 Our next panel is on free speech chairing the panel is Sophie Sandor. She used to work for the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adams-Smith Institute and her documentary school will be coming out sometime next year. So please join me in welcoming her panel. I'm looking forward to discussing free speech with you all. Today we have Yaron Brook, who you're already familiar with. The Chairman of the Einrand Institute, Suti Amgadarzee, the very impressive student who is very active on Twitter and has made quite a name for herself. And Toby Young, one of our most famous journalists and everyone on the panel has had an experience either with quite quite big experiences with the debate on free speech or indeed free speech itself. By that I mean Suti Amgadarzee's very interesting life experience of getting to the UK. So let's kick off this discussion, which most recently has been characterized by this free speech debate has been characterized most recently here and all over the world by big data and the government's role in free speech there. So should we have to agree with those whose speech we want to protect and has ever justified to force private companies to allow people to speak? These are all interesting questions that are ongoing. So I'll leave it to each of the speakers to give a brief introduction to their position or thoughts on the matter. Toby, would you like to go first? I thought I'd just kick off with a reminder about why free speech is important and then talk a little bit about current arguments against free speech and why I don't think they hold much water. So argument number one is that human beings can't flourish without freedom. You can't have freedom without free speech. Ergo, humans can't flourish in the absence of free speech. Free speech is the foundational freedom on which the others depend. Number two, freedom of speech in freedom of speech and inquiry is how we advance human knowledge. It's how we test hypotheses against reality. A process called Popper described as conjecture and refutation. And it's equally, it's not just true of how we advance scientific knowledge. It's also the best way to arrive at some kind of stable consensus when it comes to religious, political and moral knowledge as well and number three and this is the one I want to focus on, free speech is a bulwark against tyranny. Why do tyrants hate free speech? In a piece for the Boston Globe a few years ago, Stephen Pinker explained that it's because opposition to the tyrant is often extremely widespread, but the reason that doesn't lead to tyrants being overthrown is because opposition, the white, the extent of the opposition isn't common knowledge and if you suppress free speech you prevent opposition to the tyrant, becoming common knowledge and in that way preserve the tyrant's power and I think that's kind of what's going on with current efforts to obstruct free speech. It's a way of preventing skepticism about various progressive orthodoxies becoming more widely known. I'll give you an example, a friend of mine was on Question Time not long ago and it was being filmed in Birmingham and this was around the time of various protests, predominantly by Muslim conservatives, about the teaching of sex and relationship education to children in key stage one, children age five to seven and the inclusion in that curriculum of things like same-sex marriage, transgenderism and so forth, so these conservative Muslim parents didn't want their children as young as five to be taught about things like same-sex marriage in the classroom and the panelists on this particular edition of Question Time were asked who they sided with, the protestors or the authorities and my friend sort of dodged the question and the other four panelists all said they emphatically sided with the authorities and against the protestors and they unequivocally condemned the protestors afterwards over dinner each of the panelists separately came up to my friend and admitted that actually they thought the exact opposite but just hadn't felt confident enough to say so because they thought it would lead to them being monster defenestrated, targeted on social media and so forth. That's a good example of how not understanding that your skeptical position about the teaching of things like same-sex marriage to five-year-olds, your skepticism is not as widely held as you believe so you're afraid to express your view. I think suppressing this kind of common knowledge takes two forms. One is the claim that it leads to, that if you allow people to air their dissenting views, that those views will actually cause physical harm to marginalised groups, women, ethnic minorities, the differently abled and so forth. This is often an argument made in the context of Trump and Brexit, the claim is often made that since the election of Trump, since the lead vote in the 2016 referendum, hate crimes have increased, violence against minorities has increased and so forth. I can give you chapter and verse on why that isn't true. In fact, if you include un-reported as well as reported hate crimes, there's been a significant decline in the number of hate crimes over the past ten years and indeed a decline since 2016. In fact, since the election of Trump, America has actually become less racist, more pro-immigration. There was a poll done by some sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which found that Americans in 2018 were actually less racist and more pro-immigration than they were in 2016. A Gallup poll in June 2019 found that 76% of Americans believe immigration is a good thing, which is the highest number to date. So there's similar evidence in the UK about the declining racism, more pro-immigration sentiment since the 2016 Brexit referendum, totally counter to the progressive narrative that the election of Trump and the Brexit vote unleashed demons and licensed white supremacists to commit violence against minorities. It's just not true. I can go into that in much more detail, but I won't because I don't have much time, but the other form that attacks on free speech take is not the claim that they lead to physical harm to marginalised groups, but that they lead to psychological harm. So that's the argument that was made to justify firing James Damall when he had the temerity to challenge woke orthodoxy at Google about why there weren't more women in tech, because he challenged the progressive orthodoxy. He was fired, and the rationale was because simply challenging that orthodoxy created a hostile work environment. That is, it made the women at Google psychologically uncomfortable. And this is often the argument for no platforming people at universities. The idea is that if you allow someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg to come and speak and to make the argument for Brexit, that's going to be psychologically harmful to minorities. There's obviously no evidence at all of this. Social scientists have struggled to find any connection between conservatives being able to air their views and psychological harm. And in fact, there's quite a lot of evidence that the opposite is true in the coddling of the American mind by Greg Lukiyanov and Jonathan Haidt. One of their biggest arguments against suppressing free speech is that actually mollycoddling students, keeping them in a safe space, preserving them from intellectual challenge and