A Comprehensive Attack on the Decolonisation Movement in British Universities and Education

Doug Stokes, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West (Cambridge: Polity Press 2023)

The murder of George Floyd by a White police officer three years ago sparked a wave of protests across America and then Britain under the banner of the Black Lives Matter organisation. It was loudly trumpeted that western civilisation is institutionally racist and that it was based on ‘Whiteness’, the underlying racist ideology by which Whites maintained the social, economic and educational advantages against Blacks and people of colour. This ‘White privilege’ extended to all Whites, even if they were not personally racist. There have since been demands to dismantle this perceived systemic racism. This has entered the university, where, according to Stokes, it has set off a moral panic. There is supposed to be a gap between the number of Whites and ethnic minorities enrolling at university and the numbers of Whites achieving top grades and Blacks and other people of colour. This is ascribed to personal racism on campus and the content of the university curriculum. This is held to be Eurocentric and too White. Blacks and other ethnic minorities, it is argued, do not enrol in uni because they are marginalised and put off by the overwhelmingly White content and the personal racism they experience, including microaggressions. At the same time, modern science and Enlightenment rationality are attacked as merely western forms of knowledge that are alien to people of colour from outside Europe. This needs to be removed from the centre of European teaching so that proper space can be made for non-White cultures and their ways of knowing.

Decolonisation and the Advancement of Privileged Members of Ethnic Minorities

Stokes is, according to the brief personal bio on the back cover, a director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, a fellow of the Legatum Institute and a member of the advisory council for the Free Speech Union. He’s also written for a number of right-wing journals like the Times, Torygraph, Spectator and The Critic. Most of the attacks on ‘wokeness’ come from the right, but elements of the left are also turning against it. A few weeks ago the Free Speech Union put up a panel of left-wing writers and academics, who were also very much against it and its malign cancel culture. And there are certainly important points people on the left can take away from this book. Stokes argues that the determination to appoint people to prominent positions in the university and elsewhere is very much a class issue. It allows rich and privileged people of colour like Priyamvada Gopal, a history professor at Cambridge, to present themselves as somehow more marginalised than the Whites underneath. For example, Gopal declared that she was less advantaged because of her colour than the porters at Cambridge. The Beeb’s senior journo is an Asian woman, who declared that she wouldn’t have got her position without the Corporation’s diversity scheme. This is questionable, as her father is billionaire owning one of Britain’s football clubs, and her mother is millionaire in her own right.

The Professional Managerial Class and the Neglect of the Working Class

Stokes also argues that the decolonisation movement is strongly linked with the emergence of the Professional Managerial Class. This is a class of mostly White technocrats, who appeared after the dismantling of the Post-War consensus. As the trade unions were neutered and the welfare state and NHS cut and privatised, the functions of the nation state were increasingly subordinated to the authority of multinational bodies, staffed by ‘anywheres’ – officials with no particular connection to any country, who looked down on the ‘somewheres’ who still retained their loyalty to their particular location or country. And this highly privileged elite particularly despised the White working class. Stokes presents statistics that show, contrary to the image promoted by the intersectional left, it’s the White working class, and particularly boys, who are now marginalised and excluded from the academy, but this is ignored by the university sector. Bristol university set up a bursary worth millions to support 30 more Black students. By contrast, there were only two bursaries set up for people from a generally disadvantaged background. These were only worth £2 million each, compared to the tens given out under the Black bursary scheme. But even one of these two was reserved solely for Blacks. Such schemes proliferate, but only a tiny minority of universities have schemes to support people from a working class background. But Stokes goes through the statistics to show that there are a number of complex factors preventing people from going to uni which have nothing to do with class. The most important is class. Another factor is education. Most Blacks go to state comprehensive schools, which are far less successful at sending their pupils to university than the elite private schools.

Ethnic Racial Oppression Challenged by Statistics

As for the supposed gap between the number of BME pupils going on to university and Whites, the opposite of what is claimed is true: Blacks and ethnic minorities comprise 18 per cent of the population, but 30 per cent of the students enrolling at university. Many ethnic minorities are as successful and some more so than the White population. Indians and other ethnic minorities are as successful as Whites, but people of Chinese origin 30 per cent more. White working class pupils on free school meals are the least successful apart from Travellers.

Stokes cites statistics to show again and again that the Black Lives Matter narrative of racial oppression is wrong, drawn from EU and EHRC reports that claim the opposite. In America, more cops are shot by Blacks than Blacks are shot by Whites. Where there is a statically higher chance of Blacks being shot by the cops than the general population, it’s because Blacks are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. As for racial offences, while most of these are committed by Whites, 24 per cent of them are so are also committed by Blacks, despite the fact that they only constitute around 13 per cent of the American population.

