 Hello, my name is Aaron Bestani, welcome to Downstream here on Navarra Media before we go any further, I want you to do two things. Firstly, like this video, second, subscribe to the channel, it doesn't cost you a thing and it means so much to all of us here at Navarra Media. With that general elections, with that freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, without the free battle of opinions, life in every public institution withers away, becomes a caricature of itself and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor. So said Rosa Luxemburg, who also said, freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. But is the left no longer able or willing to defend freedom of speech and expression? Or is this simply a right-wing canard with sensorious conservatives saying as much to divert from the fact it's they who are the ones trying to shut down debate? In recent years, particularly here on YouTube, but increasingly in print and broadcast media too, the left has been frequently depicted as opposed to some of the most fundamental freedoms it once defended in decades and centuries past. Is there really no smoke without fire? Joining me to discuss the politics of free speech crises and cancel culture today is the editor of Tribune magazine, Ronan Burton Shaw. Ronan, welcome to Downstream. Happy to be here, Aaron. How are you keeping Ronan in these difficult times in the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic? I have no complaints. It's obviously a difficult time for all of us, but I have a general sense that people have much worse things going on than myself. So just get on day to day. And before we proceed very quickly, can you tell our audience about Tribune and why I think you're a great guest for this because I think anybody who has to edit a magazine has to obviously have a certain relationship to freedom of speech, either assert it, enable it, or to shut it down. What is Tribune magazine, a little bit about its history and your role as editor? So Tribune is one of the longest standing publications on the British Left. It was founded in the 1930s out of the movement to try to build a united front and popular front in defense of democracy against fascism in Europe. It was the kind of British expression of that. So parts of the left wing of the Labour Party who were trying to work together with other parties on the left, the independent Labour Party, the communists, and so on, in an anti-fascist initiative. And then it became, for most of its history, the voice of the Labour Left was edited for a time by Ney Bevan, who of course went on to found the NHS was edited for quite a long period of time by Michael Foote, who went on to become Labour leader and has had an excellent record in many areas. I mean, Tribune was the first publication in Britain to call for the boycott of South African goods. It was the publication which gave the first platform in Britain to Neyru and to make the case for Indian independence. It was one of the publications that built the argument around the Equal Pay Act and the fact that the Labour Council and those people were involved with it. So it has a great tradition, but obviously in our particular case, Tribune went into some severe difficulties in the 2000s, went to the wall a number of years ago. We developed again and we've got ourselves to a stage now where we've got 15,000 subscribers and we're out four times a year in print, but every day online and have managed to get to a certain sustainability, which is fantastic in the two and a half years since our relaunch. Never easy, but you've done very, very well. I guess the first point to start is, Ronan, obviously Tribune has a history, a very storied history, as you just said, of bringing together a wide range of opinions on the left. I mean, how has Tribune historically engaged with the issue of freedom of expression, freedom of speech? Have certain arguments or people been off limits? How has that boundary to the best of knowledge, obviously? We're going back to 1937. How's that generally been kind of policed? In general, Tribune has been very strongly supportive of the rights of free speech. And this is for a number of reasons. Obviously, some of the leading figures within Tribune and its tradition were big free speech advocates on the left. One of those was Michael Foote and Tribune held rallies throughout the 1940s in defense of the right to criticize the government and its policy and its handling of the Second World War, and particularly, obviously, the policy of appeasement, which Tribune and its leading figures were against. Tribune also, interestingly, had George Orwell as its literary editor for a long period of time. Another story that I think people are not so aware of is that the George Orwell's Animal Farm, which, of course, was a scathing critique of the Soviet system, and one which, of course, people may have their own critique, self on the left. But the introduction to it, which which discussed problems of censorship in Britain, was itself ironically censored. And this was something that the Tribune took up the cause over. I think throughout its early years, Tribune reflected the reality of what was going on in Britain with censorship and the fact that it was disproportionately targeting the left. One of the big canards, as you raised in your intro of the rights current narrative around freedom of speech in Britain is that Britain is a country which has a storied record of defending free speech. And that just isn't actually true. It may have been true in the days when Karl Marx arrived in Britain as a refugee, and Britain was seen to be a relatively free country for those who are freeing oppression elsewhere. But it hasn't been for 100 years or more. When you look back to things like, for instance, the First World War, some of those who are very close to the early Tribune founders, like, for instance, Bertrand Russell, were locked up for opposing Britain's involvement in the First World War on left wing grounds on the basis that it was an imperial slaughter. He was joined by people like John McLean, Willie Gallagher, major political figures imprisoned for their stances on a war. But this is not just like a historical question. Censorship has run through major institutions in British society throughout the 20th century, you've got the early days of, for instance, book publishing, and people forget that Ulysses James Joyce's Ulysses was banned for its first decade at Britain, something that's been kind of disappeared from official histories, but is absolutely essential to understand that development that didn't just end then as late as the 1980s, you had books like Spycatcher about MI5 and its activities that were, that was banned. And the economist had to run a review of that in every other country in the world except Britain, where it published a blank page. Early cinema, incredible films like Battleship Potemkin, and in fact, almost all of early Soviet cinema was banned in Britain. Some of it was banned directly, Battleship Potemkin was banned in case it incited communist revolution in Britain. But almost all the rest of the kind of pioneering early Soviet cinema was banned simply by making it impossible for it to come into the country and destroying it when there were efforts to bring it in. And it had to be shown by activists on an underground scene. This goes through all the way through the 20th century. And it's not just like radical left stuff, you've got movies like Marlon Brando's Wild One banned for anti social activity, movies about drugs, like trash and trip and so on, banned because they're, you know, to explicit on the drugs front. And it's, it's a fundamental part of much of the 20th century history of Britain is that there is a culture of censorship. And it is still something I have to say that that's in place today. And I know we're going to discuss a bit more now. But you can't really understand the debate that we're having about free speech without accepting that speech that challenges power, the challenges, the establishment, the challenges established ideas of morality and what is right has been curtailed in Britain for a long time, and across a very broad spectrum. If you're enjoying this interview and would like to see more like it, go to navaramea.com forward slash support, we only exist. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, you can make a one off payment, or you can become an ongoing supporter either is fine. And we are incredibly grateful to everybody who helps us keep going. It's only thanks to your kindness that our media even exists. Now, on with the interview. I'm really glad you started with that role. And I think it's just completely spot on, you know, as we're speaking right now, Julian Assange, probably the most influential media figure, I think of the last 10 plus years easily is in Belmarsh prison. And you've got people like Dominic Grabe talk about media freedom overseas. And this is a guy who's in prison. The reason why he's not being extradited, and you have to give credit for the judge for the judgment they made, was because they viewed him as a suicide risk in the US prison system. And yet still, even in light of that, he won't be released here. He's still in a very high security prison. Belmarsh is not, you know, it's not a category C is not walk in the park. This is a punishment being inflicted upon a journalist, because what you say, they undertook certain things which aggrieved the wrong kind of people, i.e. the American security establishment and to a lesser extent the British security establishment. So I think it's really important to say that and it's not it's not gone away in the slightest. There's a great book now you talked about the First World War, but the Second World War too, as we've mentioned before, privately, you know, great book by Clive Ponting 1940. I think myth and reality. And, you know, he talks about very clear cases of people during the early years of the Second World War, particularly 1940, this kind of debacle, which is what it was with Dunkirk and with the campaign in Scandinavia in Norway, the US hadn't entered the war. Very difficult time for Britain. The biggest political crisis this country had had all the way through, I think, to COVID. And there were people that were going to prison for five years for saying that they thought Hitler was a good man. Now, of course, I don't agree with that. I think it's a disgusting thing to say, particularly in hindsight, knowing what we know now. But it's fair to say that it wasn't and you might say that was justified. It was a country at war. But that doesn't that doesn't strike me as a, you know, a part of the national myth. And if you said that to people, they would say, oh, I can't believe that, you know, they're not hurting anybody. It's just words. No, this is like you say, it was a fundamental part of Britain's approach to security. And it kind of for me. I was going to say, I mean, those two points come together, Aaron, at a very interesting departure, which is that the daily worker was censored. People forget this. Like the daily worker, which was at that stage, because the Communist Party in Britain was significant, and it was linked into the labour movement and so on, it was substantially censored during the Second World War. And that was both an attack on journalism and the right to have, you know, reporting on a whole series of questions, for instance, at that stage, you know, what workers perspective was on rearmament and all of these kind of questions. But also it was a political manoeuvre and a kind of attempt to keep uncomfortable politics out of the public sphere. Like the Second World War was really quite basically full of censorship in Britain. And it's not been digested properly. I don't think there's some very good history on it. But in terms of the public sphere, again, this the kind of mythology about free speech Britain doesn't work when you look at the history. Well, if you look at Dunkirk, for instance, you know, again, going back to that book, Clive Ponty, 1940, it was a great propaganda victory for the British state. And again, you're at war. You have to do that. You can't say we've just suffered this abject defeat. We thought the French would be in this war for a lot longer than they were. They've just been destroyed by the vermax. We've just, you know, we thought actually France was the most powerful army in Europe. That was the kind of common sense before 1939. And it's just been it's just fallen away in a matter of weeks, confronting, you know, the Third Reich. Of course, don't say that, you know, so obviously that's what happens when you're at war. But again, like you say even today, you would have thought 80 years later, people would be in receipt of the facts about what happened with Dunkirk, the fact it was this utter debacle, the fact that it wasn't, you know, this, even this film made in 2017 by Christopher Nolan, you know, it was these pontoons, these small ships that were bringing people back, it wasn't. I think three quarters of the people brought back were on Royal Navy ships. And, and overtly at the time, you had people, again, it's all a matter of public record, military intelligence, senior people who would say openly to journalists, you need to tell a certain kind of story here. Now, I mean, we're not talking about censorship in the media and propaganda. That's a separate thing. We're talking about freedom of speech. But I think you're right to say run, and we can't really, you know, necessarily disaggregate the two when talking about freedom of speech in the context of Britain. I certainly can't with journalism, because you mentioned Julian Assange at the start of that. And I think it's an important and worthwhile case. That is obviously an instance where somebody is producing information that's in the public interest and is being given such an extraordinary punishment for it in terms of his life being destroyed, that it amounts to the same as a censorship in my view. And it is certainly what it is, is a direct attack on, on his speech. And people, there's a memory hole, really, where a lot of the details of this case is gone. Like GCHQ operatives went into the Guardian and had them destroy hard drives in a newspaper headquarters in 2014. No, the Assange case, the Guardian has never been as radical again, as prepared to challenge the National Security State again after that incident. And people just want us to forget all of it. Before we came on air, we were talking about the history of this as well, the recent history. So we're not going back here to World War One or World War Two. But, you know, the 1980s and 1990s. And I obviously, you know, have been talking a little bit about this in relation to the Pogues and the censorship of their song about the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four. But there's a much broader context to what was going on with the censorship of the Irish Republican movement at that point. In 1985, an interview with Martin McGinnis that was done by the BBC was directly censored by, by the state, was political interference. It caused a mass NUJ walkout because it was seen quite rightly by those journalists who were engaged in it to be an act of censorship. And instead of responding to that walkout with