debate, shielding them from any kind of intellectual conflict is actually psychologically harmful. They leave university completely unprepared to deal with the world, because they've been cocooned in cotton wool. And actually, if you want to prepare students properly, for life in the modern world and the 21st century, much better to expose them to as much intellectual challenge and robust debate as possible. There was a recent policy exchange report on free speech by Eric Kaufman and Tom Simpson, very much worth reading. But it found some interesting things. It found that actually if you ask students whether they think it's justifiable to no platform Jacob Rees-Mogg, or they are a representative sample of something like 505 students, by 52% to 38, the students actually thought no platforming Rees-Mogg was wrong. So clearly, a majority in favour of free speech. And when they were read a statement making the case for free speech, then they broke 63% to 30%. And interestingly, there was a poll carried out a couple of years ago by the LSE and Opinium, which found that 76% of people agree with the statement, sometimes political correctness goes too far and exceeds common sense. So I think there is a silent majority out there who are not only supportive of free speech, but who are quite skeptical about a lot of progressive orthodoxy, particularly the wild of fringe of progressive orthodoxy. How do we empower these people? How do we give them the confidence to speak up? How do we create common knowledge that they exist and that there is this skepticism and that people are generally much more conservative in all sorts of ways than we're led to believe? Well, I'm trying to start something called the Free Speech Union, which is going to protect people, protect people's speech rights and come to their defence if they do end up facing punitive consequences for expressing a dissenting point of view. If anyone here would like to join or find out more about it, or if anyone would like to help looking for website designers, please email me at jsmillsociety at gmail.com. That's jsmillsociety at gmail.com, and we hope to launch in the new year, but I appreciate any help I can be given. I think that is the way, that is one way anyway, that we can encourage people to speak out more in favour of free speech and against progressive orthodoxy. Thanks. Thank you very much. That was fascinating, and I look forward to more about that new society. Suhtiyam. Thank you for having me today. This is a great opportunity. And I think I would like to expand on what freedom of speech, or what the attacks of freedom of speech actually entail in modern society, in modern British society, and I think today, in this day and age, we've run the risk of thinking that we are actually free, and we can actually speak our minds merely because the government doesn't set particular rules that stop us from speaking, but there is something even worse out there, and that shows itself in our education system, where children are literally being brainwashed into thinking a particular way, and if they do speak, if they do present their views in an alternative way, they are reprimanded, they are told off, and the teachers use their authority to silence these dissenting voices. And because simply because it's not the government doing it, we can't see it. If they are reprimanding your children, you have no control over what's happening. And I think certainly because I'm a student at the moment, and I see this quite often, I've had so many teachers who come out and express a particular view and they don't let you speak out about it, certainly a lot of them used to tell me off of voting Tory. I mean, I don't vote Tory, but I can't vote yet, but they used to tell me off of supporting the Tories because apparently it's heartless, it's cruel, and that I'm an evil person for doing it. Actually, recently, I've had a bit of a spat with my college because they've come out with leaflets. They're distributing leaflets, which encourage students to vote tactically for a people's vote. And they're not letting alternative leaflets which support Brexit to be distributed within the college. So they're only allowing a certain viewpoint to be presented as students, and the students don't have any way of escaping that, especially the ones that aren't politically engaged. That's the only narrative that they're being taught, and that's the only narrative which they are allowed to express. So I think that the biggest challenge we have today, as conservatives, as right wingers, and as people who actually support a non-bias education system, the biggest problem we have today is what goes on behind the scenes, not necessarily what the government is legislating at the moment, but what the teachers are doing, the sort of institutional suffocation of freedom speech when it comes to the education system and any sort of taxpayer funded system, where we are putting our taxes into these systems and all they're doing is using their platforms to brainwash our children, to tell them what to think and to stop them from speaking out simply because they are descending voices. And I think Toby, you are absolutely right about the fact that they are scared. They're scared of having alternative opinions. They're scared because, actually, if we do have freedom of speech, we can dismantle their arguments so easily, and they don't want people to see that. They don't want people to know what the weaknesses in their own arguments are, so they feed one narrative, they feed one particular narrative in order to get their own way. And I think it's such cheap politics, it's such cheap democracy, and I think we need to really start thinking about solutions to these problems. That's it. Thank you. I've got lots to say about both of you and both of what you've mentioned, but, Yaron, I'll let you... Yeah, it's a real pleasure to be here. There is no issue more important than the issue of free speech in the world today. It is a precondition for anything else that we fight for. If we can't speak our minds, if we can't challenge the status quo, if we can't present radical views often, then we cannot win any other battle. So of all the issues that we confront in the world out there, those of us who are fighting for freedom, there's nothing more important than free speech. And unfortunately, free speech today, at least in the United States, is under attack by both the left and the right. Both would like to see the voices that they disagree with silenced in one way or another. And it's truly disheartening in the land that has the First Amendment. And thank God for the First Amendment, because if not for it, I think free speech would be even more under attack in the United States today and be in real regression. It is really disheartening that the state of free speech, and survey after survey, shows young people saying that they don't believe in the First Amendment, that there should be some movement away from it, and hate speech should be banned, as it is in Europe and I think in the UK here. But what is hate speech? Who gets to define what hate speech is? This is the problem with any kind of form of regulation of speech. You have to establish an authority to figure out what is okay and what is not. Somebody has to decide. The arguments about speech are ludicrous. On the one hand, speech is not violence. Speech is not physical