The stats also show that Britain is a far less racist country than others. 89 per cent of people are comfortable with someone of a different colour being prime minister. Other stats show that most people have no objections with their children marrying people of another colour and with working with people of different ethnicities. The incidence of racist crime is much lower than claimed. Most people from ethnic backgrounds are proud to be British at 65 per cent, slightly higher than Whites, and the police is actually more trusted by Blacks and ethnic minorities than by Whites. As for the university sector, while there are fewer ethnic minority professors than Whites, this is not true of certain subjects. 53 per cent of the students and staff in chemical and electrical engineering departments are Black or Asian. Similarly, the degree attainment gap is closing and for some groups it’s statistically insignificant.

There’s also a gender aspect to this. Increasingly more women are entering university than men. 53 per cent of university students are women, and this proportion is increasing so that it has been predicted that in a few decades’ time women will comprise 73 per cent of all students. They are enrolling in all the professional subjects except the mathematical sciences. This implies that in the coming decades the professions, and particularly medicine, will be female dominated.

Needless to say, these stats attacking the narrative that Britain is racist are not what the intersectional left wants to hear. The book quotes the automatic denunciations of a government report published a year or so ago, which concluded that Britain was not a racist society, by prominent members of the Labour party like Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

Intellectual Origins

As well as attacking it at the level of statistics, Stokes dissects the history of the movement. It emerged in the early 20th century in the thinking of the Marxist Frankfurt school and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci. They felt that in order to radicalise the working class it would be necessary to change the culture. This effectively stands Marx on its head, as Marx claimed that the economic substructure created and influenced ideology. This was then taken up in its turn by the American Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was concerned by the failure of the western working class to adopt revolutionary socialism. Instead, he and other radical decided to appeal to the new marginalised groups, such as gays and the ‘people of the ghetto’ – Blacks. This occurred roughly at the same time that similarly disappointed western radicals adopted the ideology of ‘Third Worldism’. They looked to the new national liberation movements of the colonised peoples around the world as an attack on western capitalism which would eventually result in its destruction. These radicals took over as their texts works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And their attitudes show a mixture of White self-hatred and sheer bloodlust. Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s book, declared that if you shot a European, you killed two people: the European and the man he oppressed. Michel Foucault, despite being an openly gay man, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic Revolution in Iran because it was a revolt against ‘western rationalism’. This included the mass purges, including that of homosexuals, by the revolutionary regime.

Foucault and similar thinkers were also responsible for the attack on science and rationality. According to Foucault and the structural and post-structural linguists that preceded him, no objective knowledge about the world is possible due to the all pervasive influence of language. Language structures people’s thinking in binaries – man/woman, Black/White and so on, one of which is always in inferior. Thus language ensures that men enjoy a more privileged position than women, and Blacks and other ethnic minorities are inferior to Whites. At the same time, knowledge is not objective but serves the interest of those in power. It does not advance. Instead, there is merely a change in viewpoint between one historical epoch and another.

Capitalism, Not Science and Rationality, Responsible for Rise of the West

Similarly, the role of the rise of science and the industrial revolution in producing Britain and the West’s global supremacy is also denied. Instead it is argued that a crisis in feudalism in the late Middle Ages led to the rise of capitalism and its institution which created the conditions for European dominance and the enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples.

Readers of this blog will now that I am particularly concerned about the focus on British and European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the way this obscures the existence of slavery across cultures from antiquity onwards. Stokes tackles this issue, exposing its existence in China. Arab merchants to China took with them Black African slaves as their personal servants. This started a craze for African slaves amongst the Chinese, but this has been erased from history. Chinese children are not taught about it in schools, nor is it discussed either officially or in popular culture. At the same time, the slave trade within Africa was very firmly in African hands. The largest collection of documents on the slave trade comes from the Dutch East India Company comprising 100,000 volumes. But these documents hardly anywhere mention the Dutch doing the actual business of capturing slaves. It was done instead by Black Africans, who then sold them on to Europeans. And some Black slavers did extremely well, such as Tippoo Tipp, who enslaved Black Africans to provide labour for his plantations on Zanzibar.

As for the supposed role the slave trade played in enriching Britain, historians have said that in fact it played the same role in stimulating the economy as sugar. The real driver of the industrial revolution and Britain’s wealth was textiles. In fact, it may even have been a disadvantage. One historian has estimated that the country would have been £500,000 better off if we didn’t have the West Indies.

