Article 19 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’

‘hate’, ‘offence’, ‘perception’ – that are hopelessly subjective.

do not protect controversial speech for its content, but rather the principle it represents.

speech is integral to the human spirit and hardly comparable with guns, knives and poison.

Where nobody can agree on definitions, there can be no unanimity on where the limitations of free speech can be drawn. In such circumstances, the safest approach is to defend free speech for all, and that includes those whose

the charge that ours is an endemically racist culture is fatally undermined by the very tactics that its proponents deploy. They prove that our society is committed to expelling the very racism they claim defines it.

Cancel culture does not seek to criticise, but to punish, and leaves little scope for redemption.

to make the leap from the natural revulsion we experience at certain alternative worldviews to actively silencing them is to surrender to the authoritarian tendency.

To force citizens to speak falsehoods as though they were the truth is a form of psychological control common to dictatorships.