force. Suddenly speech can be violence when it is inciting violence, but we've already got laws against inciting violence. There's nothing new about the idea of inciting. And often again, it's selective in terms of how we apply those laws. We apply them only to some acts of incitement and not to all of them, depending on the politics. But I think the stronger argument that the left, particularly the left has, is about the emotional damage, that people get offended. Well, get a life, get a spine. All new ideas, all innovation, all progress, all truth, is offensive to somebody. Suddenly Galileo was offensive to the Catholic Church. Newton was offensive to all the people who believe differently about the laws of physics. Tesla is very offensive to the taxi drivers in the UK. You cannot advance a truth without offending somebody. And there's no way human knowledge can progress, can advance without a protection, solid protection for freedom of speech, without somebody viewing what you think as hateful, but you having the protection against those people and the ability to speak in spite of it. And I think our priority needs to be first and foremost to look at government and to make sure government doesn't in any way infringe on these rights. I agree completely that our educational system is where this really gets manifest and it's, you know, where I think parents are afraid to speak up, teachers are afraid to speak up, and most teachers are then, in a sense, trying to brainwash our kids in particularly ideological ways and it's very difficult to stand up against them. A large extent I think that is made possible by the fact that the government has such a strong monopoly over education. I think a competitive educational system is an educational system that is much more geared towards parents rather than towards teachers' unions and political interests would be an educational system that freed that up and made that, you know, a non-issue. I think even at the university level, so much in the United States, at least so much of what happens at the university is ultimately kind of at a third and fourth level but is regulated by the state in one way or another. And of course the second aspect of that is the fact that the left has dominated their universities, the left has basically taken over our universities and therefore they dominate every aspect of what happens at the university level and of course where the teachers get trained for primary school and for high school, they get trained at the universities, they get trained with one dogma. And again, what we need is competition in order to get rid of that kind of monopoly power that our universities have and that the state has over what our kids are thinking. I also think there's a threat now, unfortunately this one is from the right, to violate companies' property rights and in a sense their free speech rights by attacking them and now a willingness to kind of try to dictate to them what kind of speech they should allow and what kind of speech they should not allow. The fact is that the freedom of speech is also the freedom not to have on my platform certain points of view, not to have certain people speak on my platform. We all exercise all business owners like this theater here, I mean it would be quite legitimate of the theater owner to say, I don't want any Iron Rand spoken in my theater, I don't like Iron Rand and I'm not renting my place out to people who are going to talk about Iron Man. It would be completely legitimate of them to do so, I think they'd be wrong, but it would be within their category of free speech and property rights to be able to do that. And the fact that now the right is advocating for some kind of egalitarian speech on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere is I think just as damaging and just as destructive as what the left is trying to do and would be horrific if it was actually put into practice. I mean it scares me today that there is a complete political uniformity and agreement about the need to break up big tech whether it's in the name of free speech or in the name of monopolies or whatever or too much power or whatever it is, both the left and the right now are in agreement about intervening into the marketplace and breaking up these, I mean amazing companies agree or disagree with their politics. They have changed our lives I think for the most part for good. So I think we need to be very wary of any attempts to silence anybody and one of the, I'll just mention this, the one role of government is to protect speech from violence, to protect us from the violent actions of those who would silence us and I think one of the ways in America at least and I think in the UK to some extent but certainly in America where the government has failed is to do exactly that and I'll just mention that this goes back to really the late 1980s with Solomon Rushdie. The fact that when the Ayatollah put a fatwa on Solomon Rushdie basically told an author of a book that they put out a contract on executing this guy and the fact that Western countries like the United States said nothing, did nothing and basically when bookstores in the United States were fired, were attacked for selling Solomon Rushdie, Bush's response was he shouldn't have written the book. I mean it really is offensive to religion. We shouldn't offend religion. Same thing happened with the Danish cartoons when there were demonstrations and there were threats and there was threats of violence. Western governments did nothing indeed again. Another Bush, the son apologized and said, oh shouldn't have published those cartoons. No newspaper in the United States would publish the cartoons partially because they feared being attacked and they feared attacked for good reason because the government would not stand by them and defend them. And we're not Tifa attacks today and where security stands by just watching as people are silenced. When physical force is actually used against people speaking that is the one role of government is to defend. That's the one role in speech is to defend a right to speak against violence. They have defaulted on it and I think that has led to the slippy slope where speech is not considered that important anymore. And it's, I think we're all in danger, Europe more so than the US of this the effect of government silencing us or not defending our ability to speak. Thank you. Karen is one of the biggest problems then because it seems we need to convince people that free speech is good. But one of the biggest challenges seems to be convincing people who want to suppress free speech that it would be bad if the people they disliked had the powers they want people they currently like to have those powers. They struggle to imagine that. It seems to be some kind of illusion that people are under that only the people they like will have these powers. I mean, yes, there is a certain mentality that exists today, which I, you know, it's a pre-enlightenment mentality. And it's a mentality that there is an authority out there that there is truth. You know, it used to be the church that had that truth. Today it's leftist academics who know what's true. And it's okay to silence everybody else because everybody else's garbage. It's untrue. It's heresy. It's useless. It's not gonna actually promote the discovery of truth because they already have the truth up