Working Class Whites Did Not Benefit from Slave Trade

He also rebuts the assertion that all Whites somehow benefited from the slave trade. This is again untrue on several levels. Imperialism and colonialism were policies devised by the upper classes. Democracy was only established in 1928 when the vote was granted to all adult men and women without property qualifications. Before then, in the 18th and early 19th century, the franchise was severely restricted to only a tiny percentage of the electorate. And most White people’s lives in 19th century Britain was one of desperate poverty and misery. The average life expectancy in the early 19th century was forty. Child labour was the norm, with small children working down the mines. He gives examples of the long hours one seven or eight year old child worked in total darkness operating the ventilation shutters in the pits, and of a mine disaster where flooding killed both adults and children. But the anti-slavery movement was strong amongst the British people as a whole and particularly among the working class. He also points out that almost all civilisations accepted the existence of slavery, and that the anomaly isn’t British and European slavery, but how the British and the West abolished it.

Geopolitical Dangers

He also argues that the decolonisation movement is dangerous on a geopolitical level. The book presents statistics that show that 47 per cent of Africans believe that colonialism benefited their countries, a higher percentage than westerners. However, slavery and colonialism are used by extremely corrupt African politicians to explain their countries poor performance rather than in the massive greed of the kleptocrats running them. One of these was James Ibori, the governor of one of the Nigerian states, who stole over $100 million but was lauded by his admirers as a great patriot. But other states, such as Russia and China, are weaponising Western guilt as part of their own foreign policies against the West. China has particularly attacked the West as racist and White supremacist for opposing the Great Chinese Dream. This includes further commercial penetration into Africa, which has alarmed some observers as a new form of colonialism.

Nations are bound together by their common histories, and the attack on the West’s history as one of shameful exploitation is designed to stop America and its allies exercising any kind of global dominance. But this retreat from a unipolar world will make international politics much more cut-throat. The state of international relations before the rise of America following the Second World War was one of competing empires which attacked and preyed on the weak. Following the Second World War, America set up a number of international bodies to protect and extend the liberal international order. This included western Europe against the Soviet bloc and Japan in Asia. The result has been that the percentage of the world’s population in desperate poverty has declined from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. He recognises that America’s position as the world’s policeman hasn’t been free from terrible mistakes, but argues that without the security afforded by America international affairs will revert to what they were before as nations compete ruthlessly for resources. He also criticises the various anti-colonialist intellectuals who were all too ready to attack the west, but said nothing about rival empires that were just as brutal or even worse. Like Edward Said, who didn’t criticise Russia, China or the Ottoman Empire, whose Barbary pirates also enslaved White Europeans. Said claimed he didn’t have to. As a Palestinian he was quite comfortable in an eastern milieu, which means that there is a shocking bias and one-sidedness in his critique of imperialism.

Decolonisation Mandatory University Policy

Despite these objections, decolonisation has become a mandatory policy across the university sector. It is demanded and enforced by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Universities UK and the Race Equality Charter as well as the Universities and Colleges Union. And it’s extremely authoritarian. Students in some universities are required to attend compulsory courses on anti-racism. This is not the kind of anti-racism which most people grew up with in the 1970s, when Dr Luther King called on us to judge men by their character, not their colour. If a student responds to the questions presented to him or her on questionnaires devised by the activists with slogans like ‘I believe in one race – the human race’, she or he will get a lecture on how this is itself racist and people of different races need to be treated differently according to their culture and background. Ditto if you’re a believer in meritocracy, in which the best people for a job should get it regardless of their colour. In fact Thomas Sowell has shown that sheer commercial necessity has frequently acted against institutional racism. Despite legislation in apartheid South Africa banning Blacks from certain jobs, some employers nevertheless sought to circumvent it to employ Black workers, simply because it made commercial sense. The activists are also vindictive and highly authoritarian. These course will also ask their White students how guilty they are and openly encourage such feelings as part of an indoctrination campaign to turn them into ‘allies’ concerned to make a fairer Britain for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Microaggressions are a part of this programme in some universities. These are gestures or body language that suggest hostility on someone’s part, even if no such hostility is openly expressed. Not sharing a lift with a personal of colour is one such microaggression, as is lifting your eyebrows if a Black person enters the room. These gestures are deemed racist if they are perceived as such by another, regardless of what was meant by whoever performed them. One university department set up a group of seven young spies to monitor and report on students and staff committing such microaggressions. It’s been said before, but this is totalitarian with a distinctly Maoist tinge. You are under authoritarian surveillance with people spying on you, and you must confess your guilt, just as Mao forced ordinary Chinese to do during his wretched struggle sessions.

