OUR very liberty has come to a pretty pass when the Government has to appoint a ‘free speech champion” to the board of the Office for Students.
But, such is the indoctrination of those within higher education, that this is exactly what is proposed.
The fightback has started, and about time.
Of course fashions and attitudes change, but there shouldn’t be a penalty for following one’s own beliefs.
Increasingly on social media, anyone daring to put their head above the parapet has been ‘cancelled’ or ‘deplatformed’ for disagreeing with them.
More seriously, jobs have been lost and reputations destroyed, particularly in academia, where, for example, traditional views on sex and gender are unacceptable.
Sussex University Professor Kathleen Stock was ostracised when she campaigned for academic freedom.
Awarded an OBE in January, she was denounced by 600 fellow philosophers in an open letter accusing her of transphobia.
Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson, self-styled “professor against political correctness”, had his visiting fellowship at Cambridge rescinded in 2019.
A long list, from feminists, to writers, to doctors, critical of the pandemic response, have been banned from speaking at UK universities and face campaigns to sack them for their views.
One Oxford College now demands that all students pass a course in ‘unconscious bias’ – the possibility that we unknowingly stereotype others.
Such is the zealotry that the chairman of KPMG was suspended recently after describing it as “crap”.
However, it’s not just within education that this intolerance has found a home.
On Merseyside, the police mistakenly erecting a bill board with the message - “being offensive is an offence”.
No it is not!
As Lord Justice Sedley put it so succinctly in a landmark case in 1999: “Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having”.