a kind of, you know, classical British defense of free speech, what actually happened was between 1988 and 1994, all voices of members of the Irish Republican movement, you know, and political parties like Sinn Féin, were dubbed off of the TV and off radio. You couldn't hear them. They had to be voiced by actors. And obviously, their statements were kept to an absolute minimum. This is at a time when, you know, political parties were running in elections and, you know, were standing for public positions and their representatives couldn't be heard in their own voice on, on the radio and television. I mean, it's, I have to say, it's just absurd to have a discussion as if this country is like, say, for instance, the United States. And I'll talk a little bit as well about something that's more relevant directly to Tribune and to me now, because this country also has some of the most restrictive libel laws in the world. People travel to London to file lawsuits on particular issues, because it is so incredibly difficult to write something and make an argument about somebody within British or English, in this, in that case, libel laws. They're slightly different ones in England and Scotland, but they're both extremely, extremely punitive. And those libel laws basically allow a situation to emerge, where if you want, as a journalist, to write something about someone, you have to know beforehand that you have a deep enough pocket of money that you can sustain a case, even if like that case is completely frivolous, the way in which the libel laws set up, all they have to do is tie you up for, you know, two, three, four, five years in some cases. Certainly, it can be multiple years in a long legal battle that you then have to pay for out of pocket. And you're very unlikely to get all your costs back. And so even if you've been vindicated by the case, you're still going to take a huge hit on it. And so very wealthy people know in Britain today that they can just go around suing everyone who says anything inconvenient about them. And unless you represent a big corporate, you know, entity, you're very unlikely to be able to fight your corner. So Tribune at the moment, and this is the first time you've said this publicly, Tribune is being sued. Tribune is subject to libel case. It is entirely, in my view, a frivolous case. It is not a case that has any substance and we're going to fight it. And I think we're going to win it. I can't say anymore. I'm legally restricted from saying any more about it. It's not related to the Labour Party before people go off on that tangent. But it is a very serious case in so far as if we were to lose it, it would be the end of all of the work we've done to build this publication over over two and a half years. And, you know, we even right now is we are being tied up and a huge proportion of our kind of resources, our time and effort is being tied up in mounting a defence for a case, which to be frank, when people see the details of it, they will be amazed. It is a case in which we have said something that there is absolutely ample evidence to demonstrate. And it's a case that, you know, we really shouldn't be involved in. But the nature we are because the nature of libel law in this country is such that it makes it extremely difficult to publish things. It makes extremely difficult to say things. And and even if you don't win the cases, you still tie people up in huge amounts of of of work with lawyers that cost an awful lot of money and in which who knows whether they're going to get their whether they're going to get their costs back. And vast majority of cases, they don't have causes that costs totally covered. We've talked about this history of censorship. We've talked about, you know, Britain has these England and Scotland, they have slightly different laws, but they're both pretty bad. Have these terrible libel laws? You know, basically, your your ability to get justice depends entirely on how wealthy you are. Why, given all of this, you know, and we don't have a constitutional right to freedom of speech, like in the US, particularly if the Tories want to get rid of certain legislation that some relates to the EU, most of it doesn't European conventional human rights, if we were to somehow escape that, you know, our codified rights would be even worse than they presently are. Why, why in all of light, in light of all that are most written, many Brits, particularly small C conservative, you know, on the right center, right Brits, why do they believe that for some reason, Britain is this paragon of freedom of speech, when there's absolutely no evidence for it, which does that comes from? What kind of what kind of need is that addressing or meeting? I think that the concept of freedom of speech has been turned on its head, you know, speech is really a question of power, your ability to say things that threaten people is a question of power. And that that really when it boils down to it is what free speech is about. Because in the first instance, you know, anyone can go around just voicing opinions if it doesn't inconvenience people and without a platform, it's not going to be picked up, it's not going to be a topic worthy of discussion. What becomes a topic worthy of discussion is when somebody gets a platform to say things. And obviously in Britain, you've got a context where half of all the newspapers, more than half of all the newspapers people read every day are owned by News UK, Rupert Murdoch's News UK and the Daily Mail Group. And so a huge proportion of these platforms are tilted to the right. So when people have, you know, that kind of platform to project their views across society, or when they're saying things that fundamentally threaten established interests and power. And that it's within that paradigm, you have to see the question of freedom of speech because freedom of speech is really most fundamentally challenged when it when people are able to project a subversive opinion across a wide section of society. But Ronan, Ronan, here's the thing. And I'm sure you found this too. You know, I remember doing BBC Any Questions in, you know, rural Devon years ago. And Ben Bradshaw of all people, Labour MP tried to shut me down and said, why is he here? And then, you know, I think it was Jonathan Dimbleby said, well, you know, we believe freedom of expression and people can, you know, say say their views as long as they're not hurting anyone. And all the audience clapped. And I do think this meme and everyone clapped, but they did. And I think it goes to the core of what people think of themselves, particularly as as British people, as English people, they think, yeah, the freedom of speech, freedom of expression, you could say what you like as long as you're not hurting. Yes, you can do what you like as long as you're not hurting somebody. That kind of libertarian sort of almost, you know, inherent libertarian politics, people genuinely believe in it. It's not like they believe in it. They don't practice it. They genuinely believe in it. They think it matters. They think it's important. Yeah, this is so at odds with the kind of legal framework and like you say, the political economy of the media. So why do they believe it? It's a really big question. You know, to to give away a little bit about our new issue, which is just launching at the moment, you have a piece in there discussing liberals and their understanding of their own history. And I think, again, this is something that gets right to the core of it. So Britain has an understanding of its liberal tradition, which is informed by a whole series of important philosophers of the liberal