Stokes has no time for racism, but sees the decolonisation movement as dangerous, not least because it attacks the principles of equality, rationality and the rule of law that have been at the heart of Western society and its success since the Enlightenment. These are values that need to be defended, especially given the global threat of Russia and China. The movement is also causing social division in the West. Polls show that the upper middle classes in America are far more optimistic about the values of diversity than most Blacks, and have an increasing contempt for the White working class. These last are especially the people who voted for Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, which Stokes denies was primarily racist. They are the people one American politico called ‘semi-fascists’. This attack on the working class also affects Stokes himself, as he states that he grew up in urban poverty in London after his father’s suicide in Canada. But Stokes doubts that the decolonisation movement will get very far outside circles like the BBC and the universities.

Woke Capitalism

As for woke capitalism, the book argues that this is an attempt to prevent criticisms that a corporation is racist or otherwise exploitative, and so a form of virtue signalling and political Danegeld. Even when that corporation is otherwise so, as in the case of those multinational companies that have been accused of using slave labour in China. There is also a political aspect to it. Woke capitalism does not challenge the class structure of society or the nature of capitalism itself. It merely wants better representation of Blacks and people of colour through affirmative action, but does not want to challenge more concrete factors that are holding people from working class backgrounds back. And affirmative action may be a real danger in promoting people because of their colour rather than their ability. If this is done, then it could mean a loss of efficiency and performance in industry, and is actually dangerous in medicine. This aspect of woke capitalism, as something that seems left but actually isn’t, sounds correct. It certainly seems like the reason Starmer has loudly embraced a new set of policies that will supposedly attack British institutional racism and make sure Blacks and Asians get high positions. While not doing anything for the working class as such.

Criticisms

The book’s certainly thorough in its attack on the academic decolonisation movements and its allied campaigns in industry and geopolitics. It’s also going to be controversial. Some may take issue with the reliability of the statistics used, such as the Labour politicos who howled loudly at the last government report. It also has a rosy-eyed view of America as the world’s policeman. America was responsible for some horrific atrocities through supporting genuinely fascist regimes in countries like South America. And the regimes it overthrew as part of its campaign to promote international capitalism were often just left-wing, not Marxist. President Benitez of Guatemala was a democratic socialist, not a commie as he was painted, when he was overthrown in the 1950s. Similarly, the president of Guyana who was also overthrown in an American led coup was a liberal. The Iraq invasion wasn’t launched primarily to give the Iraqi people their freedom from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but to loot their oil and state industries, as Greg Palast shows in his book Armed Madhouse. And Henry Kissinger, who died a few days ago, was a monster responsible for death, torture and suffering on a global scale.

And while it has to be admitted that capitalism has been successful in raising the world’s people out of poverty, globalisation and neoliberalism have had the opposite effect. Ordinary working people across the world have become poorer as elites have become richer, resulting in social unrest and a destabilisation of international relations.

Conclusion

But this doesn’t alter the fact that Critical Race Theory, the ideology at the heart of the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements is a malign, racist, anti-White ideology which ignores the material reasons for poverty and inequality in its pursuit of systemic White racism and has a very skewed, bias view of history. If we are to build a genuinely fair and non-racist society, then it needs to be tackled at every level. Including the universities, where it is actively preventing White working class students from having access to a mechanism that has historically allowed the poor social and economic advancement.

Toby Young on the Free Speech Union and Legislation Needed to Protect Free Speech

I am very definitely not a fan of Toby Young. He’s a very right-wing Tory with nasty eugenicist views. I think he’s part of the Spectator crew and something of a sleazeball, as Hill Street Blues’ officer Mick Belcher would describe him. If memory serves me right, he was one of the people behind a proposed free university, which collapsed a few years ago. Tweezer appointed him to the body that’s supposed to represent Britain’s students, despite the fact that it’s been at least a couple of decades since he was one. He got into Private Eye a few years ago for attending a eugenics conference at one of the London universities. Along with him were members of various American far right groups, who believed that race really did define intelligence and Blacks were biologically less bright than the rest of us. They also weren’t in favour of the welfare state, for the old, old reason that it’s a waste a money supporting people who can’t fend for themselves. In other words, some of the people there could be reasonably described as Nazis.

And his attitude to women leaves much to be desired. A few years ago he managed to cause mass disgust on Twitter or one of the social media platforms by describing how he watched female MPs on TV, commenting on their busts. Back in the 90s he wrote a piece for GQ about how he had been a ‘lesbian for a day’. He then revealed in the article that he’d dressed up in drag and then decided to go trolling through New York’s lesbian bars looking for a snog. He had successfully passed himself off as gay woman in two of them, before he was discovered in a third and had to beat a hasty retreat. Or been thrown out. Whatever. This is the kind of antics many lesbians are complaining about from trans-identified men, or possibly straight men claiming to be trans. They object to clearly biological men demanding romance or sex from them because they claim to be trans. There have been transwomen giving presentations on ‘Breaking the cotton ceiling’, which means getting into lesbians’ cotton underwear. Graham Linehan, formerly the writer behind Father Ted and now an anti-Trans activist, has remarked that one of the lesbian dating sites is actually full of bearded men, who are about as feminine as he is, all claiming to be trans. Well, Tobes tried this trick decades ago. But I wouldn’t like to see him as any kind of trans pioneer.

