Former Labour MP Tom Harris has written in the Telegraph today about how the Left needs to get over its animus towards the champions of free speech (such as our own Editor-in-Chief) and remember that it, too, once believed in freedom of expression. Here’s an excerpt (from a piece kindly titled ‘The Left needs to learn to love Toby Young‘ – Daily Sceptic readers will agree, of course, but then we’re biased):
I joined the Free Speech Union today.
Previously filed in my mental ‘to do’ list, I was finally forced out of my lethargy by the fuss over Scotland’s new Hate Crime Act and the impressive defiance shown by J.K. Rowling and others in the face of a state that has taken upon itself rather too much of a say in what we say, do and think.
So I duly signed up and paid my subscription, becoming keenly aware as I did so that here was yet another action that takes me further away from my old party, both politically and culturally.
I joined Labour exactly 40 years ago this month and left in 2018 after finally (and belatedly) losing patience at the antisemitism that was being so generously tolerated, not only by the party leadership but by its grassroots.
The FSU, because it’s led and was founded by a Right-wing hate figure, Toby Young, has been deemed persona non grata by the Left, despite its aims having once been wholly supported by Labour and the broad Left. When I first joined Labour, I was an aspiring journalist and considered free speech – including the right to offend – an essential bulwark of a free press and, therefore, a free society. No one I knew in Labour at the time objected to this philosophy.
The principle of free speech should be a fundamental value and a political priority for any party of the Left. Yet somehow, by an incremental, self-defeating process, perhaps resulting from a loss of confidence in its core values, the Left now regards campaigns to defend free speech as constructs of the Right which must, therefore, be opposed.
The political imbecility of such a stance hardly needs explaining: threats to an individual’s right to say and think what they like are increasing across the world, including the U.K. and particularly in Scotland. The party that has historically opposed states’ attempts to gag writers, politicians and artists in Right-wing regimes should hardly needed to consider which side to take in the latest heated debates.
Moreover, the party that once prided itself as the natural party of feminism should be at the forefront of defending women’s spaces, sports and safety, not colluding in attempts to change the language relating to, and the very definition of, women.
Worth reading in full, obviously.
Stop Press: Some great comments appearing under the Telegraph article.
The current top rated, from ‘Another Kelly’:
Toby Young is the free speech equivalent of J.K. Rowling and I am so grateful. I joined in support when they were barred by PayPal and they have done sterling work since then and gone from strength to strength.
Number two, from ‘Guy Fawkes’:
Mr. Harris, and your former comrades on the Left, please repeat 100 times: “We have always been at war with Eastasia” …
And don’t forget that it was Toby Young who called out the Covid scam, through his website Lockdown Sceptics [now the Daily Sceptic] in April 2020, LONG before anyone else would come forward in public.
Covid is dead, but he hasn’t killed off the Net Zero scam [yet], so support him, because this guy REALLY knows what he is talking about.
With a reply from ‘Geraldine Kelley’:
We joined the FSU immediately it was launched and the Daily Sceptic as well. They are voices of reason and debate and gave us hope that we weren’t the only people looking out of the window in 2020, appalled by the scam that was going on.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘…..don’t forget that it was Toby Young who called out the Covid scam, through his website Lockdown Sceptics [now the Daily Sceptic] in April 2020, LONG before anyone else would come forward in public.
Covid is dead, but he hasn’t killed off the Net Zero scam [yet], so support him, because this guy REALLY knows what he is talking about.’
Too right.
Very many thanks to Mr Young for all the years of immensely hard work at Lockdown Sceptic, Daily Sceptic, but also Free Schools….
How he has managed to evade a knighthood, ennoblement, is beyond me.
Self effacing to a fault, as ever.
A total legend.
Hear hear. And face to face the same. Curious, humble, generous.
Three cheers for Toby!
I say this as me, myself and I, Mr Joe Vorlicky. I didn’t know it at the time (felt very alone) but I was happy to find out that I stood up alongside him right at the start of the SCAMDEMIC (which for most was around 23rd March 2020).
I was never the protesting type, but this one was so flipping OBVIOUS, right from the start. Some battles are worth fighting. I scared myself with how ready I was to start punching coppers.
Moderator here. Thank you MAk and all for the kind comments, TY deserves it, and we’re still with him 4 years later…. Ensuring good free speech is probably the most difficult thing for us to deal with; on the science subjects (Covid, net zero), it’s slightly easier than on the political subjects! But we try our best..
