Tom Slater

Just Stop Oil has finally hit the fossil-fuel barons where it hurts: the World Snooker Championship. Last night, play was disrupted when one JSO activist climbed on to a snooker table and covered it in orange powder paint, leading the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry to be suspended. Another activist tried – and failed – to glue herself to the other table. Both have been arrested. Meanwhile, enraged snooker fans everywhere are trying to work out what on Earth their sport has got to do with climate change. We could speculate. The tournament is sponsored by online used-car dealer Cazoo, which is perhaps particularly complicit in the defilement of Gaia, according to those lunatics. But in truth the setting was almost incidental.

Has comedian Frankie Boyle become the latest victim of the BBC’s ‘right-wing purge’? Frankie Boyle seems to think so. Following news this week that his BBC Two show, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, has not been renewed for a seventh series, he took to Twitter, where he implied the cancellation was down to the rightward turn of the corporation: ‘Ah well, there’s to be no more New World Order on the BBC. Not surprising in the current climate, I suppose.’ In a similar vein, UK comedy bible Chortle has warned that ‘the cancellation will also fuel fears that the corporation is avoiding shows that are critical of the government’.

You might have thought that of all the things that could get you in trouble on a university campus today, blasphemy would not be one of them. That the days of unbelievers being banished and having their works burned by college dons were long behind us. That the old blasphemies had at least been replaced by new, secular blasphemies about race and gender. Not so, it seems. As one law academic has found out, criticising or even just discussing religious practice is still a risky business at British universities – only the God that campus authorities fear seems to have changed.  Universities should not be giving in to such intolerance Steven Greer was a human-rights law professor at the University of Bristol until he retired last year.

Nicola Sturgeon has for many years been hailed, particularly by commentators south of the border, as the consummate political leader – someone who effortlessly dominates the Scottish political scene. In doing so, it's said, she repeatedly shows up the public-school boys in the Westminster government for the bluffers that they are.  That unearned reputation is starting to slip, now that Sturgeon’s dogged pursuit of radical transgender policies, via her now-blocked gender bill, has blown up in her face. The public outcry over the case of ‘Isla Bryson’ – the male rapist briefly held in a women’s prison – has shown that the SNP has lost the room and the moral plot when it comes to the gender issue.

If you haven’t seen Simon Pegg’s viral video about Rishi Sunak yet, you’re in for a real treat. It’s a genius bit of satire, a brutal send-up of left-leaning, self-righteous. middle-class midwits. In it, the cult Brit comic actor turned bona fide Hollywood star does a pitch-perfect impression of the sort of unkempt craft-beer botherer who gets all of his news from James O’Brien clips. In character, Pegg rages against Sunak for daring to say people should learn maths up to 18. ‘Rishi Sunak wants a f***ing drone army of data-entering robots. F*** the Tories’, he thunders. Genius. Only it isn’t really. I watched it, hoping it was a joke. I like Spaced and it’s a shame to see talented people be so basic and preachy when it comes to politics.

Why block roads? Why make people’s lives miserable? Who do you think this is going to convince? So go the interminable TV-news debates after each disruptive piece of direct action by eco-troupe Extinction Rebellion and the various single-issue offshoots, such as Just Stop Oil, that it has inspired. These past two weeks, Just Stop Oil has been back in the spotlight. It is now into its 12th consecutive day of action in London, demanding the government stop all oil and gas production. Yesterday, its activists blocked roads in Knightsbridge, delaying an ambulance, a fire engine and cars carrying babies to hospital. Today, they're sitting in the road outside parliament.

Without freedom of speech, you do not have a university. More than any other value, it is freedom of speech that most defines the university, that makes it a special place in society set aside for debate and inquiry in which speech and thought should be freer than in practically any other workplace or institution. And yet an alarming proportion of students seem not to have got the memo. A new study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London confirms what has been clear for some time: that today’s students, far from being rebellious free-thinkers, are if anything more supportive of censorship than the general population. The numbers are pretty stark.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse – Extinction Rebellion are back! Well, if you thought an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, fuelled by a global scramble for gas, would have led the eco-irritants to sit things out for a bit, you don’t know XR. For them, the ‘climate emergency’ trumps all. Plus, reading a room has never really been their strong suit – as we saw when they tried to win the hearts and minds of commuters by climbing on top of Tube trains, or when an animal-rights XR offshoot went after that most universally disliked of figures in Britain, the Queen. This time their target is the Houses of Parliament. Earlier today, Extinction Rebellion activists bike-locked themselves to the gates outside parliament.

Thank god for Emily Maitlis. Finally someone has had the balls to call out the pro-Brexit, pro-Boris bias of the BBC. It’s been staring us in the face for years, as the Today programme, Newsnight, Question Time and the rest have become ever-more subsumed into the Ukipper deep state, forever deferential to its poundshop fascism. If that portrayal of our state broadcaster sounds like some wild-eyed conspiracy theory to you, utterly detached from reality, that’s because it is. But that didn’t stop Maitlis – formerly of the corporation, now unshackled from Beeb impartiality rules and with a new Global podcast to promote – from trotting out a version of it in a high-profile speech in Edinburgh yesterday.

What’s the point of a university? Regrettably, that’s a genuine question. The censorship and trigger warnings that are rife on British campuses make it hard to work out what our formerly esteemed institutions of higher education are for anymore, now that free speech, intellectual challenge and the pursuit of truth have become deeply unfashionable. Hundreds of freedom-of-information requests were sent out by the Times to officials across 140 UK universities. The responses found that trigger warnings, telling students that certain works might be upsetting or even traumatising, have been applied to more than 1,000 texts.