But his Free Speech Union does have a point.

Young and the others set this up to protect people from persecution because of their views. These are mostly individuals, whose views or comments are deemed offensive because of racism, sexism, homophobia or anti-trans. He appeared on a video on GB News talking about the work the Free Speech Union had done defending two such individuals. One was a railway worker, who’d been sacked because of a comment he’d posted on social media. He lived in one of the towns up north with a large Muslim community. After the lockdown was lifted, he posted that it was a relief no longer having to live in an alcohol-free Muslim caliphate. Someone complained to the company, and he was sacked. The Free Speech Union, however, took up his case, and an industrial tribunal declared in his favour that he was a victim of unfair dismissal and awarded him damages. The second case was a Christian woman, who offended woke sensibilities by stating that the Christian ideal of marriage should be the heterosexual one of a man and woman. Now I’d say that this was perfectly correct and normal, and that holding such a view doesn’t mean that you automatically hate gays or people in same-sex marriages. I’m absolutely sure you can hold such a traditional view of marriage, while recognising that gays also have the right to marry and for their marriages to be respected. But this traditional view was too much for someone, and she suffered because of it.

Now I realise that many people do disagree with these views, and particularly with the railway worker’s comments. It is islamophobic. But that’s the point. For free speech to mean anything, it has to include offensive or unpleasant speech. Free speech that only permits approved speech whether by the authorities or the populace, is no such thing. I’m not a free speech absolutist. There have to be limits, which in my opinion includes holocaust denial, the promotion of paedophilia or which urges people to commit other crimes, like incitement to riot. I’d also include real incitement to racial hatred, though my fear is that such reasonable legislation has been broadened too far to include comments which someone simply finds offensive, rather than which genuinely threatens the safety of Blacks and other people of colour. The guy’s remark is offensive and tasteless but not, I think, really worth his job.

Young explained that the Union would like to pass legislation protecting people from being sacked for their views, if they expressed them as private individuals and not as work or representatives of a company or organisation. He also talked about getting the trade unions to back such legislation, considering that the trade unions were founded to protect workers talking about their companies’ pay and conditions. Well, it was a bit more than that. They were founded to fight for workers’ pay and conditions, but yes, opposing victimisation for one’s views is part of that.

He also proposed having a two-year limit on what could be used to attack someone from their web history. Here I definitely agree with him. There have been a number of cases where politicos, celebrities and ordinary mortals have been embroiled in scandals because of something they said online a few years ago, sometimes when they were much younger. Quite often it’s people, who’ve said something unpleasant or bigoted about people from ethnic minorities and gays, sometimes when they were very young. Private Eye has done this several times. Quite often they’ve printed pieces showing that whatever such a politician, industrialist or media figure thinks now, back in the day he or she had very different views. Sometimes very far back, like in the ’80s or ’90s. People change, and don’t necessarily hold the same views they had when they were in their teens or twenties.

But another reason I’m prepared to give such legislation my approval is because it might stop some of the persecution by the witch hunters. The stock in trade of persecutory groups like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and David Collier and the GnasherJew troll farm is going through their targets’ internet history looking for anything they can misrepresent as anti-Semitism. They’ve done it to a lot of people, many of them Jews and firm opponents of anti-Semitism. They did it to the great Jackie Walker, a self-respecting Jew by faith and blood and a very committed anti-racist activist. Jackie had been discussing the involvement of Jewish financiers – who she explicitly stated were members of her own people – in the slave trade. This is historic fact, and Jackie, as a proper historian and academic, has produced an enormous amount of mainstream scholarship by respected and respectable historians to support it. She has also made the obvious point that these financiers were working for Christian, European kings and states, with whom the ultimate responsibility lies. Again, perfectly correct. But she left out a word, which allowed the CAAS to misrepresent her grotesquely as an anti-Semite. That, and the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recording some of her perfectly reasonable comments about commemorating other groups’ holocausts, like the slave trade, during a workshop on commemorating the Holocaust, has led to her being expelled from the Labour party and receiving the most horrific abuse.

