Britain’s Free Speech Union (FSU) has been asked to help people who have been fired, suspended or are ‘under investigation’ for having said or done what are deemed controversial things, usually on Facebook or Twitter.
Founder Toby Young explained in The Spectator (No sacred cows: Toby Young, 2 July) that these were not instances of hate speech, but tweets saying things like ‘All Lives Matter’.
The FSU was set up to defend people in schools, colleges, universities, the arts, public broadcasting, tech companies, local authorities and government from charges of ‘hate speech’ by left-leaning social justice institutions.
A petition started by an FSU member asking the Oxford English Dictionary to keep its definition of ‘woman’ as an ‘adult female human’ was removed by moderators on the grounds that it was ‘hate speech’.
From receiving six requests a week when it was set up in February 2020, the FSU has received six requests for help a day since the start of the recent ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) campaign.
In one case, a man was fired from the charity he’d founded for vulnerable young people, and for which he had been awarded an MBE, for posting a comment on LinkedIn in which he took issue with BLM’s policy of dismantling capitalism.
Young says the British police have investigated and recorded 120 000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in the past five years. Recently, a judge ruled that it was perfectly fine to sack someone for saying ‘men cannot change into women’ because that particular belief ‘is not worthy of respect in a democratic society’.
[Picture: Brian Wangenheim on Unsplash]