tradition, which come out of the kind of English political sphere. And that makes a certain sense. People learn about this and that tradition in their schooling to some degree, certainly if they go on to learn about politics at higher level, they do. And there is this idea that that that is quite written into the fabric of the British state. And there's of course, all of these discussions about, you know, people's rights and the Magna Carta and so on, exactly, which which are a big part of the identity of of being British. And I understand that. And but then that has to be counterposed against the reality, which is that when you're discussing who can speak and what they can say, which is that that fundamental set of questions, you have to look at the history of it, which is that the reality for most of the 20th century was that people who were saying things that was challenging British foreign policy, the British security services, the wealthiest, you know, major corporations, British society, its major political figures in governments, they were all subject to enormous restrictions. And therein you get the again, the distinction. I think the Tories, you know, are not stupid in what they're doing here. This is quite a successful cultural war campaign that they're running. And we may come to some discussions about about why that might be in universities and so on and in the next in the next piece of this conversation. But what they're doing is they're cynically manipulating the space that exists between the popular understanding of Britain's own history and an identity around what it means to be British and freedom and free speech and so on. And the reality of all of these right wing governments, to be frank, which have been almost not entirely because Tony Blair did plenty by way of censorship as well, whether we call him right wing or not. I certainly would. But anyway, all of these governments throughout the 20th century, which have, which, you know, have have instituted very significant restrictions on free speech and which have allowed a situation to develop where speech is so incredibly controlled in Britain because ownership of the press and ownership of the media is so controlled. So you have this newspaper circuit, the print press, where half of what people read every day, as we said, is owned by two corporations. That then massively informs what is put out in broadcast media. And even broadcast media then itself, in turn, is subject to a huge amount of political pressure. So with the BBC, obviously the government of the day, as we now know with all of these discussions about the new leadership in the BBC, has its role in selecting who's going to oversee the BBC. And there's a whole other conversation which relates to Ofcom because for a long period of time, you know, Ofcom as well, throughout the 20th century and the regulatory bodies throughout the 20th century, when it comes to television, were involved in regular exercises of censorship, not just on like this or that program can't go on. But, you know, in terms of content of programs, in terms of censoring words in programs, censoring scenes in programs and so on. And there has been a more concerted effort with Ofcom recently. I remember Therese and May's Queen's speech a number of years ago about the need for Ofcom to be involved in the restriction of extremist views and attempt to kind of integrate Ofcom into the broader anti-terror counterterrorism, nexus, which is so restrictive of the right to free speech and, you know, so determinative in many cases of who can say something and what they can say in Britain. And, you know, that was a key moment in the progression of Ofcom. It shouldn't get anywhere near enough scrutiny. And now this question, you know, this idea we're going to have Paul Daker of The Daily Mail, who, you know, ran years-long hate campaigns against the left through that institution and argued, you know, The Daily Mail was as far as you could imagine from a free speech champion for most of that period of time, because it spent its time pursuing and persecuting left the academics, NGOs, people in the civil service who might have had pro-labor views. I mean, this is not a publication that had any kind of respect for for broad opinions. What it basically did was have a very narrow understanding of what was patriotic and which suited the right wing. And anyone who went outside of that was smeared ruthlessly as a terrorist sympathiser, as a red, as a whatever. And this is now the person who's going to be in charge of Ofcom. So I think we have there's the what I would say about the Tories, you know, and it applies to history and their understanding of all that as well. And the mythology, the mythology suits them much better than the reality. And that is what they are playing on with these these kind of campaigns. Let's move to the sort of the nub of the conversation, because I think, you know, much of our audience would agree, you know, the right and the Tories don't really mean what they say on freedom of expression, freedom of speech. Do you think the left has failed on freedom of speech? Do you think it's failing on freedom of speech? You think it's failing to defend freedom of speech as a principle, but also in practice. And if that is the case, when did it happen? When did the shift take place where the left no longer viewed itself as wanting to defend freedom of speech? And now we're in a different place. Or do you think, again, that's just a right wing can answer two questions there, I suppose. Look, I think the left has a problem of understanding around speech. And I've been saying this for some time now, which is that people think because there is some degree of cultural superiority for certain social liberal ideas at this moment in time that that means that the left has an extraordinary amount of power. And therefore we should be getting involved, you know, alongside, say, major social media corporations or university management or whatever else, and in policing people's right to say certain things. But what that inevitably does, and in fact, what that is already doing is making a stick for our own back, because when it comes down to it, the people who really have the power to decide who can say something and what they can say are people who own things are people in state power, the people who, you know, exert control in our society and the left has none of those positions. And so here and there we might run, you know, a campaign to get this or that person sacked. You know, say, for instance, some some person has a view that we dislike in a university department. I could think, you know, you could imagine a scenario, for instance, in universities where an economist comes out with some very extreme view on on pro austerity and whatever on the left starts firing around petitions. But actually, what's far more likely to happen is that some sociologist who says something radical in defence of, you know, a group that might have an armed wing or whatever else is much more likely to get themselves sacked, because the left is not the one making the decisions. And so I think in this, in this instance, the left has got a misunderstanding about what its own power is in society. They're not seeing clearly enough that having won some of the kind of post 60s social battles doesn't actually give you a huge amount of institutional power. And the other side of it is that engaging in this kind of in a sensorious campaign, I think, has become a particular tactic of the left because other tactics have been diminished. And this is part of this is part of a bigger discussion. And it's part of why the cynicism of this Tory