Freedom of Speech

Hello welcome back, now in news that came out yesterday, apparently Bridget Phillips, she’s the education secretary in the Labour government has decided she’s going to shelve the higher education freedom of speech act 2023 which the last government bought in because they were rather concerned about the lack of free speech on university campuses.

She’s decided that she wants to have a look into it and perhaps even axe it all together. The previous government and I think a lot of normal minded people thought that free speech on campus was indeed in peril.

We’ve all seen all of these sit-ins, the protest that is no platforming, the safe spacing, this kind of taking a machete to everything and turning it into an anti-colonialist quagmire of nonsense. But it seems to me the Labour government think that this is a bad idea. Does that spell trouble?

Well, here to answer that question is Frank Furedi who is one of my favourite free speech advocates, Frank, it’s brilliant to have you on the programme. It seems to me we had reached a pretty desperate level when it came to what we could all see taking place within university departments on campuses with student bodies, the intimidation some people were faced with, the bullying, the harassment, the de-platforming, the wrestling and then of course this sort of really perverse attitude towards having to decolonialise huge swathes of the curriculum and so after a long time, the previous government decided they needed to do something about this, why on earth is the Labour Party saying they’re going to scrap that?

Well, I think if you look at the record of the different politicians, even in the front line of the Labour Party, they’re not fans of free speech and academic freedom and whenever you discuss stuff with them, it kind of points out the problems, invariably they say it’s an exaggeration. The situation is not as bad as you paint it.

Intolerance

Actually in the most universities are really robust defenders of free speech and they live in a fantasy world where free speech is flourishing, academic freedom is blossoming but in reality the reason why they have this attitude is because the targets of cancel calls to universities are not to leave a front bench, it’s not people like Keir Starmer or the secretary of higher education, it’s other kinds of people and from their perspective they don’t care if Jewish society gets cancelled, the Zionist speaker is shot down. They don’t care if a conservative or a populist or a patriotic speaker is excluded from campus, that’s okay.

I think for that reason it’s a political decision when basically saying as far as you concerned that regime of intolerance towards the freedom of speech can continue on, we’re not going to do anything about it, but you think they completely fail to understand that in many respects some other things that are happening on our campuses and not good for social cohesion, they’re not frankly good for national security that a great number of our campuses have been infiltrated by extremists who deliberately want to sow division and actually shutting people up having these mass protests, making common sense of gratitude suddenly seem far right and safe, is playing into the hands of hostile regimes who want to completely disrupt our harmony.

I think they really underestimate the scale of the problem just as much as they underestimate the scale of the problem with mass migration, just as they underestimate the problem posed by a kind of multicultural ethos that is great, ignored.

Oh, we’ve lost a little thanks for doing the list tree if we can sort out that and then watch, I could see you nodding away to all of this. This isn’t just a matter of not liking certain views there and fashionable or this sort of neo-fascists labelling everything as far right, whether it’s your water supply, you’re tearing age a telephone the biscuit I’m eating, it’s all some sort of neo-Nazi, you know, manifestation.

British Culture & Diversification

This is actually dangerous for I think it’s all yeah, you’re right. I mean, I think it’s all a function of the way society is developing into pockets now. There’s been a lot of discussion on various television programs, much of which I’ve been involved in about the fact that we are becoming in this country somewhat like France where immigrant cultures, migrant cultures are living in cities of their own by themselves that have very little to do with the rest of it and they’re unrecognizable at the same time.

You have cultures like the Bank of England where they think that diversity is sex and gender and place and not people with different opinions, which is why they’re keeping interest rates high because they have this twisted view, there’s no challenges. They have this twisted view of inflation, which they have not curtailed and it’s wrong and in the same way, universities live in pockets of they all go to lunch and the canteen together and say the same stupid things to each other and reinforce and believe it, that’s how it happens.

It’s one of the problems here, Frank, that actually what this seems to engender is hatred, resentment and ironically an attack on basically what is the backbone of Western society? It tends to sort of provoke a lot of anti-white sentiment, anti -middle sentiment, anti-male sentiment, anti-heterosexual sentiment and actually that accounts for the vast majority of people who go out and contribute to the economy.

I think you’re absolutely right, it’s interesting that many of these people actually tell me that free speech is really a euphemism for hate speech and what they really mean by that is that if people like you and me, find our voice and say what we see as the problem, if you point out what the problems are then from their point of view that’s not objective truth, that’s hate.

Society is Polarized

The regularity with which they dismiss views that are entirely common sensical for millions of people as expressions of hate indicates that we live in two different worlds. The polarization of society is so deeply entrenched, the language we use is so different, the values that we like and cherish are so different to their values that sometimes you feel like when you go on a campus, you’re an alien country, when I go on a university campus and look at the platforms.

At first I think it’s joke, I think this is a grotesque caricature then I realized they’re deadly serious and I realize that I’m in an alien territory altogether. Do you think as well, Frank that there are class elements to all of this because when you look at the people who voted for Brexit, people who I personally think got it, who want their country to not be sort of delegate authority and regulation and control to faceless bureaucrats in other countries, but start making tough decisions back here at home, when you look at a lot of expertise they happen to be from the working classes.

Frankly we’re on the sort of tougher edge of the impacts of some of the EU’s policies, a lot of people messaging me today talking about this unity march taking place in central London and I do want to talk to people at that march. Again, it seems to me a lot of people who are turning out and just saying we don’t like what’s going on, we don’t like our kids being given hormone blockers, we don’t like other cultures usurping or eroding our own culture, we want to protect what’s ours.

We want to protect our country, we want to protect our families & by-and-large these are the working classes and that’s just the middle classes who get drawn into all of this madness, who don’t seem to swallow the red pill but seem to be brainwashed by this wokery, the warmth of a better word and sneered down their noses at the common man who actually can see the wood from the trees.

Reversal of Political Positions

Yeah, there’s been a complete reversal of trends. In the old days, the middle classes were very conservative and they tended to have a very kind of conservative outlook, today the university educated classes are invariably on the left, what we call the left of society and most working class people when the past matters for the Labour party markets devoted to the left, think of themselves as patriots, they think of themselves as more aligned with what you and I would call conservative traditional values and that’s the case everywhere in Europe, it’s amazing when you talk to I go to a football match, it’s really working class people they all talk the same language as you and I, there’s no discussion that’s not debatable.

You look at each other’s eyes and you know that we both think that this is nonsense, where I go to my universities and that meet academics, and they really have these so called luxury beliefs and they look at data from people who are of working class origins, and they think they’re so selfish about the environment, they are so racist because you don’t want to share their home with migrants, they have all these euphemisms that are used which basically demonize working class people as somehow morally inferior to this wonderfully educated individual.