there in the Ivy Tower of academia. So it's almost impossible to convince them who've abandoned the idea of reason, who've abandoned the idea that truth is accessible to all of us because they believe that truth is only accessible to a certain minority. It goes back, I mentioned this in a previous panel, goes back to Plato, it goes back to this idea of the philosopher king having some kind of spiritual ability to discover the truth through revelation or in religion you have a very similar thing. But the left today has embraced that notion that they are the arbiters of truth. They are the authority. And any challenge, it's useless. Yeah, it's offensive. And it doesn't actually promote any goodness, right? So the right or those who advocate for capitalism or for freedom in any kind of respect. You know, all they do is damage because we already know what's right. What do we need all this stuff for? And this is a very pre-enlightenment attitude. I mean, the idea that free speech is crucial for human liberty because it is an expression of human reason and we must be free to think and therefore we must be free to express our thought is a new phenomena. This is like 250 years old to 300 years old. It's a product of the enlightenment and unfortunately we voted against it. And in many respects we're turning against the enlightenment and I think we do so at Apparel and free speech is just one manifestation of that. Do you have any thoughts on why, Toby, this has become such a block for us being able to convince people, you know, it really would be bad if people who didn't think had these powers so they should be able to empathize with those of us who are trying to stop anyone being able to suppress free speech such as the government. It used to be the case that the left was pro-free speech and most of the challenges to free speech came from the right and left wing advocates for free speech like Matt Hentoff, the famous village voice columnist, constantly made the point that free speech isn't just for, it isn't just for those who currently aren't in the ascendancy, ideologically. It's important for those who are not in the ascendancy. And I think he came up with the phrase free speech for me but not for thee to sum up that attitude that it only applied to a kind of dissenting minority at the time and not everyone now that conservatives have become a dissenting minority, the left have generally abandoned their commitment to free speech not entirely but certainly they're much less enthusiastic about it than they were. We just wanted to pick you up on one point of fact. We don't have any laws in the UK at present specifically prohibiting hate speech. There are forms of illegal speech that have been designated hate crimes but anything against the law can be designated a hate crime if in the view of the victim or anyone who witnessed the crime, the perpetrator was motivated by the victim's membership of a particular protected group. There's actually a really good, I think an interesting question is if you are pro-free speech, what should be your attitude to hate crimes? And I think there's a really good argument made against the concept of hate crime by Jonathan Rausch in his book, Kindly Inquisitors which is a great passionate pro-free speech essay. And he makes the point that to say that some crimes should be punished more severely if the perpetrator is motivated by hate is to criminalize certain kinds of feelings, certain thoughts and that is effectively to create a category of crime which amounts to thought crime. That's not quite straightforward as the crime being a thought crime because you can't be punished merely for having a bad thought but if you punish someone more severely because if in the course of committing the crime they're having a bad thought then that is effectively creating a thought crime. So for that reason I think that defenders of free speech should be opposed to hate crimes. Thank you. Suti, I've heard so many examples like yours of teachers only advocating one of you in the classroom, but as far as I know there's supposed to be a law protecting against things like that happening. If they express one of you and give information about one ideological side there's supposed to balance it out as far as that's possible. So do you think it's more an issue that the law just isn't being instituted? Oh yeah, definitely. I think the problem is a lot of people don't want to implement that law. A lot of people don't take it up actually. Students don't have the money to take it up. They don't have the money to go and see the college at a high school because one of the teachers has said one mean thing about their political opinions. It's the Education Act 1996 I think. And that's the problem. Actually linking back to the question that you said earlier about why we can't convince people why freedom of speech is such a good thing. I think there was a recent study might have been by a telegraph that came out. 70% of young people don't know who Mao is. I think it was something about 50% don't know who Lenin is actually. If students, and these people are going to be the future of this country, if these people don't know what authoritarianism is like, if they don't know what it does, if they don't know what banning free speech does to a country and what it does to themselves and obviously they're not going to see the consequences. They're not going to be against banning free speech simply because they don't know that it's bad, simply because they don't know the consequences. And I think that's where the problem is. The law is there. It's not being enforced because it's almost impossible to enforce it. A lot of people don't even know about the law. A lot of the students don't even care. And if this is not being enforced and a generation of the future is being brought up not knowing the consequences of banning free speech and we are in deep, deep trouble for the future. You've followed that point. Very good point about... I think it's more than 70% of students don't know who Chairman Mao was. And as you say, the reason that's alarming is because if they don't know who Chairman Mao was, not enough of them know about the crimes of Lenin and Stalin. All they've been taught is about the crimes of the far right when they've been taught about fascism and Hitler and so forth. Then they're not going to treat Jeremy Corbyn and people who espouse similar dogma with the right kind of appropriate suspicion. And a good example of this was Jeremy Corbyn. I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but Jeremy Corbyn was on the Ma show last year and they were discussing what had brought about the rise in China's economic fortunes. And Mao was making the argument that it was largely because the current communist regime has, in important respects, departed from communist dogma when it comes to economics. And Corbyn was challenging that view and he said he thought the most important thing which had led to China's current prosperity was Mao's Great Leap Forward. And Dominic Lawson wrote a column in the Sunday Times in which he pointed out that 46 million people are estimated to have died unnecessarily as a result of Mao's Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward took place over a four year period. In a comparable four year period in Nazi Germany, six million Jews were murdered. So roughly seven times as many