'Free speech in the nations and regions of the UK has suffered a catastrophic accident in the past few years' // ruth_wishart
JUST so you know, Adult Human Female, the documentary protesters and Edinburgh University itself have now twice stopped being screened, is readily available on YouTube. I do hope those who tried to stop it being shown have actually watched it.
The student body, rather than shouting from behind barricades, should be in lecture theatres arguing the toss with everyone and anyone, not least in the Scottish capital where the Scottish Enlightenment was born and thrived. Much later in life, I took the second chance offered by the Open University and spent years gaining a humanities degree alongside working full time. I loved that. Especially since the course in question was perfect for the butterfly mentality and insatiable curiosity of a journalist.
This is all wrong. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that a known racist or homophobe had been invited to give a major lecture to a major institution. You could of course insist that he or she were disinvited. That is now commonplace. No, it’s not. It’s a matter for everyone who cares about freedom of speech and the current vogue in closing it down before a word can be uttered.
And wouldn’t it be just wonderful to observe Sir Keir in a Red Wall seat explaining to a female voter of a certain age why some apparently do? In a sense, Stonewall was a victim of its own success having managed to persuade so many policymakers to accept same-sex marriage and civil partnerships. You suspect they became a de facto consultancy looking for a new client base. The Scottish Government, incidentally, became a client. As did, for a while, theNOW, ironically, many gays and lesbians feel threatened, and not just by the attempt to portray the fight for trans rights as analogous to that fought for gay and lesbian rights.
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