Another victim of the witch hunters was a perfectly innocent Jewish lady in Devon. She was mentioned in an online film Mike and other Corbyn-supporting peeps appeared on promoting a documentary refuting the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. That film opened with a group of venerable rabbis in long beards, dark coats and broad-brimmed hats stating very clearly that Corbyn was no such thing. Many of the speakers, including Mike himself, were victims of the witch hunt and what looks to yours truly as gross libel. One of these wretched witch hunting groups had posted a map of the locations of anti-Semites, and this lady and her address were on it. As a result, she not only received abuse but her car was firebombed.

This is what is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.

This is the name given to the type of online activism when someone deliberately posts comments that will rile people up against a particular group or individual to the point where they may physically attack them. But the remarks that provoke and encourage the assault are carefully phrased so that the person making them can always disavow responsibility: ‘T’wasn’t anything I said, your honour. It’s nothing to do with me and I didn’t intend anything like it should happen.’ Except, of course, they did. As in my view was the case with this lady.

Toby Young is a Tory with deeply unpleasant views. But I do think the Free Speech Union has a point and deserves support.

Especially if it prevents malign witch hunters doxing innocent people, leading to attacks on them and their property.

Telegraph Journo Embarrassed by Sargon and Robinson’s Free Speech Organisation

As we know, embarrassing the Tories is good and righteous work. So Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, the man who broke UKIP, deserves especial congratulations for making the Tories uncomfortable over the whole question of free speech. He didn’t do it intentionally. It’s just that they found the similarities between Toby Young’s Free Speech Union and a rival right-wing organisation founded by Sargon and the islamophobic thug Tommy Robinson far too close for comfort.

Last month the Spectator’s vile Toby Young announced that he was founding the Free Speech Union along with a load of other rightists. This was going to defend those expressing controversial opinions from being silenced and kicked out of their jobs. The Heil on Sunday quoted Tobes as saying

“People who become the target of ‘Twitter storms’ after making controversial remarks will be defended by a new body called the Free Speech Union. The organisation will ‘stand up for the rights of its members to tell the truth in all circumstances’. The union has been set up by the journalist Toby Young in response to police investigations into a string of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ triggered by outspoken comments”.

“If someone at work writes to your boss to complain about something you’ve said, we’ll write to them, too, and explain the importance of intellectual tolerance and viewpoint diversity. If self-righteous social-media bullies pick on you, we’ll return the fire. If someone launches an online petition calling for you to be sacked, we’ll launch a counter-petition. The enemies of free speech hunt in packs; its defenders must band together too.”

The organisation has a Latin motto, which runs something like ‘Audi altri partem’, which I think means ‘Hear the other side.’

However, it’s not a union, but an incorporated, whose five directors are all spokesmen for the right. They include Young himself, Prof Nigel Biggar, who defends colonialism, Douglas Murray, who has islamophobic opinions, and Radomir Tylecote, who was suspended from the Treasury for writing a book against the EU. And their record of defending their opponents’ right to express their opinions is actually very poor. Zelo Street in their article about the wretched union quoted Paul Bernal, who tweeted

“As Toby Young should know, your commitment to free speech isn’t shown by how well you defend those whose speech you agree with, but how you defend those whose speech you don’t. When his ‘free speech union’ talks about the excesses of the Prevent programme, then see”.

The Street himself commented that it was just free speech for the right, and a way for Tobes and co. to complain about how unfair the world is.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/02/toby-youngs-free-speech-sham.html

Unfortunately for Tobes’ outfit, Sargon and Tommy Robinson, the founder and former leader of the EDL, have launched their own right-wing free speech organisation, the Hearts of Oak Alliance. And the similarities between the two concerned Tory feminist academic Zoe Strimpel to write a piece for the Torygraph on the first of this month, March 2020, complaining about this fact. Strimpel’s a Cambridge graduate with an M. Phil in gender studies. She’s the author of a series of book on men’s psychology, feminism, dating and romance. She began her article with the statement that her circle of friends has taken on a left-wing hue. It includes many Labour supporters, against whom she has to defend capitalism and Zionism. Well, at least she said ‘Zionism’, rather than accuse them once again of anti-Semitism. She’s upset by them chuckling off her fears about the erosion of free speech and thought, which, she claims, is under attack by a visible machinery of censorship in offices, the cops, universities, arts and online. She cites approvingly a report by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, which advised universities to guard against being the voice of critics of those, who despise the supporter of the traditional values of patriotism, family, faith and local traditions. They have to be willing to represent and not sneer at those, who feel justifiable pride in British history, culture and traditions.