campaign is so important for us to understand, which is that the Tories are pursuing universities right now, because they're the final place where radical voices have any degree of institutional power. So the unions have been smashed and we have no institutional power in the economy. The radicals have largely been driven out of civil society organizations. The NGOs have been almost totally taken over by corporate liberals and so forth. So the last place that there are radicals who can come out and say something that is really challenging about, you know, particularly the economy, but about politics and society and culture and so on more generally is in the university sector. And having pursued us out of all these other parts of society, the right is now coming for the universities as a final attempt to marginalize radical voices. And that's why this campaign is so important for us to fight back against because it is a question of whether or not radical voices have institutional positions in society and can speak freely on things. So so does that mean then that because as a principle and I agree, I think most people would agree with that, you know, maintaining freedom of speech as a principle, you know, necessarily benefits the left because we have so little leverage just, you know, institutionally, whether it's in the media, whether it's in politics, does that therefore mean you give a pass to things which you find reprehensible? I mean, how does that work in practice? So I agree with you for if a right wing economist says austerity was good, I think the guy's wrong. I think he's an asshole, whatever, but I don't think he should necessarily lose his job. I mean, that's an easy example. But if somebody talks about eugenics or, you know, Toby Young is a good example. You know, it wasn't that serious a role. He's a bit of a not serious guy. So it's kind of people don't need to necessarily think it through. But if somebody's attending sort of eugenics conferences and so on, you know, are they are they in the right, you know, place professionally, intellectually to be overseeing Britain's institutions, Britain's universities? So I guess this sort of feeds into the question of, you know, is that I think there is such a thing as a hate crime. But of course, where do you draw the line? I mean, so how does the left response to those cases? Because obviously there's often very egregious instances. Yes. Yes, there are. I'm one of these people. I don't have a total, like I'm not a free speech champion that says that I have no critical position on that because my view is that speech is very much related to power. And the second you divorce it from that question, you're trying to establish principles that don't interact with the realities of the world in terms of who has power to dictate who can say something what they can say, well, then you get off into a kind of fantasy land. But I'm very broadly pro free speech. And when we talk specifically about universities, because that's the number of the examples you brought up, I'm very defensive of academic freedom, and of tenure, because I think that if we're going to defend, and I do have a principal position here, my view is that universities and the higher education and adult education, lifelong learning and so on, they're about the critical pursuit of knowledge. And so much of what's happened over the reforms of recent years and decades has been diminishing of that. I want to come back to that in a second, because I think it's really important within universities to raise the question of what actually who's restricting what can be said and what processes are. But we have to defend academic freedom and we have to defend tenure because these are the pillars on which you base a free exchange of ideas. And you can actually have you know, an institutional position for radical voice within disciplines in universities, only because when campaigns come on from, you know, major media outlets to demonize radical academics and to, you know, say that they're brainwashing your kids and they're, you know, teaching them all this kind of anti-British stuff or whatever it is they're going on about, it is only the framework that's not kid ourselves in a moment when our universities are so cap and hand from money and so like determined to get corporate sponsorship. It's only the frameworks of academic freedom and tenure that save these people's positions. And like a lot of the radical academics that get attacked in the media being totally frank, like I don't agree with them on lots of things, particularly postmodern academics who spend huge proportions of their careers attacking Marxism, socialism, the broader left, like I don't agree with them. But you know, they're really important. And one of the reasons they're really important, and I think it's very important for us to defend them, is that they open doors. The number of people who go into classrooms with radical academics who simply put different kinds of texts there, that doesn't mean that's all left wing texting me, right wing texting me, whatever, but we're willing to put texts that are heterodox on their syllabuses. Those open doors that people then begin to walk down and think about it. I mean, I remember I had that experience with reading Foucault and University. I mean, I have no time now for Michelle Foucault as a social theorist. But the fact that I was given the exposure to reading Foucault was actually pretty important because it took me down into Foucault and then the critiques of Foucault and questions of radicalism. And then what had happened in the post sixties period in the nature of the welfare state and before the end of it, I ended up with, you know, quite advanced sets of understandings that are running counter to mainstream understandings of the 20th century. And it's because that door was opened. And so this is why we have to defend it. And we have to have a discussion more broadly about the universities as well, because the right is running a campaign right now about, you know, it's these wild students who are, you know, trying to get everyone sacked in universities with their no platforming tactics and whatever. And I'm not going to defend all of that. And we've just had a discussion about, you know, my belief that we shouldn't be calling for people to be to be sacked. I think it's a it's a stupid tactic. And it's also in principle wrong. But there is a broader question here, which is, I remember the post crash economics discussion after the 2008 crash, when students had to come together and demand that their universities include some more left wing economists in the economics departments, some more heterodox economists in economics departments, because what they were seeing happening in front of their eyes day to day on television no longer made sense against what they were learning in their in their syllabuses. And that is actually the reality of British universities, certainly the sec the sections of those universities that really have something to say about power, the politics departments, economics departments and so on, the history departments, these are not run by in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases by like wild-eyed radicals. It's a complete nonsense. If you have, and I have to say, you know, it doesn't mean I read quite a lot of historians who are not left wing, and I'm interested in quite a lot of like, earlier social history, I think that, you know, BBC's program in our time or whatever is a really fantastic kind of way to show off the interesting historical discussions that are going on inside British universities, but it's a total canard, right, to