Tom Slater

‘We’re not the thought police’, says the new chief inspector of constabulary, Andy Cooke. That the police don’t want to concern themselves with what’s going on inside our heads, punishing those who entertain dissenting ideas, is welcome news. But the fact Cooke even felt he had to make this intervention, in his first interview in post no less, reminds us just how bad things have become in English policing in recent years. Cooke is clearly keen to push back – or at least be seen to be pushing back – against the alarming rise of what can legitimately be called thought policing in our supposedly liberal country. More than 120,000 so-called non-crime hate incidents were recorded by police between 2014 and 2019.

If Elon Musk truly intends to make Twitter a free-speech platform, he’s clearly got a fight on his hands. That was made abundantly clear by the collective meltdown among media and political elites that greeted the billionaire’s shock takeover of the platform last month. The vested interests in keeping Twitter a sanitised, censorious place are apparently considerable. And not only will Musk have the great and good, his own employees, our own Nadine Dorries and Joe Biden’s new ‘disinformation tsar’ to contend with, but potentially Twitter’s advertisers, too.

If you want a glimpse of how toxic the UK’s race debate has become, take a look at the treatment of Tony Sewell. Sewell has devoted much of his working life to improving the lives of ethnic-minority Brits. The charity he chairs, Generating Genius, has been helping some of the most deprived young people get into high-paying Stem fields for more than 15 years. Here is a man who truly walks the walk, amid a race-relations industry that is full of solution-free, identitarian jabber. The cowardice here is breath-taking And yet, he has been thoroughly demonised.

Is maths racist? That’s the question apparently troubling the department of mathematical sciences at Durham University at the moment. As the Telegraph reports, the department has put out a new guide on ‘decolonisation’, urging maths academics to ensure their teaching is ‘more inclusive’ and not dominated by a Eurocentric view on the world. Of course, exploring the overlooked contribution of non-western thinkers to mathematics would be no bad thing. But this guide goes a fair bit further down the ‘decolonisation’ rabbit hole. It urges academics to introduce more non-white thinkers into their classes, thus presenting their race as more important than their merit or impact.

In the never-ending debate about left-wing bias in BBC comedy, a more crucial issue tends to be overlooked. Namely, that the deeper problem with much of the material is that it is predictable, boring and geared towards applause rather than laughs. That most of it is also marinated in what passes for left-wing politics today, replete with all the usual talking points and lame anti-Toryism, is almost a second-order issue. Expressing a high-status opinion now takes precedence over actually landing a punchline. So much so that I’m not convinced your average anti-Tory genuinely finds this stuff funny either. Frankie Boyle's New World Order on BBC Two is an interesting case in point.

It is often said that J.K. Rowling is uncancellable. So rich and bankable is the Harry Potter author — now a modern-day folk devil due to her views on transgenderism — it is almost inconceivable that she could be deprived of her livelihood or pushed entirely out of polite society. But her deranged haters are certainly giving it a good go. The demonisation of Rowling has taken a decidedly Stalinist turn of late. Her crime? Making some mild criticisms of gender ideology and holding to deeply old-fashioned views like believing in biological sex. The cultural elite might not be able to deprive Rowling of her income, but they can try to erase her name from the very work she has created.

Are we cancelling former Isis sex slaves now? It would seem so, at least going by this barmy story out of Toronto, Canada, where a school-board recently pulled out of an event with a survivor of the Yazidi genocide amidst fears her story could ‘foster Islamophobia’. Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human-rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner. In 2014, her family were killed by Isis as the group swept through northern Iraq. She was sold into sexual slavery. She was raped, tortured and passed around depraved militants until she eventually escaped. She has since become an advocate for the rights of Yazidis, determined to make sure the West does not forget what happened in Sinjar.

I am starting to wonder if the world of arts and culture is staffed, in large part if not exclusively, by massive whinging babies. What other plausible explanation is there for the frequency with which publishing houses, streaming services and theatres are going into open revolt because their employers have commissioned work by someone whose opinions they happen to find disagreeable? Terry Gilliam is the latest artist in the crosshairs. The Monty Python legend and director was due to co-direct a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the Old Vic in London next year. Sondheim had expressed support for Gilliam’s vision for the show. But according to reports in the Stage, ‘staff unrest’ about his personal views has led to the show being cancelled.

The great awokening of the British constabulary has got to be the most curious and infuriating part of our culture war. While knife crime continues to rise, an inordinate amount of police time now seems to be taken up by various virtue-signalling initiatives. Take the rise of ‘rainbow cars’. For some time now members of the public have been bemused to see cop cars patrolling their neighbourhoods emblazoned in the LGBT flag. Now the LGBT+ lead of the National Police Chiefs Council has felt the need to make an Instagram post explaining it all to us.

So it’s finally happened. Cancel culture has come for Mumford and Sons. Winston Marshall, former banjo player in the hugely successful group, has left the band after becoming embroiled in a Twitterstorm earlier this year, during which he was essentially smeared as a hard-right lunatic. It seems that the culture war can now leave no corner of actual culture untouched, from the Royal Academy to middle-of-the-road folk rock. And what a bizarre Twitterstorm it was. Marshall was first set upon in March because he tweeted about a book written by a conservative author – namely, Unmasked, a book about Antifa by US journalist Andy Ngo. That’s genuinely it.  Marshall didn’t have a Wiley-style meltdown. He didn’t leave a glowing Amazon review of Mein Kampf.