However, she was worried whether it was possible to defend free speech, without sullying the cause with too many real thugs, who wanted to get as close as possible to inciting actual violence under the guise of expressing their democratic rights. Was it possible to challenge the climate of intimidation, snide snitching, and mendacious and manipulative accusations of hate-mongering, racism and making people feel ‘unsafe’, without being a magnet for the alt-right? She agreed to become a member of the advisory board, but has her reservations. She’s uncomfortable about Sargon’s and Robinson’s organisations, because of Sargon’s own anti-feminist, misogynistic views. Sargon was, she declared, far right, a thug, who called feminism ‘a first world female supremacy movement’, and ‘all kinds of blokeish’. He’s also the man responsible for sending that Tweet to Labour MP Jess Philips, telling her that he ‘wouldn’t even rape her’.

She concluded her article by stating that the aims of Tobes’ outfit were perfectly legitimate and free speech is under threat. But it was ‘just a shame that in defending those who ought to speak freely, one has to defend those, who – in an ideal world – wouldn’t have anything to say.’

Sargon was naturally upset at this assault on his character. He therefore posted a piece up on his YouTube channel, Akkad Daily, on the 2nd of March defending himself from her attack. He didn’t deny he was anti-feminist, and defended his own comments on this. But he roundly denied being a thug and far right. He was, he repeated, a Lockean classical liberal, and believed in precisely the same values as those Policy Exchange’s report claimed were under attack.

Sargon is indeed far right. He’s a libertarian, who would like everything privatised and the end of the welfare state. He’s against the European Union and immigration, and is bitterly critical of feminism and affirmative action for women and ethnic minorities. And yes, he is an islamophobe like Robinson. But in very many ways he and Robinson are absolutely no different from Young and his crew. Young is also far right. He’s a right-wing Tory, who attended eugenics conferences whose members and speakers were real Nazis and anti-Semites. And Young also is all kinds of blokeish as well. He’s posted a number of tweets expressing his obsession with women’s breasts. Way back in the ’90s, he also wrote a piece for the men’s magazine, GQ, about how he once dressed up in drag in order to pose as a woman, because he wanted to snog lesbians in gay clubs.

And it’s not just the people in the Free Speech Union, who have no real interest in free speech. Neither does Conservatism or Zionism. Thatcher tried to pass legislation making it illegal for universities to employ Marxists. A week or so ago, Turning Point UK announced that it was launching a British version of its parent organisation’s Professor Watch, a blacklist of university lecturers, who dared to express or teach left-wing views. And anti-Zionist and Israel-critical bloggers, like Tony Greenstein and Martin Odoni have described how Israel’s super-patriotic supporters, like Jonathan Hoffman, don’t want to permit free debate about Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. Rather, they turn up at pro-Palestinian meetings with the intention of heckling, shouting down and otherwise disrupting the proceedings. They also seek to use the law to suppress criticism and factual reporting of Israeli atrocities as anti-Semitism.

Now there are opponents of free speech on the left. But Stimpel, as a good Tory, doesn’t want to recognise that it exists on the right. She’s embarrassed that supporting right-wing speech also means supporting extreme right-wing figures like Sargon and Robinson. But she doesn’t recognise, because she can’t afford to, that Sargon and Robinson aren’t actually much different from Toby Young, Douglas Murray, Radomir Tylecote, Nigel Biggar and the rest. In fact, there’s little difference between the two groups in fundamental attitudes.

It’s just that Sargon’s a little more extreme and doesn’t have a column in a major right-wing newspaper or magazine.

Turning Point UK Preparing Anti-Academic Witch Hunt

There’s some areas of the American right still pining for the days of the McCarthy witch hunts. And unfortunately, it looks like they want to export them to these shores as well. Turning Point UK is one of them. If you don’t remember, Turning Point UK is the British spawn of the American Conservative outfit, Turning Point USA. Founded by the repulsive Charlie Kirk, who ‘LIVES AS A CAPITALIST EVERY DAY’, as he shouted at the Young Turks’ Cenk Uighur, this is supposed to be dedicated to inspiring young people with right-wing ideals, turning back the evil tides of liberalism, socialism and so forth. Its British branch got off to a notoriously bad start when Candace Owens, another prominent American rightist, told the assembled faithful at its inauguration that Adolf Hitler wasn’t really a nationalist. She declared that what he did would have been all right if he’d stuck to his own country, but he wanted to make everyone German. This was the opposite of nationalism. This was the opposite of history and morality, as was soon pointed out to her. TPUK have kept a quiet profile since. So much so that it has been suggested that the outfit is no more than a trick to part elderly American Conservatives from their money through encouraging them to donate to it, so little has it actually done. Unfortunately, it still seems to be around and making a nuisance of itself. Zelo Street has posted a couple of articles about the organisation posting attack ads libeling former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey as anti-Semites, terrorist supporters and claiming they aid paedophiles.

