Free speech on campus is to be protected, but the war against cancel culture rages on – Telegraph.co.uk

Early last year, I found myself at dinner with someone influential in the Government, and lost no time in presuming to tell this person how important it was to fight and win the culture war.

On my high horse after a glass or three, I opined on how the culture war is a real war, with real consequences for peoples freedom and happiness, as well as their safety, and insisted that the major battleground was freedom of speech in institutions. Infractions of the right to legal free speech, I said, should be punished with fines, and there should be a body that watched universities in particular including their so-called diversity and inclusion policies like a hawk.

The Government bigwig nodded distractedly, and was soon engaged by someone more important than me. I felt a bit silly, forgot Id ever had the conversation, and went back to fuming inwardly about the state of free speech, cancel culture and the rise of woke both on and off campus.

I dont flatter myself that my wine-fuelled lecture to this senior figure a year ago had any impact. But that doesnt lessen my happiness at new evidence that the Government is taking the grim fallout from woke ideology seriously.

Last week, it announced proposed measures that would see universities forced to adhere to a free speech condition in order to receive funding. Under the rules, the Office for Students would be endowed with the power to impose sanctions, including financial penalties, for breaches of the condition. And the new measures would also make it easier for those punished no-platformed, prevented from speaking, or bullied or sacked for pursuing politically inexpedient research agendas to seek legal redress. In other words: bullying, censoring and cancelling people for having divergent opinions or asking unorthodox (read: conservative) research questions will no longer be the entirely consequence-free joyride it has so far been.

The announcement didnt come without a sting in the tail. There was the immediate adverse and totally predictable reaction from the woke Kool-Aid drinkers of the Left-wing press and beyond. It is hard to understand quite what makes so many supposedly progressive people come out in public against the defence of free speech, but thats the world we live in.

The Guardian immediately supposed that a free-speech champion would do the opposite of championing it, while the New Statesman proclaimed the proposals a half-baked mess. Even former education secretary Justine Greening took umbrage, as did David Blunkett, who (ironically) accused the Government of playing identity politics. It all made me rather want to crawl under the bed.

The politicians have their own axes to grind, but the whining of the Lefties was telling. It was, of course, entirely lost on them that the reason the Government needs to intervene at all is because they have so remorselessly and successfully pushed through their ideological agenda. It is they who have formalised horizon-squashing policies forbidding offence and exclusion and creating intimidating environments that appear to disallow certain thoughts, let alone certain questions to be asked or texts to be set.

Indeed, this has been possible because their own freedom has been untrammelled. Cambridge dons, including the woke-possessed Priyamvada Gopal and other professor-activists recently gathered at Gopals own college, Churchill, for a debate on the wartime prime ministers legacy on race. Apparently part of a year-long inclusivity review, the debate saw the man who saved Britain from the Nazis and won the war rebranded as backward, racist and a keen collaborator in a British Empire far worse than the Nazis.

Indeed, some might wonder at the total freedom with which these educators have gone around comparing Churchill to Hitler, as Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham University has been blithely doing for some time, and to great acclaim. The woke-agogues have heartily availed themselves of the privileges of free speech for years; they just dont think the same freedom should be extended to anyone else.

The fight for free speech is going to be long, precarious and complex. These measures are a nice burst of artillery, but will not, alas, be nearly enough on their own. For cancel culture has spread right through to the very air the students breathe; students who are encouraged to call out peers and friends when they make an offensive slip of the tongue both in and out of class. Asking questions has already become too hard; none but the bravest students now risk querying, say, blanket condemnation of the Empire, or the integrity of concepts such as white fragility or white supremacy.

Meanwhile, academic staff are also under huge social and peer pressure to fall into line. The new laws will help when they are publicly shamed and rendered professionally untouchable, but will be scant help for all the private social punishment they face.

The rule of intimidation that has been eroding free speech on a grand scale is now at its most dangerous on a far more micro, atmospheric level than the Government can hope to control. Who wants to speak their mind, even among friends, when those very friends might turn on you for a wrong word?

At the end of the day, no legislation in the world can stop someone from losing their friends.

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Free speech on campus is to be protected, but the war against cancel culture rages on - Telegraph.co.uk