Freedom of speech

Wednesday

Toby Young

Can superintelligent AI be regulated?

In the House of Lords on Monday there was a short discussion, prompted by a question from an ex-Labour minister, about whether the government is doing enough to ‘regulate the development of superintelligent AI’. This is an example of what I call ‘Caligula syndrome’, a common affliction in the Upper House. You will recall that the lunatic Roman emperor declared war on Neptune, ordering his legions to line up on the coast of Gaul and collect seashells as ‘spoils of war’. What can the British government – or indeed any government – do to halt the advance of AI? Hubris doesn’t quite cover it. It’s in the same category as

Thursday

Toby Young

Juries are defenders of free speech

On Tuesday, David Lammy announced in parliament that a bill would be included in the next King’s Speech restricting the right to trial by jury in England and Wales to those accused of serious crimes, such as murder, rape and manslaughter. Lesser crimes, he said, would be dealt with either by magistrates or by a new tier of jury-less courts. The point of the reforms is to address the delays and backlogs in the courts, with the Justice Secretary pointing out that the Crown Courts are facing a backlog of 80,000 cases. I’m opposed to this, obviously, because jury trials have been a bulwark of English liberty for 800 years.

Friday

G.V. Chappell

Inside the mind of a modern-day heretic

When I was growing up, it was generally accepted (unless you were a football hooligan) that, however much you disagreed with someone, they were entitled to their opinion. You listened, occasionally interjecting, and then made your case – sometimes forcefully. In the end, you might agree to disagree, but you didn’t harbour any enmity. These days, the idea that a person is free to hold their own beliefs, especially if they run contrary to your own, is considered laughably old-fashioned. The aim now is to silence that individual. If necessary, you eviscerate them, figuratively – usually online. Sometimes, tragically, their views are deemed so unpalatable that they’re silenced for good.

Thursday

Toby Young

The persecution of our local politicians

Have a thought for Darren Grimes, the 32-year-old Reform councillor. Since becoming deputy leader of Durham County Council in May, he has been investigated more than two dozen times by his officials following complaints. Among other things, he has been accused of bringing the council into disrepute, failing to treat people with respect and not representing people with different views. Of those complaints, the vast majority have been dismissed, but a handful are still under investigation. Darren has condemned this ‘persecution’ and he’s amended the council’s code of conduct to include clauses protecting free speech. I should declare an interest since those amendments were based on a policy the Free

Thursday

Toby Young

Lord Young goes to Washington

I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and thinktankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist,

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The lost art of the insult

Imagine I were to begin this column by remarking that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. Dear me, that would never do, even in as cheeky a magazine as The Spectator. Then try instead: ‘Dr Johnson was no admirer of the female sex. “A woman’s preaching,” he said, “is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”’ I could get away with that. An antiquated opinion, safely attributed to an 18th-century writer, enclosed behind quotation

Toby Young

Goodbye and good riddance to ‘non-crime’

The congratulatory messages started pouring in shortly after 5.30 p.m. on Monday. The Metropolitan Police had just issued a press release saying that the force would no longer investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and people were chalking this up as a victory for the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run. That may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Met linked the decision to its failed pursuit of Graham Linehan, the comedy writer it arrested at Heathrow airport in September over three tweets taking the piss out of trans-rights activists. It was thanks in part to the FSU, which pulled together Graham’s legal team, that the Met decided

Thursday

Toby Young

The hypocrisy of the limousine liberals

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at all the Hollywood celebrities rending their garments about Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech. In an ‘open letter’, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, among others, took the administration to task for browbeating ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show from the air after he falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk’s murderer was associated with the ‘MAGA gang’. ‘In an attempt to silence its critics, our government has resorted to threatening the livelihoods of journalists, talk-show hosts, artists, creatives and entertainers across the board,’ they wrote. ‘This runs counter to the values our nation was built upon,

Thursday

Matt Ridley

The cultification of science

My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’ Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title

Toby Young

You can’t cancel the cancelled

When Theresa May appointed me as a non-executive director of the Office for Students, the Downing Street press office decided to embargo the news until midnight on New Year’s Day 2018. It may be that it hoped to slip it out under the radar, calculating that most journalists would be too drunk to notice. If so, it didn’t work. The Guardian decided it wasn’t going to let the government get away with this sleight of hand and stuck the following headline on its website at 12.01: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ The offence archaeologists immediately set to work digging through everything I’d said or written, looking