believe that the British universities and their history departments are all being run by radicals. They're being run in the vast majority of cases by pretty conservative mainstream establishment historians, and you've got the odd radical voice here and there dotted around the place. And it's the same with most other departments, most other disciplines. There are a few that have more sociology and so on, have more, but not that many. And that's the reality of what universities look like. But can I just say, Ron, as well, it just it goes back to your point about money and resources and power, because if you take UCL, for instance, recently, there's a bit of a fight there about adoption of the IHRA. Now, you might think that's a good thing they should adopt it. You might think it's a bad thing they shouldn't adopt it. What I think is inarguable, I don't think they should adopt that's my personal view. But that's kind of irrelevant because what matters is, like you say, if they get enough pushback on whatever decision, if corporate donors don't want to get involved, if people who are leaving their money, you know, sort of in their legacies and their will, alumni who are sort of wealthy and giving them money regularly, if they start saying this isn't really acceptable, you know, to what extent is their academic freedom at UCL to adopt one position or the other? Because money talks because right now, universities to an extent we've really not ever seen before have been subordinated to profit and to capitalism, right? Fundamentally, you need money to exist, which 40 years ago, 50 years ago, wasn't necessarily the case of universities. Now, I'm not saying they were more enlightened 40 or 50 years ago. But like you say, the extent to which power, resources, money inhibits freedom of expression, freedom of intellectual curiosity, I think that's an archival and it's clearly only going in one direction. Absolutely. And it's actually the structure of the modern university, which is the most restrictive thing in terms of setting the terrain for what can be said and who can say it. Because the truth of it is that the modern university, like the vast majority of big and important research decisions are made with corporate sponsorship in mind, at the very least, if not are made on the back of what funding is available from who to be able to do what research, which means that and this is not just in sciences. I mean, it's not just in the kind of hard sciences and natural sciences and whatever. It happens in the social sciences to some extent as well, where the questions are being asked over your ability to pursue things on the basis of what money is available and then who's making the decision of what money is available. Well, in many cases, certainly, you know, when we think of the role that Big Pharma is now playing in universities, and I know we have all this debate about the vaccine and so on. We can get into a later stage. But whatever you think about that outcome, the process by which big pharmaceutical corporations can decide how huge amounts of university resources are deployed is obviously a question of determining who's allowed to pursue what research and where. And that applies actually across the university, the big money is shaping what is what you can pursue and what you can't. And you know what else is shaping it is the process of university staff being casualized, university staff being underpaid for their work. And and the fact that academics are being forced into a hamster wheel to produce more and more and more kind of papers publications in order that universities can rank in a certain way in league tables in order that then those universities can attract more international sponsorship and more international students and more money in as part of a kind of commercial racket. Those academics who are being forced into that hamster wheel, they can't actually go about saying what they want to say. They can't go about, you know, writing on the topics they really want to write about or pursue because what they're being forced to do is to simply churn out as many papers and as many kind of topics as they can in order to get the university more points in this in this system. And the same, by the way, with academics who have got precarious working positions or casualized and whatever else, well, what happens when they go and say something controversial? Their prospects of not getting rehired, their prospects of getting sacked and whatever are all much higher. And the right doesn't want to engage in any of this debate. It doesn't want to engage in any serious structural debate about what is influencing the modern university and what it's pursuing. The left has to be able to step into that sphere. And this is why the freedom of speech discussion is important. The defense of academic freedom, the defense of tenure, we have to be able to step in and defend the idea of the university as a side of learning. The idea of not just learning, I have to say, in the university setting, because the truth is we have undervalued other forms of learning. We've allowed this idea that a degree is just a stamp on your right to give you a professional job at some later point. People go on and get masters just so they can, you know, have a little bit more than a BA to get up the employment ladder a bit further. We have to break the idea of an education system that's totally instrumentalized towards the economy, the jobs market and profit at the end of the day and fight for one that's about the critical pursuit of knowledge, which is the old idea, the Enlightenment idea of the university. And that should be ours to defend because actually the biggest threat to the Enlightenment idea the university is the marketization of higher education, which is backed entirely by the Tories. But look, there are other aspects here. You've written you mentioned the IHA definition. The Israel Palestine debate is a hugely important structuring debate over over speech universities at the moment that the right wing free speech champions have basically nothing to say about. And it's not just the IHA definition, which I agree with you, you never I don't think there should be anywhere near universities don't think we should anywhere near universities because you've got it immediately at that point, you are placing extraordinary limits on academic freedom by using a different kind of context, you by using the context about safe spaces and whether or not, you know, there is discrimination so on, you're infringing on academic freedom discussions which should be being held actually on their own basis. You you raise the question so of eugenics. Well, a good academic freedom discussion will deal with eugenics by saying, is this good principle decent research? Or is this pseudo scientific nonsense? And if a person is engaged in pseudo scientific nonsense that has no basis that they cannot prove, well, then I think you've got a much stronger case within the University of, you know, critical inquiry to make to make an argument against that person. And that should be the way in which things are dealt with not on the basis, for instance, of whether this person is creating a safe space or or or not for for students also because the safe space concept is a fundamentally misleading one. I understand why it came about, but it's misleading. It hasn't developed any kind of position of power for the left more generally. In fact, it's more often being used now, as we can see to the discussion over Palestine against us and also to some of the prevent discussions. I'll come to that in a second. But it's also just not how these things work. When we