people were murdered in a four year period effectively by Chairman Mao, but because 70 plus percent of students don't know who Chairman Mao is, Jeremy Corbyn can perfectly innocuously praise Chairman Mao for having killed 46 million people and not lose any votes, certainly not a Marx dating to 24 year olds. Wow, okay. And they want to silence our speech, right? I mean, talk about offensive. I mean, there's nothing more offensive than that. And where are the voices of the people who do know? Because this should be yelled from everywhere. The guy just praised Mao, one of the greatest murderers in human history. I'll open it up to questions in a moment. I've just got one more question for the whole panel about which was sparked from Citi. I'm talking about the education system and you're feeling more confident about free speech in general in this country. Should we not, there's a huge amount to be positive about relative to the rest of the world in the UK with free speech, of course. But we are creeping towards the public and politicians wanting to regard private entities as public entities so that they can be liable for things that are happening on their platforms. So it's one of the main problems that, and does it get most bad when free speech is being suppressed in public entities and spaces like the education system and where the government is allowed to regulate? So is it worse because free speech is under attack in the public space as well? Yes, and should we worry about private entities becoming public entities? Yes, I think we should really worry about the government regulating speech on Facebook. Nothing good can come of this. I mean, how are they gonna do it? Are they gonna count how many conservative posts there are versus how many liberals? Or who gets deplatformed and when and under what? I mean, they're talking, they're truly talking about commissions who will then sit and decide whether the platform has been okay in what it's deplatformed and what it hasn't been okay and who gets to choose the commission. And the commission then has the power of government. So I think one of the worst things possible for the cause of free speech is any attempt to regulate or censure these platforms. I think the best way to regulate or censor the platforms in a market sense is don't use them if you don't like them, right? Or start a new platform as Jordan Peterson just has or I think others are going to do or just stop using Facebook. You really hate them that much, right? The more we get government involved in these things, particularly with the tendencies of politicians both on left and right, the more control and the less free speech we will get. And once we sanction their ability to regulate speech on these platforms, it's all over because we've sanctioned their ability to regulate speech in any platform. You know, and we're already seeing that. I mean, I completely agree about the left's complete hostility to free speech. But when the president of the United States talks about going after Amazon because they own the Washington Post and he doesn't like what the Washington Post is writing. Oh, and he calls all the media fake news. I mean, some of it is wrong and it's certainly biased and fake is something completely different. That's manufactured and made up. But when you're doing that, even if some of us view it as, yeah, finally somebody's calling out the leftist newspapers, this is the president. This is the guy with a gun. This is the guy with authority. When suddenly the government is then telling us, oh, this is good news on some days Fox and other days for the right wing thing. And these are bad news organizations. I mean, the government should have no opinion about what happens in the press. No opinion about what happens in the press. And if you don't like your coverage, then present the facts as you see them without having an opinion about the press. And when government has an opinion about the press, it legitimizes the idea that we, it's okay then to shut down. And even unfortunately on the right in the US, opinion about freedom of speech is declining. I think because some of this rhetoric, I think because the vilification, and as much as I hate the New York Times, I think this is nutty what Trump is doing in terms of vilifying the New York Times and legitimizing that attitude towards the press. I think it is a very, very scary direction. Do you think it's a free speech issue when private companies ban people? No, it's not a free speech issue. I mean, I can invite anybody. I mean, I believe you should be allowed in your private store, in your private business to discriminate in any way you want. I think some discrimination is irrational. I think what Facebook has done on occasion is irrational. I think what Twitter does, I mean, I know that YouTube suppresses, the algorithm suppresses my stuff because it's not politically correct. I know that they don't allow me to use advertising on some of the videos. Most of my videos are fine, but some of my videos, and it seems to me if I offend the right too much, if I offend religion too much, or if I offend the left too much, I don't get advertising dollars. But that is not censorship. Censorship and attacking free speech could only come from those who hold the gun. Everything else, and education I think is it's an arm of government because the government is so involved in education. But these are private enterprises. They should have all the right to discriminate in terms of the views they represent, or they don't. And I actually think what Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are trying to do is very difficult. I think we trivialize it, oh, they're against conservatives. But it's very difficult. They're trying to keep up certain points of view that are al-Qaeda. They don't want al-Qaeda. On the other hand, they're trying to keep away pornography. I mean, there's just a debate on one of the channels that I follow about nude art. And Facebook is saying some of the nudity in the art might be pornographic, and they're not sure because they have machines do it, right? It's not even people. It's AI trying to figure out what art is nudity and what art is pornography. I mean, how do you do that, right? But so, a human eye I think can tell the difference, but a machine has a hard time. So when you challenge them, they often say yes, that's okay. It's a very tough job for them to decide what they want and what they don't want on their platform. I don't think they're doing a good job. I don't think they're very clear about what their standards are. I don't think they're abiding, they're being very objective about how they do it. But that's, you know, they're not doing a good job, so I don't like them. So I use Facebook less than I would probably, otherwise use them because I don't think they do a good job, but it's their business. They can do whatever the hell they want. One thing to alert people about if they're not already aware of it is the white paper that was published earlier this year called Online Harms. And it was published by the Home Office I think. And it proposed to create, either to empower Ofcom to regulate the internet or to create a dedicated internet regulator. And if you read this proposal, this white paper, it was full of absolutely horrific details. So for instance, it wanted to empower either Ofcom or this new regulator with the