Dear Mod——Yep you all are doing a great job, and this new Scottish tyranny is a biggie. Good luck. ———–We must all remember two important things about Free Speech (1) It is Free and (2) It is only SPEECH. —-cheers.
I remember giving a copper in his car a dirty look at a junction in 2020. I don’t usually do things like that.
Yes we all need to help bludgeon the Net Zero scam into submission but it is getting and will get a huge bit of help from something called—————— REALITY. Sooner or later the political class will have to live in the real world, and all of their fanciful targets and obsessions about CO2 will fall like a set of dominoes when the real world bites their behinds. ——-In the meantime ofcourse we are all going to be facing the astronomical cost of this absurdity.
I don’t think they have any fancy targets beyond scam as many people as possible out of as much for the money as possible for the longest possible time. As project, it’s blindingly obvious that Net Zero cannot no more fly than a stone can swim. Hence, it cannot be meant to succeed and must be a smokescreen for something else.
Yes he’s a very humble guy. I wrote to him when he first published Lockdown Sceptics and said he should be knighted for what he was doing. He generously wrote back in his usual self effacing way and actually published what I’d written about to him. My claim to fame!!
A hero in my book even though I don’t agree with everything he says and he’s always worth listening to.
“the Left needs to get over its animus towards the champions of free speech (such as our own Editor-in-Chief) and remember that it, too, once believed in freedom of expression.”
Did it really? Hmm. I’m sure it said it did, and I’m sure that it would still say that now. Mr Tom Harris may well have believed in it and still does. But in my experience most people say they believe in it but when you give examples of speech that they really don’t like – pick whatever their particular trigger is – then they will say “oh of course that shouldn’t be allowed because that’s hate speech and no right-thinking person would want to say that”.
Leftists supported free speech on a purely instrumental basis ie for criticism of then dominant conservative institutions and traditions. Having now captured all institutions of the state and the dominant narrative, leftists are committed to suppressing speech not to their liking. Inconvenient truths are after all inconvenient.
Exactly that!
The Left, being communist-oriented, are about CONTROL: control of thought, control of speech, control of action. Authoritarians to a man and woman and men pretending they’re women.
I have never forgotten Gormless Brown’s response when asked to comment on a jury deciding ‘Not Guilty’ in the case of BNP members being tried for slander, making false statements or whatever the cooked-up charges were circa 2008. He almost frothed at the mouth in anger as he swore to do something about stopping juries reaching wrong decisions. He wasn’t sure what he’d do, but perhaps he thought it would be ‘the terrors of the earth’.
BNP’s ‘crime’? Warning the public that muzlims in northern towns were deliberately targeting and grooming young white girls for sex, giving them drugs and passing them round. What they said seemed hardly credible to the public, but it was all true and we hadn’t heard the half of it because this was happening to hundreds of thousands of girls up and down the country. BNP were tried in a court of law for telling the truth.
Some time later it became clear that Gormless had known all about it when, in addressing a Labour conference, he described the girls as ‘having chosen their own path’. In other words, these girls, many underage, deserved no protection and had chosen to be prostitutes. That gives us the clue as to why the police, Labour councillors and the DPP ignored it all for years and years until the truth burst out like a poisonous boil erupting.
Never forget, never forgive. Leftards are immoral lunatics, like their hero Stalin.
100%
Thank you.
Ideology is safe and warm, and comforting, until it runs up against the rocks of reality. The left have always had perfect visions of perfect solutions to almost every problem you can think of. But when we reach the reality of essential compromises, because no solution is a ‘one size fits all’ perfect fit, then it sullies the perfection of the idea. That’s what they hate the most.
Yes apparently 1000 new members in the last fortnight, and long may this last. Hats off to Toby for all the good you do……even if we do need to have the odd whinge and grumble about DS from time to time. But the Leftards are never going to love free speech. Let’s be real here…
Moving on. Here is a man exercising his right to free speech and he happens to be bang on in this post. Who put this ridiculous, insulting sign on the toilet door? It’ll be those pesky bloody ‘Feminazis’ again, no doubt. If you’re a sexual predator paedo creepy sleazeball b’stard, being able to don a dress and identify as female is akin to finding the golden ticket so that you can gain access to the chocolate factory and ALL the goodies are immediately available to you. Well, what’s a creepy paedo sex pest sleaze to do? Show restraint?
”Did ppl think that pedophiles were so heavily overrepresented in the priesthood because there was something inherent about that job that turned otherwise normal men into pedophiles? Or is it mayyyyyyyybe more likely that pedophiles – being the opportunistic predators that they are – were drawn like a magnet to a profession that 1) have them much greater access to victims and 2) the social clout to extricate themselves from situations where they got caught?