say, oh, this or that is not just not up for debate. Like, you know, a person's life is not up for debate. Well, you know, Irish people could have said that very easily in the 1980s and 90s. You know, our rights aren't up for debate. Well, I'm sorry, but they are. And they were. We do need to win political institutional battles to try to defend them. But like when people were being shot dead for for demonstrating for civil rights, that whether or not you say your life is not a subject to debate is kind of irrelevant. It is a subject to debate. And you've got to both be able to win the debate in the public sphere on that question over, you know, your right to civil rights, as it would have been in that case. And you've got to be able to win the political battles that actually, you know, secure those rights in the in the real world. I think that's spot on. I just want to say, Ron, I think, you know, speaking as somebody who's, you know, British Iranian, there are, you know, there's there's a a dearth of of our academics, more, more so in the United States, who I think, you know, a lot of their presumptions and their, you know, their way of viewing the world and interpreting facts, I think is kind of is kind of racist. I think that however, like you say, I mean, does that does that mean I therefore think that scholars and the kind of the realist school of international relations theory that they should because I don't really like them. And I think what they're saying is kind of actually, this is kind of incontrovertible. If you look at the kind of the the that pipeline between ideas and then sort of neoconservatives which surrounded Bush in the White House, Bush, Jr. You know, you could say, well, this is deeply, you know, unacceptable to people of Middle Eastern heritage, Iranians, Iraqis, etc., etc. And like I particularly in the university, you know, you can have these debates in various other institutions. I don't think the IHRA should be adopted by the Labour Party. I mean, that's again, just my opinion. But at least with the political party, you can say we have an executive. These are our values. We don't think this is congruent with our values. That's a different argument. I think you're quite right to make this difference with the university, where it's more about a sort of there's a meta debate going on where actually fundamentally the point of the organisation is not your congruent with our values, but actually we have a range of views which we kind of try, you know, we try and enable and to inspire and hopefully that they can be productive, productive agreements and disagreements. So I agree that freedom of speech, particularly in the context of education, I think is so important and it's a little bit different to the arguments elsewhere. I just wanted to say as well, Ronan, because it feeds into that precarity and freedom of speech kind of point feeds in as well to the media and to journalism. And we had a great example of this recently with Nathan Robinson, current affairs writer, founder, who was a columnist at The Guardian. I'll briefly reiterate the story. I'm sure our viewers are aware of it. You know, who's a columnist at the Guardian, Guardian US and he made an offhand comment on Twitter, which was interpreted by John Mulholland, the editor at The Guardian US is anti-Semitic or even just not becoming of a columnist, which ultimately that's fine, right? That's that's what you do as an editor. But rather than say, I don't think this is a wise thing to tweak, please delete it or what you mean. He was kind of just they didn't really respond to him anymore and he wasn't being commissioned to write articles anymore. And what this shows you is you can only do that with a freelancer. You know, you can't do that with a guy who's on contract in the union, who's in the office every, you know, every week or whatever has deep social capital with the rest of this of senior editorial team, other columnists and so on. But they could do with Nathan Robinson because, you know, he is the kind of columnist which is increasingly the norm in the media industry, which is he didn't have a contract. They could kind of leave him hanging, which is very much like these untenured academics. So it's not just in the in the academy and universities, but also in the media. And this was at The Guardian, right? This was at an institution which is meant to be one of the most progressive, liberal, you know, comment is free, apparently not. You know, media outlets in the Anglophone world and actually in many ways it is, you know, let's be honest, it's clearly much better than the Daily Man and the Sun. But even there, we have a problem around freedom of speech. And like you say, this clear connection between resources, between political power, between the power of labor, actually, and one's ability to actually say and think what one wants. I think it's a very important point. Also, you know, let's let's remind ourselves again, when we talk about speech and power, that in the last five, six years in Britain, there has been a leader of one of the two major parties who has had no major newspaper, TV station, whatever, no major media outlet that reflected his views or that gave him support. The left, actually, in the broader context of speech in Britain is basically written out of the picture here. The real, you know, the left and by that, I mean for me, I mean socialists. None of the newspapers, major newspapers reflect our lines were very consistently left out of the conversations that happened on BBC, ITV even, even on Skype, slightly less there has to be said, but even still in places like that. So we are basically denied on a much broader scale, you know, the right of running these campaigns around who's invited to like student debate societies. There's some importance there. By the way, it's not the same as academic freedom in those places. This is a student debate society. It's not whether someone has tenure or not. And I think those are very distinct and different questions. But they're going crazy about this or that person not being invited or being, you know, invite being rescinded or whatever from a student debate society. What about a whole massive section of society who was for a period of time, you know, reflected in the leadership of the Labour Party who have no media institution that will go to bat for them. The Guardian and the Mirror, to a significant extent, the new statesman, they were actually more aggressively anti-left and anti-socialist throughout the Corbyn period than even the right wing was in many instances. And so but there's no discussion of that because they don't have an interest in and having a real debate about speech. And you know what? This is true across the board for the right because one minute they're going on about, we need to have free speech in society. It's a very important thing, you know, and in universities and whatever else. And the next minute, what they're saying is like Michael Gove when he introduced that new curriculum for history, or we only need to be teaching patriotic history and all this British anti-empire history has to be written out. One minute you're getting a line from the Tory government, which is like we need free speech as ours in our universities. The next minute you're getting the culture secretary coming out and saying that in the case of the National Trust, when it did a report into the history of some of the properties and empire and slavery and whatever else, that, you know, we need to stop this anti-British propaganda in our institutions. And so they want a particular version of history to be taught. They want to, you know, attack