Why should we try to stop a speaker from coming to an event they were invited to? Let us imagine the speaker poses a threat to the welfare of the audience; or the speaker espouses views so egregiously offensive that they should not be given any sort of platform to express them. Something like safetyism is thus invoked as the reason for stopping the speaker from coming.
This is especially the case in institutions full of young people, like universities. People who bang on about free speech are just using that talking point as a figleaf to justify harmful speech — the kind of speech that makes life harder for oppressed minorities. This, at least, is one way to see it.
The latest person to be caught in the free speech wars is Claire Fox. She is the director of a think-tank committed to free speech called the Academy of Ideas. Recently, she was invited to speak at Royal Holloway, University of London, by the debating society of that institution. Her talk would be about cancel culture. It would have been the debating society’s first in-person talk since the Covid-19 pandemic.
But her talk was itself cancelled because some members of the university’s student union objected to the fact that she retweeted a joke about trans people made by actor Ricky Gervais that featured male and female anatomy. Fox was thus disinivited not because of what she was going to say in the talk but because she had supported something unacceptable — making fun of transgender people.
In an email seen by the press, Maia Jarvis, the president of Royal Holloway’s student union, wrote to the debating society: “Claire Fox re-tweets and praises this video of Ricky Gervais being overtly transphobic. I wonder if you have thought about the impact of bringing a person who is an advocate for hate towards trans people and publicly ridicules them.”
But here is the crux of the issue: it was the debating society that invited Fox. It was not the student union. What is the point of being a debating society if you are not allowed to invite people to talk about the principles underlying debating controversial issues? Adam Ryan-Self, the president of the debating society, told Fox: “After back and forth with the SU, it seems they will find any way to make your visit onto campus an issue of student safety and wellbeing. I see it as nothing less than bullying.”
The rights of a society to invite guests is crucial in all of this — more so than any question of safety or well-being. If you dislike Fox, don’t go to the event. But your veto should not stop other people from attending. Nothing perfectly captures the strange ironies of the free speech wars more than this story: a debating society cancelled a talk about free speech because the speaker invited retweeted something members of another part of the university found offensive.
Maverick Mesut will be missed
Mesut Özil is cool — this was my first impression when I first saw him play, in the 2010 World Cup for Germany, and that impression has never left me. Since the former Arsenal midfielder announced his retirement yesterday I think back first to that tournament. He was brilliant for Germany against Ghana and Australia in the group stage matches but he really announced himself when Germany thrashed England 4-1 in the round of 16 match.
A slightly odd-looking man with fishbowl eyes, Özil stood out; a maverick footballer with a languid style. He embodied football as romance, he was the kid at the school playground for whom the game was fun and just easy. We might pretend to resent that kid, think he should take things more seriously, but at a deeper level we are charmed by him.
He reminds us that football is above all a game, not a test.
