Say what you want about Toby Young no, really, hell defend your right to say it – The Guardian

Toby Young has done something, again, and we have to talk about it. Its simply astonishing how often that sentence has had to be pulled out over the past 20 years, isnt it? There is some singular power to Young that pulls your forehead like gravity towards the nearest wall, and here he is again, talking about free speech and here we are again. Talking about Toby Young. Just like he wants us to. Hes done it again. The Michael Jordan of Being Wrong on the Internet.

Anyway, heres what Youngs done: hes very solemnly announced he is the general secretary of the new Free Speech Union (FSU), a sort of grift-cum-movement. For 49.95 a year (24.95 for retirees and students, though I would pay a sizeable amount of money to observe the day-to-day workings of any student who wants to pay Young to defend them on the internet) Youngs union will protect you if you want to start shit online. All members will be defended by the FSU if they are penalised for exercising their legal right to free speech, the silver-member tier promises. If youre targeted by an outrage mob on social media, well mobilise an army of supporters.

In the opening video, Young paints a vision of an all-nations union of people who are just furious that online discourse demands a degree of empathy these days, saying: Nobody is safe from these witchfinder generals, which is why mavericks and dissenters of all stripes will be welcome in the Free Speech Union. The protection level offered to you is known as Sword & Shield, which and if youll allow me a moment to exercise my free speech by pointing this out isnt a million miles away from the 2018 Shield and Sword far-right festival in Ostritz, Germany, that celebrated Hitlers birthday. I mean Im sure thats a coincidence as free speech advocates will point out, lots of things have associations with swords and shields, even Pokmon maybe Toby Young just thinks that Pikachu had some legitimate ideas among the loathsome pika, pika rhetoric. Still, come on, guys. Lets please not attack Youngs right to coincidence. I just bought Twitter insurance off this man.

My real fear, though, is: what if this isnt a grift? What if Young is being serious? Because there are shades of Nigel Farages early Ukip mobilisation to this

Theres a structure payment system for membership in place, so Gold Members are offered regular meetings with the directors, which means for 250-a-year Young will Skype you once a month and agree with you that there are just too many genders. In many ways, I do think this is brilliant by Young. Hes taken the sheer trauma of the trial-by-Twitter blockbuster cancellation he suffered in January 2018 and turned it alchemy-like into gold. In arguably one of the biggest and most crippling Twitter cancels Ive ever seen, Young took a position on the board of the new Office for Students university regulator and ended up resigning from five of his jobs and stopping all charity work just because some vile trolls went online and found every one of the hundreds of tweets hed made about women on Newsnight having breasts and yeah, maybe eugenics isnt that bad after all. As a result hes licked his finger and held it to the air and realised theres a groundswell of sub-100 follower Twitter accounts who are mad they cant drop the N-word online and still keep their jobs about it, and hes figured out a way to make them pay him protection money to let them keep doing exactly what they are already and were keep going to do. If you pay 50 a year, Young will wade into your next 12 Twitter fights and reply well said when you defend your right to call your dog an outdatedly racist name. What a stunning, stunning scheme.

My real fear, though, is: what if this isnt a grift? What if Young is being serious? Because there are shades of Nigel Farages early Ukip mobilisation to this. We didnt take Ukip seriously at the start because it was just Robert Kilroy-Silk pouring excess energy from not being on TV any more into saying legitimate concerns a lot. But then, slowly, they started amassing support: Farage, who you thought was just a man who cared about two things and two things only beer that smells like eggs and white men who stand up to clap somehow became a quiet power player in the political realm. And then, oops, we all woke up and Brexit had happened. What if this is the next completely useless breath-wasting topic-dominator at the next election?

The year is 2024, and the Amazon is literally on fire, and Jeremy Clarkson is on his third month of a Balls To Eco stunt that sees him endless revving a Hummer in the middle of Trafalgar Square, and while we should all be worrying frantically about reversing the temperature of the sea, instead were having, night after night, endless ITV debates about Youngs right to tweet: Cor, knockers. We can laugh at the Free Speech Union now before anyone from the Free Speech Union kicks off at me about that, please check your own Statement of Values (We take no position on the validity of others opinions, political or otherwise, whether expressed in speech, writing, performance, or in another form), which says you legally cant have a go at me, ever but, in five years time, when Young is somehow deputy leader of the Conservative party and Free Spexit is in full swing, thats when well look back on today and go: ah, shit. Its happened again. Toby Young has done us again.

One of the personal joys in my life as a writer is entirely fake news, a particular niche of lifestyle reportage that is always led off some PR firm advertising something and surveying about 16 people to get the answer they want before dressing it up as a viable statistic. This week The Times went all in on just under half the flights taken by men aged 20 to 45 in 2019 were for stag dos (succinctly debunked in this very satisfying thread) before suggesting that, to reverse the irreversible carbon impact on the ozone layer, drunk men should simply stag at home, perhaps in Cumbria, or something.

On one hand, I do love the constant othering of the environment problem ah, I thought, gently, reading the news, thank goodness me and the recycling I tell myself I should do but dont ultimately do is not responsible for the environment thing. Its lads who are the problem. And on the other hand, which also agrees with the first hand, Im absolutely on board with outlawing stag parties abroad on false pretenses. Stag parties are always the same and theres really nothing you can get from flying to Latvia that you cant just get on a big night out at home. I can sleep in a room with no curtains and five bunkbeds at home. I can convince a bouncer in broken English that, nah, my mates alright mate, he puked on his shoes to feel better not worse, at home. I can go spend exactly one day too many in the company of six men called Gareth and, whenever conversation falls silent, spunk 30 on a tray of shots at home.

If Toby Young had his stag party at home, maybe people would have come to it. In this instance, I say: let the fake news stand. Sure, stag parties are killing the oceans. Go with it. Fine.

Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant

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Say what you want about Toby Young no, really, hell defend your right to say it - The Guardian