The UK government this week appointed Cambridge academic Arif Ahmed as its ‘free speech tsar’. Of course, the obvious reaction is to laugh. What next? An ‘anti-death executioner’? A ‘liberty tyrant’?
It’s not just a ridiculous name. The idea that there is an assault on freedom of speech in our universities is also silly. Conservative journalists, politicians and think tanks panic about ‘no platforming’ on campuses. But whenever they are pointed to the six organisations no-platformed by the National Union of Students and therefore most students’ unions – the Islamist groups Hizb ut-tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun; the Muslim Public Affairs Committee; and the fascist groups the British National Party, the English Defence League and National Action – they struggle to say which of these they are so desperate to uncancel.
In 2018, as the right-wing press convulsed with panic over a supposed ‘cancel culture’ on campuses, research from the BBC’s Reality Check team found that, since 2010, no book had been removed from any library. Only four courses had been changed – in one case, to remove a photo of a scrotum from a presentation about dinosaurs. And there were only nine occasions on which universities had cancelled speakers after receiving complaints – one involving the BNP and National Front, and another because the speaker had been arrested on rape charges.