pretty viciously in their tabloids and with their platforms as government ministers in a public sense. Anyone who steps across the line into critical analysis of Britain's history and actually analysis of the reality of what happened under the empire, which is nowhere near analyzed enough completely to the country of what the Tories say about the kind of history people get in schools in Britain and even into the universities. There's nowhere near enough discussion of the atrocities which was committed in very many colonised countries in Britain's name. And yet what they want is and they're running an active campaign at the same time as they're running a culture war campaign over free speech. They're running a culture war campaign over, you know, let's marginalise or completely remove from the public sphere anyone who has critical view on British imperial history. They're complete hypocrites, I'm afraid. And by the way, it goes even broader than that. You think of Pretty Patel and the kind of, you know, campaign that she's running over free speech and making a big part of her position and her kind of political discourse at the moment that we need to defend free speech. And then we find out that actually the government is supporting through John Woodcock of all people and inquiry into progressive terrorism and into, you know, like the activities of far left groups and all the rest of it. Somebody when John Woodcock, you couldn't pick aside from a bigger idiot, you couldn't pick a more like prejudiced person to run an inquiry on that basis because he spent his entire bloody life involved in like battled back and forth with people who are socialists and particularly in recent years. And so like, you know, we all know what he's going to end up saying about this. But the same government that's arguing we need free speech for people then turns around and says, well, we need to look into, you know, all of this kind of stuff that's too radical, that environmental groups and whatever are doing. And that, you know, is part of a context too with the spy cops bill and the fact that progressive groups in a wildly disproportionate instance, only a handful of our right groups were looked into. We now know because of the spy cops inquiry, you know, the government is quite happy to go in and send its agents into progressive groups to snoop on us. It has a massive surveillance apparatus. We just discussed what the GCHQ did when it came to the Guardian. And yes, somehow the Tories are the defenders of like free speech and and critical debate in the public sphere. It is a farce. It's a complete farce. And the people in the media who like outside of the right wing, who are just cynical about it, the people in the broader media sphere who engage with them as if they're honest actors or good faith actors are are doops at best. Final question, Ronan, because you talked about, I think it's a good analysis of what of what the truth is. What does the left do about it? How can the left reassert itself as a champion of freedom of expression, freedom of speech? Do you think that's simply not possible, given you've got this sort of structural economic analysis of things? Is the answer, oh, well, we need to find this on newspaper or are things a little bit easier than that? I think we need to defend the public sphere. I think it is important. So more broadly than that, we need to be able to have arguments about what kind of political debate, broad political debate that allows heterodox ideas should be sustained in society and how that should be sustained. And we should be leading that debate instead of allowing terms like free speech to be totally co-opted and taken by the right, who don't believe in any of it, because unless we do that, the truth is we'll be the ones shut out. It is a principle point. It's a principle point certainly for universities. It's a principle point because we should believe in those enlightenment ideas of the critical pursuit of knowledge that sustain the institution of the university. But it's also a point around politics and that people have to be really clear that we're not the ones who have the power in society to dictate the terms of the debate. It's not really us who gets to police it, despite what a few like big corporations who have BLM flags or gay pride flags at certain times a year might lead you to believe. The truth is a small amount of like power, social or cultural power in terms of liberalism doesn't translate to any significant power for the left. And then the bigger question of all this is as well as us making an argument over speech and the public sphere in society, we have to do the practical work because we can go and make principle cases about these things for free speech, the public sphere, critical pursuit knowledge and all the rest. The right doesn't care about any of them. They're going to have their free speech unions. They're going to have all this kind of stuff. It's a cultural campaign. They're not going to care. And what they're certainly not going to do is allow a scenario to emerge where actually we have a platform like a significant media outlet where we can voice our opinions or where we have think tanks on the same kind of scale that they would have or where we have anywhere near the number of academics even with like properly radical views of these socialist Marxist or even some of the postmodern ones in these big institutions, say like in economics departments, we're a million miles away from having any kind of significant number of socialist economists in the economics departments of British universities and they're never going to change any of that. So we have to begin to adopt institutional analysis. And it does start with the question of the media because you the media is a key fulcrum of the public sphere. It's what the Tories are running this campaign over the university sector and so on and we have no voice in it. You know, the Guardian occasionally gives access to a few radicals here and there, but they only do just to sustain an audience. They hate us. They absolutely hate us. And we have to have our own. And that means going back to some of the discussions the left was having back in the 80s, you know, where the news on Sunday was launched and all the rest of it. We have to actually talk about balancing the media landscape by having a big mass audience, left wing newspaper or publication, you know, channel, whatever it is that will begin to put a counterbalance to the kind of constant lurch to the right that outlets like, you know, GB News are just the latest example of. Great place to finish on. We're not going to have meaningful freedom of speech without a different kind of media. Ronan, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me today. Pleasure. And you did so after having a difficult surgery on your shoulder, I'm told. Yeah, two weeks ago and got a shoulder reconstruction and it's going all right. It's going all right. And we managed to get an issue of of Tribune out through it. I would highly encourage people to go and look at our Twitter page and Facebook and all the rest for the latest offer to subscribe to Tribune because, you know, we need your support in order to survive in the same way Novara does. And actually, there's a very good crossover in the latest because we have we have the noble Aaron Bostani in the latest print issue discussing some liberal falsification of history. So so I think people will be very interested in it. We did a great job editing it and its commitments to the cause that you managed to do that whilst whilst bedridden. Thanks again, Ronan, really, really good conversation. Appreciate it. Cheers.