And yet despite the fact that we KNOW predators will go to such great lengths as choosing an entire career based on accessing victims, there are ostensibly intelligent adults who will pretend that it’s simply unfathomable that these same predators would NEVER slap on a dress and claim to be a woman if it allowed them unquestioned access to women’s single-sex spaces.
That’s what they dont understand (or don’t WANT to understand) is it really isn’t ABOUT “thinking all trans ppl are pedophiles”. It’s about understanding that if you create a sacred caste of men whose motives cannot be questioned and actions forever justified (no matter how problematic) you will inevitably be ringing the diner bell for every creep, predator and sex pest in society to adopt this new identity.
How can anybody who wasn’t born yesterday see a sign like the one below posted in the female bathroom and honestly not understand how this cult has created a perfect safe space for the most predatory men in society?”
https://twitter.com/Rob_ThaBuilder/status/1776031763883590008
*WARNING* Another man exercising free speech, incoming…
He may be Pat Condell but PC he is not. This funny vid is worth 5mins of your day. *Trigger warning for the Miserable Git Association*
https://twitter.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1776338539900227997
Read a Condell book some years ago —cheers.
The Free Speech Union appears to be going from strength to strength.
JK Rowling has reposted the FSU tweet about the number of new Scottish members joining the FSU and the Hate Speech Hotline, and in 21 hours the tweet has received 266k views, 4k likes, and 1.1k reposts – which is hugely more than FSU tweets usually get.
https://twitter.com/SpeechUnion/status/1776032109057999281
The left believes in power and revolution that’s it. There are no better angels to appeal to.
The left wing has never supported free speech, tell be a socialist country that is open to free speech and freedom of expression.
I joined the FSU as freedom to express oneself opening without fear of persecution is something worth fighting for.
I will probably very need to use its services, but like any insurance policy, it’s there when things go wrong.
The left have come to hate free speech because as Thatcher pointed out “Socialists don’t like you having a choice because you might not choose Socialism”. It is as basic as that.————–It should not come as a big surprise that a political system that seeks to control everything also wants control of the speech that could undermine it. And it is ofcourse so easily undermined with examples from everywhere in the world. ——–The left hate this.
Having abandoned the MSM quite some time ago as being wholly biased and unreliable, sites like the Daily Sceptic (I started with Lockdown Sceptic), The Conservative Woman, etc. are now the bright lights of rationality. I just wish my ‘pompous oaf’ (not my description) of a green-blob MP would read and digest the DS site, it might save him from being the fool he is.
“…threats to an individual’s right to say and think what they like are increasing across the world”
Yes. The left doesn’t like the individual and every effort has been made to equate with selfishness and against the nebulas ‘greater good of the community/group’.
Here is an extract from a book written in 1991 about aviation medicine. This is a branch of medicine that investigates why pilots make mistakes and has led to extraordinary improvements in airline safety.
The Naked Pilot by David Beaty
…In terms of communication, Crew Resource Management emphasises that fast-diminishing art of ‘how to listen’, especially to the underlying message rather than just the words. There are so many examples already shown of accidents where the underlying message was not understood – even the spoken words, for that matter.
This Cockpit Resource Management also touches on the defence mechanisms we put up against seeing and hearing what we don’t want to.
‘Groupthink‘ (a form of conformity) is identified rightly as the negative aspect of team cohesiveness, something to be avoided at all costs. Examples are given of the pressures that bring about groupthink.
Peer pressure – “We’re all in this together”
People experiencing groupthink apply direct pressure to any one individual who momentarily expresses doubts about any of the groups shared illusions or who questions the validity of the arguments supporting a strategy favoured by the majority.
Time pressure – “Let’s get on with it!”
Victims of groupthink are often more conscious of the time element than of how well the decision is processes when time pressure is critical. Time appears more important than the task.
Self-censorship – “What would I know?”
A desire to avoid deviating from what appears to be group consensus, keep silent about their misgivings, and minimise to themselves the importance of their doubts.
Unanimity – “We all agree . . . we’re right.”
The sharing of an illusion of unanimity within the group concerning almost all judgements expressed by members who speak in favour of the majority view. This partly results from self-censorship. The effects are augmented by a false assumption that any individual who remains silent during any part of the discussion is in full accord with what the others are saying.
‘Net Zero’ and ‘Climate Change’ are pure groupthink worldwide.
The unofficial additional verse to the red flag. The working class can kiss my a**e, I’ve got the bosses job at last