DANIEL HANNAN: Britain is now not a liberal society… we’ve got invented a proper to not be offended and elevated it above all others

It has been a terrible two months for free speech. First, people were sent to prison – actually sent to prison – for saying unpleasant things in the aftermath of the Southport riots.

Then the journalist Allison Pearson was harassed at her home on the morning of Remembrance Sunday because one person decided to be offended by a year-old tweet.

Now the Press regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), has ruled against The Spectator magazine for describing a trans activist as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’, a ruling the magazine’s new editor Michael Gove fairly describes as ‘offensive to the principle of free speech and chilling in its effect on free expression’.

The author of the offending article was Gareth Roberts, a TV scriptwriter with a delightful turn of phrase. He was writing about Nicola Sturgeon‘s appearance at an event in Sussex, and mentioned en passant that she ‘was interviewed by writer Juno Dawson, a man who claims to be a woman, and so the conversation naturally turned to gender’.

Dawson complained to Ipso on three grounds. First, that the statement was inaccurate. Second, that it constituted harassment. Third, that it breached section 12.1 of the editors’ code, which lays down that ‘the Press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability’.

Ipso threw out the first two complaints, but upheld the third, finding that the reference was ‘personally belittling and demeaning toward the complainant’.

I would love to say that Ipso overstepped the mark and issued a perverse ruling.

But, reading the editors’ code, I think it is worse than that. I think Ipso may accurately have interpreted section 12.1 which, in effect, outlaws the use of hurtful words for individuals who belong to certain protected groups.

How the blithering flip did we end up with such a prohibition? The depressing answer is that it happened on the Tories’ watch.

After the phone-hacking scandal in 2012, there were demands for statutory Press regulation.

The Conservative government managed eventually to head off these proposals, opting instead to allow a system of self-regulation. But Ipso has proved no less prone to wokery than government departments.

For those tiresome people who still pretend not to understand what wokery means, it means the sanctification of supposedly historically marginalised groups.

The sensitivities of these groups are elevated as the supreme goal of public policy, trumping free contract, free association and free speech. Hence Monday’s Ipso ruling.

It is indeed outrageous. But it is also a sobering thought that, at every stage between the formation of Ipso and the entry into force of the current editors’ code in 2021, Michael Gove was a government minister. Once again, we see the impotence of our elected representatives before our standing bureaucracies.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the issue here is free expression, not the right to identify as belonging to a different sex.

A newcomer to the debate might think that transgenderism is a new phenomenon. It is not. The word ‘transsexual’, though now out of date, is more than 100 years old, and the idea of rejecting the sex dictated by your chromosomes is older still.

Nor was the phenomenon hidden away. As long ago as 1970, The Kinks reached No 2 in the charts with Lola, a song about a transwoman (‘Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…’).

In 1973, Tim Curry sang: ‘I’m just a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania’ in the Rocky Horror Show.

None of this was especially controversial. The controversy began much more recently when, instead of exercising their own freedom, trans lobbyists began to demand that everyone else curtail theirs.

People have the right to change sex through reassignment surgery. They have the right to stop short of a full operation but to adjust their appearance. They have the right, if they prefer, simply to have hormone replacement treatment. And, indeed, they have the right to do nothing except cross-dress and use whatever pronouns they please.

What they do not have the right to do is tell the rest of us what words we are allowed to use. In a liberal society, trans people, including Dawson, would be at liberty to call themselves male or female. And others, including Roberts, would be equally at liberty to describe them in any way they pleased.

By this test, as by so many others, we are no longer a liberal society. We have invented a right not to be offended and elevated it above every other.

The reason I describe wokery as ‘sanctification’ is that its tenets are not subject to debate in the normal way. They are treated, rather, as absolutes, like matters of religious faith. This can lead us into all manner of absurdities. 

Before publication of the landmark Cass Report into treatment at the now closed Tavistock gender identity clinic earlier this year, we were offering puberty-blockers to children and embarking far too freely on life-changing operations for minors.

Almost everyone could see that it was a bad idea but, because we sanctify protected groups, few liked to say so.

When you have something like religious fervour on your side, you can spout all manner of nonsense with conviction. You can argue, for example, that Britain, which distinguished itself by leading the fight to end slavery, somehow owes ‘reparations’ to various countries which showed no interest in abolition. And, as with the trans madness, no one will want to tell you that you are talking utter rot.

Free speech restrictions are perhaps best understood as blasphemy codes. They punish certain opinions, not because they constitute incitement or harassment, but because they constitute impiety.

Britain last jailed someone for mocking Jesus in 1921. But two years ago, a British former policeman was sentenced to 20 weeks for mocking George Floyd, the African-American whose death after being arrested sparked the Black Lives Matter mass protests in 2020.

There was no question of public disorder: the former policeman’s comments were on a private WhatsApp group. That’s the thing about blasphemy codes. They are about sniffing out sacrilege, not preserving peace.

How tragic that we, of all countries, should now be retreating from free expression, the ultimate guarantor, not just of personal liberty, but of social progress.

It is open inquiry that allows good ideas to drive out false ones, that lets a mistaken consensus be shattered by new facts or better logic.

We used to understand this. We are the country of Locke, Lilburne, Milton, Wilkes and Mill – and that’s just the Johns. For what it’s worth, all those men were seen, in their own time, as progressives, opponents of autocracy and obscurantism.

Yet now, in a polar switch, attacks on free speech come overwhelmingly from the Left. The religious order against which those earlier radicals fulminated has been replaced by a new Trinity: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.

Our country fought for freedom, including free speech, against the Nazis and the Communists. We exported and defended the liberal order. Yet now, to the dismay of our friends and the bewilderment of our adversaries, we are giving up on it at home.

Not because we have lost a war or been occupied by a hostile power. But out of sheer torpor. I dread to imagine what past generations would think of us.

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative peer.