ability to find a social media company, 10% of its annual profits in the preceding year, if it publishes hate speech or fake news or indeed anything that anyone judges offensive. So that would be a recipe for much, much heavier policing of speech by Facebook and Twitter and on YouTube and so forth. And it didn't define, of course, hate speech or fake news with any precision. And bear in mind that if it's Ofcom that is empowered to regulate the internet, the head of Ofcom is appointed by the Secretary of State at DCMS, how long would it take before if this regulator was created and we had a labor government empower, the new Secretary of State at DCMS decided that anything that was critical of the government constituted hate speech and threatened to find any internet provider, any social media company, indeed any newspaper or magazine that published anything online that was critical of the government, 10% of that company's annual profits, it would soon eliminate criticism in a single stroke. Hopefully this won't actually come into existence now, even though it's strongly supported by Sajid Javed and was strongly supported by the last conservative government. I hope Boris will throw it out. But just if it doesn't happen, that doesn't mean that speech on the internet isn't already being policed by the police. I mean, this is an extraordinarily sinister development but the Times ran a piece a couple of years ago, they submitted an FOI request to discover how many online crimes have been investigated by the police in 2016 and it turned out the police were questioning, detaining and questioning seven people a day in 2016 for online crimes, things like misgendering on Twitter. And the police designate, I said earlier that there wasn't yet a category of hate speech which was legally prohibited in the UK but there is something called non-crime hate incidents. Now the police can legitimately question you if they suspect you of having committed a non-crime hate incident. So it's not a crime, it's just expressing a point of view that they think might lead you to at some later point commit a hate crime. They're like the precox in the minority report anticipating what people are likely to do and on that basis, interviewing them and warning them about the kinds of things they've said on Twitter or on Facebook. And in a really sinister development it turned out last week that homicide police when asked for an enhanced DBS check by a teacher or a care worker or someone proposing to go into those professions actually included non-crime hate incidents in the person's enhanced DBS check because they form part of that person's record even though they're not actually crimes. So effectively, if you've misgendered someone on Twitter it might be that you couldn't get a job in Humberside as a teacher or a care worker which is absolutely shocking. Yeah, it really is reaching insane levels in this country. Did you want to add something to to him? And then we will open it up to questions. Yeah, I just wanted to add to Yaron's point about freedom of the press and freedom of private companies to essentially allow any type of speech they want and I completely agree with you. I think that actually Twitter is a private company to have the right to allow speech that they deem appropriate on their platform. If you don't like their platform, leave it. I've deactivated Facebook, I can't deal with it. And I also agree with you. I don't think the government should be intervening at all. I think that private companies should be left alone. They are owned by shareholders and they get to decide what goes on there. But in the UK we've got something different because we've got the BBC and that one is we're literally forced to pay for it. And I think that when people, when the taxpayer in one way or another is forced to pay for something, then their views should be represented equally and they should have their views represented. And I think this is a big problem at the moment where as a debate, the left are claiming that the BBC is biased towards the right and the right are claiming that the BBC is biased towards the left. Probably differs depending on the programme. But I think that this does get quite tricky because the BBC does need to remain balanced. The BBC does need to provide services which make the taxpayers happy at the end of the day. And I think we really need to think about reforming the BBC in a way in order to make more people happy with the services because I just feel like people aren't from the left or the right. Well, this is why the state should own no media. I mean, and the BBC should be privatised tomorrow as soon as the better because you cannot achieve that balance. You cannot please. So as soon as the state has any form of from Plavda to the BBC, the state should never be involved in news production in any form of media. Let's have some questions. You were first with the glasses on. Well, I just want to ask about the panel, agree with me or not, on the words Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, homophobia. How many other words has been created just to shut down freedom of speech because you can't criticize any religion in the East in any organisation you go? I mean, I think it depends. I think anti-Semitism is a real thing. I think there are people who are anti-Islam for the sake of being anti-Islam. I think you have to judge it based on the context, but I think in... But yes, it's also used to shut down debate. Certainly in America now, if you're... Lots of points of view are criticized as racism and that's supposed to shut you down. And yet there are people who are racist. So part of the use of the word in that way makes it very difficult to differentiate the true racists from just the left throwing that word around against anybody they disagree with. They're actually diluting its use. They're actually making it more difficult to combat real racism. If you call anybody an anti-Semite, then when they're real anti-Semites, you can't actually attack them. So no question, the left is using those words and it's actually making the phenomena that's really behind it in a sense worse because you can't combat it anymore. Yeah, the big test for me, when probing how committed I am to free speech, the big test I asked myself is, would I defend the free speech rights of a Holocaust denier? My father-in-law is Jewish, lost some close family members in the Holocaust. And I think yes, I would. And the reason I would is because the best way to expose the claims of Holocaust deniers as toxic nonsense is to allow them to air them in public where their evidence can be challenged and where their claims can be contradicted. Much better to have a robust debate, much better to allow them a platform so their ridiculous nonsense can be comprehensively debunked by the evidence than to force them, than to ban them, which may in fact extend the life of their claims by not exposing them to the disinfectant of public scrutiny. And I think it's the same argument for allowing Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time. That was protested by 500 or so people outside the BBC. They said that the BNP was on the rise and allowing him a platform would only fuel the growth of the BNP. Actually, it had the opposite effect by giving him a platform, by allowing him to be challenged by other panelists and members of the audience. Actually, it