Nigel Biggar and I wrote a joint op-ed for the Telegraph yesterday to coincide with our introduction into the House of Lords. I’ve republished it below in full.
Freedom of speech is valuable, but not merely for letting individuals say whatever they fancy within the law. It’s valuable primarily for the sake of the public good. For if dominant orthodoxies are false, misshape public policy, and go unchecked, we all suffer. Free speech allows us to interrogate reigning ideological emperors – on race, transgender, colonialism, public health and climate change, among others – to find out if their new clothes are a reality or a dangerous illusion.
On transgender self-identification, there’s plenty of reason to doubt its intellectual coherence. When a biological male believes his inner, authentic self is female, what exactly does he think being ‘female’ is? How is he not trading on gender stereotypes that feminists taught us to abandon decades ago?
As Dame Hilary Cass’s report has argued, there’s even more reason to doubt that the health of young people is well served by uncritically allowing them to align their bodies with their imagined genders by making irrevocable physical changes. Or – as J.K. Rowling has long been contending – that the safety of women in changing-rooms and toilets should be jeopardised by forcing them to suffer the presence of men who happen to identify as female.
On race, ‘progressive’ anti-racism threatens to deepen racial alienation and conflict in Britain by importing radically pessimistic American ideas, rooted in America’s history, that espouse a dualist opposition between ‘white’ and ‘black’, seeing ‘whiteness’ as irredeemably racist. People should not be penalised for expressing such ideas, but nor should they be for advocating Martin Luther King’s approach, namely, that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin.
As the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities argued in March 2021, Critical Race Theory doesn’t map onto the complex realities of race in contemporary Britain, which include considerable elements of progress and signs of hope. We should not lose sight of the fact that Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world – one reason so many black and brown refugees want to come here.
On colonialism, the reduction of the history of the British Empire to a cartoonish litany of racism and oppression is not only historically and morally insupportable; it trashes an important part of the record of the West, corroding faith in it. It puts wind in the sails of Scottish separatists who justify the disintegration of the United Kingdom as an act of repentance from an evil, British, imperial past. It makes the surrender of the strategically important Chagos Islands seem like the decent thing to do. And it exposes U.K. taxpayers to Caribbean claims of £18 trillion reparations for historic slavery, and, according to a recent Oxfam report, a further £53 trillion in reparations for the colonial exploitation of India.
It‘s vital people should have the freedom to challenge these dogmas, just as we should the received wisdom in public health and climate change. That’s not because it’s wrong, necessarily, but because without subjecting metropolitan groupthink to scrutiny and debate we could be saddling ourselves with destructive policies that harm the interests of the United Kingdom, as well as jeopardising the liberal values we all want to defend.
Our freedom to express doubts about, to question, and to contradict reigning orthodoxies is vital for the public good. It’s vital for the political triumph of truths important for the mental well-being of children, the physical safety of women, the building of a harmonious multi-racial society, the effective remedy of unfair disadvantages between ethnic groups, the survival of the United Kingdom, the self-confidence of the West, and justified resistance to opportunistic claims of reparations for slavery and colonialism.
Of all our current political leaders, only one has a consistent record of grasping the importance of what’s at stake here: Kemi Badenoch. As women and equalities minister, Badenoch championed sex-based women’s rights and had the courage to take on the political indoctrination of children in schools. As minister for equalities, she backed the Sewell Commission and launched its report. And as international trade secretary, she rejected claims that Britain owes its economic prosperity to colonial exploitation, especially slavery.
Because we care so passionately about freedom of speech, we set up the Free Speech Union five years ago, a non-partisan public interest body that stands up for this vital human right. Since then, we’ve fought over 3,300 cases. The FSU was recently described as “far-Right” by Wikipedia, but 40% of those cases are gender critical women, almost all of whom identify as left-wing. Free speech is something people of all political persuasions should defend because without it we cannot defend any of our other rights. Kemi Badenoch has made it clear how much she cares about it by ennobling the two of us and we hope Britain’s other political leaders will soon come to realise its importance as well.
You can join the Free Speech Union here.
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