And now Zelo Street has also reported that one of its scummy number has announced on Twitter that they want to import their parent organisation’s campaign of blacklisting left-wing academics. TPUSA has a ‘Professor Watchlist’ of academics they claim have a ‘left-wing agenda’. One critic, the Skeptical Seventh, has said of this that “They must know that what they are doing will lead to people being harassed, being shut down … It is undermining academic freedom, which is ironic for an organisation that claims to be in favour of free speech”. Yes, but for them it’s a case of free speech for me, but not for thee. However, the Beeb reported that it had been told by Dominique Samuels, one of the TPUK’s influencers, that they wouldn’t be introducing that policy over here.

This has been flat-out contradicted by the odious Darren Grimes. Grimes was upset when Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer at Cambridge, tweeted a particularly apt quote from Lord Macauley to describe Priti Patel. She said:  “We should acknowledge, as we look at Priti Patel, that there was one very successful cultural eugenics project: ‘We must at present do our best to form…a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’”. This was too much for Grimes, who didn’t recognise the quote, and ranted  “This person is a lecturer at Cambridge. Is it any wonder our students are churned out of these university factories like hard-left, braindead sheep when this is what is teaching them?! What a truly bloody horrendous thing to think, never mind tweet”. Gopal herself was highly amused by Grimes’ reaction. She said “Before I withdraw again for a bit, I thought I should share my enjoyment of Mr Grimes’ condemnation of Lord Macaulay’s  ‘truly bloody horrendous thing to think’ … The great thing about British far-right is their complete ignorance of their own history &  literature”. Macauley’s comment demanding the anglicisation of Indians is notorious. It frequently appears in textbooks as an illustration of the hostile attitude of the British colonisers to their subject peoples’ indigenous cultures.

The TPUK twitter feed then joined in with the ominous statement “Our uni campuses are overrun by leftist lecturers who teach their overt political bias as objective truth. This is not ok. The fight back begins now. Introducing ‘Education Watch’: Documenting University Lecturers’ Political Bias”.

This is, as Zelo Street has commented, the right using the false assumption that not only do they have the right to their own opinions, but also their facts, to start a witch hunt. And as Grimes was at the launch of Toby Young’s wretched Free Speech Union, it also shows that’s a sham as well.

Paul Bernal, an associate professor of Law at UEA, commented: “Can I just ask, what do the thought-police *want* us lefty academics to teach our students? Obviously facts are out. Analysis is against the law. Nothing foreign. Nothing expert”.

Tim concluded his article on this latest right-wing assault on free speech with the observation that TPUK were obviously trying to whip up hate and harassment because they were so desperate for the publicity. And so he was sure that they would be condemned by all good Conservatives.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/02/turning-point-uk-turning-nasty.html

Let’s be clear what Turning Point are demanding – the harassment and purging from academic of lecturers, whose politics they disapprove of. This is a feature of just about every totalitarian regime and movement. The Italian Fascists did it. The Nazis did it in the ‘coordination’ of the universities, which saw Jews and Marxists purged. The Communists did it. And it got really unpleasant in China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, when children were called upon to denounce their parents and teachers. The BNP or National Front also tried something like it in Britain in the 1980s. They urged nationalist schoolchildren to write to them informing on ‘Communist’ teachers. They would then send a couple of their thugs round to assault them. TPUK haven’t called for having them attacked, but this is what such a list would lead to.

As for this wave of left-wing lecturers churning out a generation of impressionable kids indoctrinated with cultural Marxism or whatever, this is, in my opinion, somewhat of an hysterical overreaction. Yes, there are outspoken left-wing academics, and always have been. But there are also Conservatives and all shades of political opinion in between. And, with a few obvious exceptions, such as those calling for sectarian or racist violence and hatred, for example, they should all have the right to teach what they believe to be objective fact. Because this is what democracy and freedom of speech means.

Freedom of speech and conscience means putting up with speech, ideas and opinions of which you don’t necessarily approve. It certainly does not mean tolerating only those opinions that you share. That, whether done by the left or the right, leads to intolerance and persecution.

And in the intellectual context, it also means the massive impoverishment of national culture. As a result of the Nazi purges of the universities and the arts, German culture suffered immensely. That of other countries, particularly America, benefited immensely, as talented scientists, mathematicians, writers, film-makers and artists took sanctuary on the other side of the Pond. It’s been said that if the Nazis hadn’t taken power, and pushed their greatest minds abroad, the 20th would have been hailed as the German century rather than the American.

This is what Turning Point would like to do to America, and which their equally idiotic counterparts on this side of the Pond would like to do over here – a stifling, stagnant, impoverished culture in order to enforce their own intellectual agenda.