debunked a lot of the nonsense that the British National Party were saying. And shortly after that, the British National Party nosedived in the subsequent election. I think it lost all its council seats and its two MEPs. So actually, the decision to allow him to appear on Question Time was good precisely if you oppose what he stands for. So I will just add to that, that slippery slopes do indeed exist. And the first form of speech that was banned in Europe was Holocaust deniers. But once you give anybody that authority to decide what nonsense is, they're gonna expand the definition of nonsense. And soon, same positions are viewed as nonsense by the authorities at the time. So I absolutely would defend the Holocaust deniers right for the reasons articulated, but on top of that, because nobody should have the authority to decide with the power to enforce it, with a gun. What is nonsense and what is not? Absolutely. The more people hear of these nonsense proponents, the more other people dislike them and they dig their own grave. So it does us all a favor. Yes, you're at the back. I think Suti on the point, touched on the point I want to make, but I'd be interested if people discuss it. We've talked about the BBC, we've talked about free speech in various arenas, but I put two young women through university in Britain in the past 10 years, one through the University of Cambridge and one through the London School of Economics and was absolutely horrified by the fact that I was paying to have my daughters indoctrinated. There was absolutely no question that Britain's universities are captive. I mean, they've been taken over. In her first term studying politics at LSE, the very first seminar was on Plato, surprise, surprise, and I immediately looked at my copy of Gull Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume one, Plato, volume two, Marx, and said, you might like to read this. And she said, our lecturers already told us that Popper is completely discredited and anyone who mentions him with approval will be failed. This is term one. There's no question of a discussion about it. My other daughter who was at Cambridge, I was very active in student politics. I was president of my student union and stuff when I was at university and I suggested to her she might like to do the same. And she said, dad, I want a good degree. If my dons realize I am not left wing, I will not get a good degree. But the heart of darkness for free speech in Britain is absolutely in academia and something has to be deliberated because we're all paying for that. These are public spaces. We have no choice over it. I mean, those are hair-raising stories, but they're certainly not unusual. In the policy exchange report I mentioned earlier, which was specifically about the assault on free speech in Britain's universities, it found that just 39% of students who thought Brexit was a good thing felt comfortable airing their views in the classroom at university compared to 89% of remainers. And actually, I was surprised that it was as high as 39%, the authors of that report make various recommendations, all of which are very sensible. But I think one way to, what one of the suggestions they make is that universities should have to make an explicit commitment to free speech. Many of them already have. But the Office for Students needs to be empowered to make sure that the commitments they give or have given to upholding intellectual freedom are prioritized over creating an emotionally safe space. Often universities say, yes, we're committed to free speech. That is in our founding articles, but we also have to have an eye to the emotional safety of our students. And for that reason, we do have to prohibit microaggressions. We do have to know platform people like Jacob Rees-Morgan, so forth. And it needs to be made clear to universities by the government in some way, possibly through an act of parliament, certainly could be done by empowering the Office for Students to do this. It needs to be made clear to universities that they have to give absolute priority to intellectual freedom and can't balance it against the emotional safety of students, which has to come second. I do think this is a massive, massive problem, but I think that actually, this is in a way the fault of the right. I feel like we haven't done much at all to combat it until today. I think that actually we need a student-led movement against this when I first came out about the fact that my college was distributing people's vote leaflets. I went to the principal and I told him that this is actually illegal and that I will get the media involved in this if they don't stop either handing those leaflets out or getting new leaflets, which support the Brexit side and distributing them alongside the people's vote leaflets. And I think that actually, a lot more students need to do this because if we have all the students who support Brexit, 16% of universities and students want to support Boris Johnson in a selection, that's plenty. If all these students stand up and say that actually we believe in this and you cannot inhibit my freedom of speech and you cannot do this and we need to cannot kick me out of the course, then actually, I think we can genuinely make a difference and we can genuinely enforce this into universities. It's just that we're not doing much at all and we're not giving this issue much attention. We talk about it, but no one does anything about it. And I think it's genuinely becoming a fault of the right at the moment. We're letting the left take control of this. We're letting them dominate the discussion in both universities, colleges and in high schools. But in the long run, the only solution to this is to replace the bastards, right? It's because a professor can say, I mean, I was a professor and sure, it's completely legitimate for him to say Carl Papa is a nobody. I don't respect him in the academia today and nobody publishes articles about Carl Papa, so who the hell is him? I'm not gonna teach him. And students wouldn't even know he exists, right? So even if they're allowed to speak, they don't even know that those ideas are possible. The only way ultimately is for more better people to go into academia and replace. The fact is that the left for 100 years has systematically come to dominate universities. And I know this in the United States, but I'm sure it's everywhere. And as long as they dominate the universities, you can force them to be balanced, but they're not gonna be, right? You know they're not gonna be. And God forbid that again, the government gets involved in the curriculum and says, oh, you have to have a class on Carl Papa. We don't want that, right? So the only way to do it is to actually get our voices heard, partially through students' activism and partially through ultimately replacing the professors at the universities. As long as the universities are dominated by these leftists, this is what we're gonna get in one form or another. We have to do more to emphasize, you know, academic studies among people who think differently. Too many of us give up on the academic studies because it's hard. One tactic which has occasionally been used successfully is to persuade wealthy alumni to withhold donations from universities that don't uphold free speech. And that worked in the case of Oriole College, Oxford, when it looked as though it was