Tuesday

G.V. Chappell

Save our satire

When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, musician and satirist Tom Lehrer famously quipped that political satire had become obsolete. Today, many people under 50 would be hard-pressed to say who Kissinger was – let alone why the award was controversial. So perhaps, given recent events, it’s time to update the epigram: satire became obsolete the day an Irish comedy writer was arrested by five armed police officers and questioned for hours over a few offhand remarks he made on X. Personally, I never post anything on X. I don’t have the time or energy. And while I’m an implacable supporter of free speech, I also

Thursday

Toby Young

How America could save free speech in Britain

The only holiday the Youngs had this summer was a week in Norfolk for the Hunstanton tennis tournament. I’m too hopeless to enter myself, but my friend Nell, who has a house nearby, organised a different competition that I was more suited to. It involved making an ‘elevator pitch’ for a policy that would fix broken Britain. What made it challenging was the panel of judges was chaired by Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary who is also Nell’s dad. The problem I focused on, needless to say, was the free speech crisis. My proposal was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and

Thursday

Toby Young

Save our swearing!

Last week I took a day trip to Margate. Not to enjoy a swim in the sea, but in the hope of having a debate with a member of Thanet district council about its proposed ban on swearing. A few days before, when the ban was being discussed, a Labour councillor had challenged me to come to Margate, where he promised to give me a piece of his mind. ‘If you’d like to come down here and meet me I’d be more than happy to tell you exactly what I think of you and there might be the odd expletive in it,’ he said. Not sure that’s the best way

Thursday

John Power

Ctrl U: the Online Safety Act is shutting down the internet

This time last year, the UK was consumed by the worst race riots since 2001. It was precipitated by the spread of online rumours that the perpetrator of the Southport atrocity was a Muslim refugee. This summer, there have been smaller protests following reports of sexually motivated attacks allegedly perpetrated by migrants. But something is different. Legislation which was originally passed in 2023 came into force last Friday and the effects can already be felt. Social media posts showing rioters fighting with police have been suppressed; those referring to sexual attacks have been automatically flagged as pornographic. Footage from a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Leeds, which showed police

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

The subversive genius of Tom Lehrer

The greatest living American until this week has died at the age of 97. I refer to Tom Lehrer, the finest satirist of the 20th century. He’s the one who observed that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the genius who put the entire periodic table of the elements to the tune of ‘I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major-General’ (Gilbert and Sullivan was his childhood obsession). He was a mathematician who could be as funny about maths and science as about poisoning pigeons in the park (yes he did) or contemporary pieties (‘National Brotherhood Week’). If you haven’t yet

Tuesday

Anthony Seldon

With many despairing academics packing it in, who will solve the problem of the universities?

Whatever happened to universities, beacons of the liberal enlightenment? Well, according to both these authors, they are in deep trouble. Cary Nelson is a distinguished literature academic who for six years was president of the American Association of University Professors, set up in 1915 by John Dewey to advance standards of excellence and academic freedom. His book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Anti-Semitic Assault on Basic Principles, published last year, has now been supplemented by this powerful thesis published by the Jewish Quarterly. Even before the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, he argues, campus anti-Semitism was rife across the West. Following the attacks, 56 per cent of

Thursday

Toby Young

Is the end of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in sight?

Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an amendment to Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill that would make it illegal in almost all circumstances for the police to collect or retain personal data relating to hate incidents where no laws have been broken. For those unfamiliar with this Orwellian concept, an NCHI is a record the police make when someone accuses you of

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

I’m a culture war addict

Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’, I had a queasy sense of recognition. Lawford claims that Vladimir Putin has no real desire for a peace deal in Ukraine, because both his personal political power and his country’s militarised economy depend on the conflict. She quotes an IMF former chief economist as saying: ‘He’s enjoying the war. It’s awful. But he doesn’t want to end the war.’ Doing the podcast rounds in London during the past week, I’ve felt a sheepish kinship with Vladimir. Have I, too, been enjoying the war? The culture war, that is. If

Toby Young

Are you offended by ‘hard-working families’?

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were warned that ‘sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive’ in some cultures. I don’t think they meant supporters of Millwall football club, but you never know. Not to be outdone, Cardiff University has told its students to avoid using ‘British-English’ phrases such as ‘kill two birds with one stone’, ‘break a leg’ and ‘a piece

Thursday

Simon Heffer

Buckingham University’s shameful treatment of Professor Tooley

One of many reasons I felt blessed, seven years ago, to be offered a professorship at the private University of Buckingham to teach modern British history was that Buckingham appeared to reject the doctrinal horrors that were, and still are, poisoning many other universities. I, blissfully, had never heard the term ‘woke’, which certainly did not apply at Buckingham. This did not mean we all went around being gratuitously offensive about minorities, women, people who change their gender or any other traditional targets of so-called white male privilege. What it did mean was that we had freedom of speech and of discourse, and proper academic liberty to advance anything we