Toby Young’s ‘Free Speech Union’ is illogical – and more to the point, it won’t work – inews

OpinionIn a mature, civilised, multi-ethnic society, no one has the right to say exactly what they want

Tuesday, 25th February 2020, 5:15 pm

A friend of mine, a successful man of the world, once gave me some very good advice. Organisations are very often precisely the opposite of what their name suggests. So always be careful if an establishment with professional in its title (only amateurs would say such a thing), or a company calls itself international (you may find, for example, that its coverage extends only to the wider Stevenage area.

As a result, I have always been suspicious of anybody using the word freedom to describe itself witness the Freedom Party. I had a similar reaction to the advent of the Free Speech Union, the journalist Toby Youngs latest venture.

Exactly whose freedoms are Young and his friends seeking to protect? Is it principally those who demand the freedom to say things that offend others? As Trevor Phillips put it so well on the radio the other morning, when Young is involved, it is tempting to think that this is an opportunity to defend right-wing nut jobs, but that would be to diminish a largely well-intentioned enterprise, which has identified an increasingly problematic aspect of civil society.

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'Consider an oratorical free-for-all, where all manner of crackpot rhetoric or hateful speech could be defended on the grounds of an inalienable human right'

Toby Young has a formidable gift for self-promotion, and has a vested interest in the subject he has been defenestrated from public positions because of statements that were deemed beyond the pale. However, this shouldnt be an impediment to our taking his position seriously. What all his activity brings to the fore is a hugely important question, one that has never been properly answered. Is freedom of speech an indivisible human right, without limits? In other words, is Youngs right to say what he likes about Claudia Winklemans breasts (which he has done) the same as Tommy Robinsons right to say that Muslims should f*** off out of the UK?

And this is where the fault lines lie in Youngs argument. In a mature, civilised, multi-ethnic society, with huge disparities of opportunity and power, no one has the right to say exactly what they want. This is not about freedom, its about respect, something that social media, and Twitter in particular, has done much to erode. We do need people to police public discourse in order to protect minorities and the disadvantaged, and, actually, I would rather they were academics, professionals and public officials than Toby Young and David Starkey (one of his named supporters, who even Piers Morgan once called a racist idiot).

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I wouldnt disagree with Young that serious institutions are now on a hair-trigger when it comes to sanctioning anything that is perceived to be offensive. The banning of mainstream speakers on university campuses because of their unorthodox views is clearly a nonsense. But consider an oratorical free-for-all, where all manner of crackpot rhetoric or hateful speech could be defended on the grounds of an inalienable human right. If you want to see what that looks like, log on to Twitter at any time.

I would suggest that the Free Speech Union will not be much of a union, either. Free speech means very different things to different people, and Young will have difficulty protecting his noble vision from the ideological outcasts, trolls and, yes, the nutjobs of the right and the left.

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Toby Young's 'Free Speech Union' is illogical - and more to the point, it won't work - inews