gonna succumb to a Roads Must Fall campaign and pull down a statue outside the College of Cecil Roads when the alumni who were intending to give money that year objected and said they were gonna withhold money and write the college out of their wills. They did take down the statue of Cecil Roads, the college very quickly back down. Though I was at a conference in Oxford earlier this year to discuss ways to protect intellectual freedom in Britain's universities. And this came up as a potential way. And Amy Wax, an American law professor at Penn Law School who's gotten to various difficulties for saying politically incorrect things. She wrote a piece in the, co-authored a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer defending bourgeois virtues and was immediately damned as a white supremacist and petitions were brought up at her college and so forth. And she said that trying to organize rich alumni to withhold donations is very difficult. She said, first of all, lots of alumni give money because they want to secure places for their children or their relatives, children at the college or university in question. Secondly, she said that lots of these alumni are themselves quite liberal and are sympathetic to the university's apparent concern for protecting the emotional safety of marginalized groups in the university and don't think that free speech should be prioritized over that. And she said, even if they do actually believe in your cause, their wives are likely to be liberal and they won't want their husbands to be associated with a campaign which the left will immediately tarnish as an alt-right astroturf organization created to defend hate speech. And she said that their wives might end up threatening to withhold sex unless they donate it to their old colleges if they dare to align themselves with a group like the Free Speech Union. So she thought that was the road to nowhere, that tactic wouldn't work. We have just under five minutes left so one more question, please. Yes, you? Oh, maybe. Yes. I work in further education, not higher education. And I'm glad to work in that sector. I would not want to work in the university sector at all. I've got a question. Basically, at one time it was between 8% and 10% of the population here in the UK who went into higher education. You now I think have got something like 55% of the population who are going into so-called higher education. My question is this, although it seems some of you are saying, well, it's all the fault of the professors. I want to throw the question out and say, well, is it maybe more the fault of the bureaucracy that surrounds these institutions, which is going back to the kind of debate we had before about, well, I mean, basically, Lucy Harris was talking about being in MEP and the kind of quangos and which goes on there. So that's my question. Brief answers, please, and also include your final thoughts if you wish to. No, my view is it's 100%, well, close to 100%, the fault of the faculty. And it doesn't matter how many people go to university. The fact is that intellectual shape our world. If a news organization wants an expert opinion, they go to Cambridge or Oxford to get an expert opinion. When a politician wants an expert opinion, they go to Cambridge or Oxford to get an expert opinion. We are, as a culture, the intellectuals dominate the culture. They shape history. Ideas shape history. And if you lose the commanding heights of academia, if you lose the intellectual commanding heights, you lose the battle long-term. You might win a few battles in between, but in the long-term, they come to dominate. And you have to take them on. Now, I'm not saying the bureaucracy is good. The bureaucracy is terrible, and it partially sustains the left's hold on the universities. But it is these leftist professors. It is the ideas that they hold, and it's the fact that we are so timid in challenging those ideas. We need to be a lot more aggressive. We need to be a lot more certain. And we need to not just attack them for their ideas. We need to offer alternative ideas. We need our own intellectuals, our own set of intellectuals who can replace those guys. And until they're not replaced, they will still dominate much of our culture to our detriment. I think you raise a good point, actually, because part of the problem that we have is the government doesn't push alternative methods of education enough, so apprenticeships are going straight into work. So a very big majority of students do go to university, but a lot of them don't end up being intellectuals. Because at the end of the day, a degree in gender studies is not equivalent to a STEM degree. And if you get a degree in gender studies and don't get a job, you're going to end up blaming the government for not having a job. So I think it's time that we start thinking about alternative ways of education, because a lot of courses at university could be vocational courses. And I think we need to start thinking about how we can offer them, because a lot of students do would actually benefit more from vocational courses. And it would give such a boost to our economy if people didn't waste three years of their lifetime going to university when they could learn the exact same skills better in a vocational course. Yeah, well, in support of your point, the policy exchange authors asked their respondents who they got their opinions from. And only 1% said they're university lecturers. And something like 67% said social media. I think it's multifactorial. I think that the overwhelming left wing bias, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, has definitely played a big part. And it's become much more biased in the past 25 years. I think it used to be that registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by a ratio of something like three to one until about 25 years ago. And now it's something like eight to one. And in some departments, it's 33, 50 to one. In some American universities, there are simply no registered Republicans at all in any departments. And the same is broadly true here, too. So I think that's certainly an important factor. But the growth of diversity crats, diverse-o-crats, I think they're called, is certainly a factor as well. Things like Title IX in the US, the Equality Act here, create obligations, legal obligations, on the parts of higher education institutions that they employ these vast armies of diverse-o-crats to enforce. And often, that involves suppressing anyone who challenges particular progressive orthodoxies on campus. So I think that's definitely a factor as well. I hope that some of you will be interested in helping me fight back by joining the Free Speech Union. As I said, I think we're hoping to get the company registered next week. We're hoping to launch the website a couple of weeks after that and get the actual organization properly launched the date we're going for is the 21st of January, which is the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's death. And as I'm sure you know, George Orwell was a great champion of Free Speech. And if we want to hold the BBC to account, we can remind the BBC that outside Broadcasting House there is a statue of George Orwell. And the words under that statue, I think, are something like, if liberty means anything at all, it means telling people, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear.