The Left Needs to Learn to Love Free Speech

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.