The Institute of Race Relations’ head of media defends their decision to invite a controversial columnist to speak.
The last time I wrote about David Bullard, I said rude things about what I thought of the column that got him fired – but rejected the basis of his dismissal as a threat to our hard-won freedoms.
Those who only defend freedom of speech for opinions they agree with merely reveal just how tepid and insecure their convictions really are. They think they are right, but not with a conviction sufficient to risk putting their thinking to the test.This has been understood among intellectuals for a very long time.
In that opinion, ageing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Union soldier in the Civil War, thrice wounded and not given to mewling pacifism, declared that there was no principle “that more imperatively calls for attachment than … the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate”.
In one case after another, the silencing of voices fails the shouting-fire-in-a-theatre test, the most recent being the hounding of Karima Brown, another symptom of the atmosphere of intolerance for ideas some don’t like. It’s not the ideas that threaten us, but the inverse, the shutting down of conversations that preserve openness and independent-mindedness.
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