are so frequent you have to conclude that it is not the odd rotten apples that needs throwing out but the whole stinking barrel.’ Nick is not the only journalist to take this view. The British

You sexist/racist/liberal/elitist bastard! How dare you?

While he was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Tony Judt found the breath to educate those who believe they could ameliorate pain with soft words and bans on ‘inappropriate’ language. “You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.” Worry about whether you, or more pertinently anyone you wish to boss about, should say ‘person with special needs’ instead of ‘disabled’ or ‘challenged’ instead of ‘mentally handicapped’ and you will enjoy a righteous glow. You will not do anything, however, to provide health care and support