After 17 months of drift following the Government’s January 2025 reset of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, the free speech complaints scheme administered by the Office for Students (OfS) is at last going ahead. The Government has now signed the commencement regulations needed to bring the scheme into force. From 1 September […]
Should universities have a say before speakers are excluded from the UK? The Government has cancelled the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) of a controversial left-wing US political commentator, in a move that prevents him from appearing at one of the UK’s oldest debating societies and raises renewed questions about broad and discretionary powers used to […]
Over the past year, my pastime has been defending Americans from Ofcom, the UK’s internet censorship agency, while parrying demands from regulators in Australia, the EU and Brazil. Most readers will know about this work because of a cartoon hamster. That hamster, sent in a letter to Ofcom on behalf of my client 4chan, illustrated […]
The more sensitive souls in my generation have a new Netflix obsession: ‘My Oxford Year’. An American Rhodes scholar goes to Oxford to study Victorian poetry for a year, during which time she meets a handsome professor with whom she shares a turbulent, passionate romance which invariably ends in tragedy. Shots of ancient Oxford colleges, […]
‘These are totally unacceptable Tweets… I think it was proportionate to arrest him.’ This is what the newly elected leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, had to say on Newsnight yesterday in response to comedian Graham Linehan’s recent arrest at Heathrow airport. Linehan’s supposed crime? Posting gender critical content on X. For the uninitiated, […]
Marx was wrong, Burnham was right: capitalism wasn’t replaced by communism, but by managerialism. In ‘The Managerial Revolution’ (1941), James Burnham wrote that the bourgeoisie weren’t sinking into the proletariat – they were being replaced by ‘administrators, technicians, managers’. If, like me, you love Edmund Burke, this might remind you of his mournful line: ‘The […]
On a wintry afternoon in February 1988, two large human columns, both several hundred strong, merged at the intersection of Kirov Avenue and Teryan Street in downtown Yerevan, Soviet Armenia’s capital. Their march continued down the wide, winding Kirov Avenue, joining a larger demonstration already taking place in Opera Square. I was one of those […]
When Kemi Badenoch spoke at the Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher Conference last month, she was interrupted by protestors calling for the abolition of billionaires. Like others in the audience, I was frustrated. After all, I had paid good money to hear her speak. But ultimately, I found myself, reluctantly, in admiration of the […]
‘It’s a free country,’ we used to say to each other when I was growing up in the 1970s. Usually, it was an indication of tolerant and good-humoured derision that had been preceded by someone else expressing some eccentric taste or allegiance. ‘I support Arsenal,’ or, ‘I’m getting a pair of corduroy trousers.’ Perhaps even, […]
