Tom Slater

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.

There’s a word for countries in which you might get collared by the police because someone took offence to your jokes. And it isn’t a nice one. It’s the sort of thing you read about going on in Erdogan’s Turkey or Putin’s Russia. But it is also the sort of thing that now happens in allegedly liberal Britain. As Joe Lycett has found out. The stand-up comic and former Great British Sewing Bee host says he was contacted by the cops over a joke in his new show, referring to a donkey’s genitalia. ‘Someone came to my tour show a few weeks back and was offended by one of the jokes. And their perfectly understandable response to this was… to call the police’, he posted on Instagram yesterday.

When did student radicals become so pathetic? There’s a lot of talk – often rightly so – of how sinister woke student activism can be today. Think balaclava-clad blokes protesting against Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex over her alleged ‘transphobia’ – that is, her heretical belief in biological sex. Or students at Essex University condemning gender-critical academic Jo Phoenix and proclaiming in a flyer ‘SHUT THE F**K UP TERF’ next to an image of a gun. But much of the censorious agitation that goes on on campuses today is often just embarrassing – the wail of entitled, overgrown infants afraid of hurty words. Events at the University of Warwick on Friday are a case in point.

If you want a snapshot of how warped the police’s priorities are these days, look to the case of Kevin Mills. Mills, a 63-year-old electrician, has just had a ‘non-crime hate incident’ scrubbed from his record following a bizarre battle with Kent Police. It all stems from a testy exchange in 2019 between himself and a woman he was doing some work for.  Mills showed up to the woman's house in Maidstone in Kent to install a bathroom mirror. When he realised he’d need £50 more for materials, the two got into a row and she insisted on keeping some materials he’d already bought for the job. Mills walked out, saying something to the effect of ‘I'm not working for someone like you’.

We need to talk about Russophobia. There really is no other word for the swiftness with which Russian sportspeople and artists are being expelled from international competitions and festivals, for no other crime than being born Russian. While all right-thinking people condemn Russia’s brutal, imperialist invasion of Ukraine, the neo-McCarthyism ripping through various western institutions is getting really ugly – and will prove completely counter-productive. Hot on the heels of Fifa – that most morally unimpeachable of sports bodies – banning Russia from the World Cup, Wimbledon’s organisers are now on the verge of announcing a complete ban of Russian (and Belarusian) tennis players.

Just when you thought Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s collective victim complex couldn’t get any more vast and cavernous, up they pop again to make clear, in pained tones, just how persecuted this multimillionaire formerly royal couple believe themselves to be. We already knew that their allies think ‘Megxit’ was all about racism. That their departure from the monarchy, freeing them up to cut lucrative deals in the United States, was forced by their supposedly racist treatment by the tabloids. Now we learn it was also all about misogyny, and that the term ‘Megxit’ is itself shot through with hatred for the Duchess of Sussex.

What have environmentalists got against commuters? Not for the first time a group of bedraggled climate nuts have taken their argument for ‘radical’ action on global warming not to Downing Street or to Parliament Square, but to ordinary people just trying to go about their business. Junctions have been blocked along the M25 near Kings Langley, Heathrow, Swanley, Godstone and Lakeside. This is the work of Insulate Britain, a single-issue Extinction Rebellion offshoot demanding action on home insulation. So far 42 have been arrested. The protesters tweeted that they were ‘disrupting the M25’ to ‘demand the government insulate Britain’.

‘There’s more than one way to burn a book’, wrote Ray Bradbury, in a coda to the 1979 edition of his anti-censorship classic, Fahrenheit 451. The case of Kate Clanchy, the Orwell Prize-winning author, currently rewriting her book after a particularly strange fit of identitarian pique, shows us just how true that is. The story of Clanchy’s sudden fall from grace in the publishing world is utterly mad, even by today’s standards. She is an author, poet and teacher. In 2019, she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a memoir reflecting on her time teaching in an Oxford comprehensive, to critical acclaim.

When a top Edinburgh school announced earlier this month that it would stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, citing the novel’s ‘white saviour motif’ and use of the n-word, the response ranged from uproar to bafflement. We may be living in increasingly censorious times, it seems, but banning books, even just on a school’s curriculum, still has a bad smell around it. Well, perhaps not for much longer. In an alarming new poll, conducted for The Spectator by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, 40 per cent of respondents said they supported the UK government censoring books with content that it deems sexist, homophobic or racist. Just 30 per cent were opposed while 24 per cent would neither support nor oppose it.