Cancel culture

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Easter special: how forgiveness was forgotten

36 min listen

This week: how forgiveness was forgotten, why the secular tide might be turning, and looking for romance at the British museum.  Up first: The case of Frank Hester points to something deep going on in our culture, writes Douglas Murray in the magazine this week. ‘We have never had to deal with anything like this before. Any mistake can rear up in front of you again – whether five years later (as with Hester) or decades on.’ American lawyer and author of Cancel Culture: the latest attack on free speech, Alan Dershowitz, joins the podcast to discuss whether forgiveness has been forgotten. (02:11) Then: Will and Lara take us through some

Tuesday

Stuart Kelly

Progressives vs. bigots: How I Won a Nobel Prize, by Julius Taranto, reviewed

This is the kind of comic novel I greatly admire, because it makes me feel so anxious and wrong-footed. I laughed wholeheartedly until an inner voice chided, in a contradictory fashion, ‘that’s not supposed to be funny’ and ‘can’t you see it’s a joke?’ Given that the book is about that very modern set of dilemmas, my admiration for Julius Taranto’s work is even greater. The novel’s protagonist is Helen, a graduate student, who explains her field in the opening sentence: ‘The Rubin Institute had nothing to do with high-temperature superconductors, so I cannot say I had spent much time thinking about it.’ Her supervisor has been offered a position

Wednesday

Robin Ashenden

The dazzling classic The Red Shoes has several unfashionable lessons for us today

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film about a ballet and its company, is 75 this month, and its birthday is being marked with great fanfare. From October to December, the BFI is putting on a major retrospective of the films of Powell and Pressburger, with an accompanying exhibition and nationwide screenings of The Red Shoes itself. A companion book to The Red Shoes by Pamela Hutchinson – stuffed with insight and background – is being published, as well as a lavish volume, The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, complete with pictures and essays (almost love letters) about the late filmmakers from artists such as Tilda Swinton

Wednesday

Dot Wordsworth

How the Chancellor of the Exchequer created cancel culture

I used to worry on holiday about not having cancelled the milk, which would grow into a phalanx of doorstep bottles semaphoring an opportunity to burglars. Now whole classes of society are ostracised or cancelled for disagreeing with the declared ‘values’ of companies.  Sir Robert Goodwill, the chairman of the environment committee, told the Daily Telegraph last week that banks are trying to ‘cancel the countryside’ by closing the accounts of shooting businesses. Hunts had found the same thing. It’s funny that cancel culture and the Chancellor of the Exchequer share the same origin, linguistically. They go back to the latticework barriers marking off the judge’s space in an ancient

Sunday

Brendan O’Neill

In defence of Howard Donald

The mob has claimed another scalp. This time it’s Howard Donald’s. The Take That star has been found guilty of likecrimes. That is, he liked some ‘problematic’ tweets, including a tweet that said – brace yourselves – ‘Only women have periods’. For this, for giving his approval to a statement of biological fact, he’s been damned as a vile bigot and dumped from July’s Nottingham Pride Festival. Next time someone tells you cancel culture is a myth, point them to the unpersoning of Howard Donald. For here we have a good bloke, a veteran of the boyband era, being publicly shamed not even for anything he said but simply for

Friday

Tom Slater

Who’s to blame for our censorious students?

Without freedom of speech, you do not have a university. More than any other value, it is freedom of speech that most defines the university, that makes it a special place in society set aside for debate and inquiry in which speech and thought should be freer than in practically any other workplace or institution. And yet an alarming proportion of students seem not to have got the memo. A new study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London confirms what has been clear for some time: that today’s students, far from being rebellious free-thinkers, are if anything more supportive of censorship than the general population. The numbers are pretty

Tuesday

Jesse Singal

The problem with being anti-woke

I’m going to do something that will likely annoy you, dear reader: I am going to make an argument about a certain class of people without naming names. If I do name names, any response will devolve into a debate over whether I am unfairly tarring the individuals in question. That’s beside the point, because the phenomenon in question is undoubtedly real. That phenomenon is anti-wokeness curdling into reactionary crankery. Don’t get me wrong: as I’ve previously written, I think there’s a moral panic afoot in many liberal institutions. Whether you want to call it ‘wokeness’ or something else, it seems undeniably the case that a culture of illiberalism has corroded

Thursday

Jack Wakefield

Why Christie’s is wrong to cancel Eric Gill

Eric Gill was an incestuous paedophile and his own letters prove it, but the value of his work can run into millions of pounds. So it was a surprise to hear rumours that auction house Christie’s will no longer be accepting his art. Will they really be turning away all Gills, even the masterpieces? I asked one Christie’s employee for confirmation. ‘Yes,’ they said. ‘It would not be consistent to refuse to sell the Gill trifles but continue to sell his masterpieces.’ The Christie’s press office said they wouldn’t comment, which is a shame because the decision raises interesting questions. Why single Gill out? Christie’s will keep selling art by

Thursday

Claudia Massie

It’s a miracle this exhibition even exists: Audubon’s Birds of America reviewed

In 2014, an exhibition of watercolours by the renowned avian artist, John James Audubon, opened in New York. The reviews, from the New York Times to the Guardian, were unambiguously enthusiastic, celebrating the painter as a legendary genius who ‘exceeded the limits of his era’. Fast forward eight years, and a rather different vibe hangs over the latest outing of his bird portraits, one that reflects both the limits of that era and the limits of the man. Visitors to the National Museum of Scotland’s Audubon’s Birds of America are welcomed with an acknowledgment that the artist was ‘full of contradiction and controversy’. His charge sheet is substantial. It’s not

Thursday

Toby Young

Are cancel-culture activists aware of their sinister bedfellows?

Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This 500-page door-stopper, which combines a history of free speech with a persuasive case for its defence, is aimed squarely at snowflakes and social justice warriors. Mchangama deals patiently and methodically with all the objections they might make to ‘the first freedom’ and then tries to convince them it’s in their interests to defend it. Take the assumption that untrammelled free speech perpetuates current inequalities, favouring the privileged and penalising the disadvantaged. That view often underpins the efforts of student activists to cancel controversial speakers, believing as they do that anyone

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

Julie Burchill has found a new way to provoke: she’s turned sincere

The greatest ever social media spat took place before the first tweet was sent, and was conducted via fax, which was like email but with the satisfyingly tangible tear of a fresh missive just arrived from across the planet. It was early 1993 and Julie Burchill, then of the Modern Review, was locked in a war with Camille Paglia, then of any US talk show you cared to tune into. The conflict began with a disobliging review Burchill filed of Paglia’s Sexual Personae, before shifting to the Xerox front, where Paglia made the mistake of questioning her interlocutor’s working-class credentials. Burchill brought hostilities to an abrupt close with her final

Thursday

Winston Marshall

When did artists become the mob?

‘The mob’s going to want a chicken to kill and they won’t care much who it is,’ wrote John Steinbeck. ‘Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.’ I’ve been thinking about those words in recent days as more ‘cancelled’ headlines fill the news. I was a co-founding member of the band Mumford and Sons, which I quit last year. I praised a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States and all hell broke loose, so I decided better to leave my band and save my bandmates the trouble. Better that than stay

Thursday

Michael Mailer

What Norman Mailer’s ‘cancellation’ reveals

New York Recently a story about my father, the writer Norman Mailer, getting ‘cancelled’ tore across the internet. What started the hoopla was Random House, Mailer’s long-standing publisher, suggesting that his estate bring a proposal for a book. The book was to contain excerpts from several of his political writings and interviews in which he presciently laid out the fragility of democracy. The collection was intended to honour his centenary next year. Random House received the proposal favourably, but then weeks later declined to publish it. The reasons are hearsay. One suggestion is that there were objections by junior executives to the use of the word ‘negro’ in Mailer’s essay

Nigel Jones

Robert Harris on Boris Johnson, cancel culture and rehabilitating Chamberlain

Robert Harris has long been on a one-man crusade to reverse history’s negative verdict on the architect of appeasement. He argues that it was Neville Chamberlain’s duty to go the extra mile for peace and give Britain the moral authority to fight Hitler in the second world war. ‘There seems to be a general feeling that he couldn’t have done much else. He bought us precious time.’ Now the appearance of an acclaimed Anglo-German Netflix film Munich — The Edge of War, starring Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain, and based on Harris’s 2017 novel Munich, gives him the chance to bring his quixotic campaign to a mass audience. Born in 1957

Wednesday

Ed West

The mind virus killing academia

We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that rare distinction of inspiring a whole discipline in the form of evolutionary psychology. The great sense of loss did not seem to be shared by Scientific American, however, which soon afterwards put out a piece reflecting on the ‘complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas’. Among the ‘problematic’ aspects of Wilson’s work, the author argued, was the ‘descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies’. This was ‘a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued’ because ‘context matters’. Scientific American is not Teen

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter ban is nothing to celebrate

Marjorie Taylor Greene is nuttier than M&M World. Not your garden-variety conservative, or even a conservative at all, but a conspiracy theorist who rode these febrile times into a seat in Congress. She describes American Airlines Flight 77 as ‘the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon’ on 9/11, remarking that ‘it’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon’. She suspects the 2018 California wildfires were started by a Rothschild-funded ‘laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth’ in order to help Democrats build a high-speed rail project. Her Facebook account has liked a post proposing ‘a bullet to the head’ for Nancy Pelosi.

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Why I love to be hated

I’ve never been keen on the idea of popularity. Courting disapproval has been a large part of my career and I find it bracing, like an early dip in a cold sea. I remember back in 2003 feeling put out because the Most Hated People In Britain list featured me at a mere 85, sandwiched between Damien Hirst and Richard Branson. So imagine my excitement this week on reading that the alleged comedian Stewart Lee had dispatched me into his New Year Pedal Bin, a list of his least-favourite people, alongside such chucklesome types as Ricky Gervais, John Cleese, Graham Linehan, Maureen Lipman and Dave Chappelle. I’ve always fancied myself

Wednesday

Steven Barrett

The Colston verdict is the triumph of values, not law

The verdict is in on the case of the Colston statue in Bristol. Not guilty. Every one of the accused is innocent. And I mean that: everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If found not guilty, they must — at all times — have retained their innocence. But something feels wrong. Eminent lawyers have described the verdict as both absurd and perverse. In the UK we ‘relate’ to law. We aren’t taught it in schools. Our parents, teachers, instead introduce it to us by osmosis. We have a feel for it, a grasp of it. We might have felt we knew what criminal damage was, and we might have felt that

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The forgotten story of the pioneering surgeon who healed disfigured airmen

‘You’re inside an incinerator. The cockpit is on fire. You are burning. You can see bits of your body melting off. And you are struggling to get out.’ This is Andrew Doyle, the creator of Titania McGrath, describing to me the experience of an RAF pilot trying to escape from a stricken plane during the second world war. He explains that the injured airmen were treated by a New Zealand surgeon, Archibald McIndoe, who developed new methods for repairing skin damage at a specialist burns unit in the 1940s. And this is the subject that Doyle has chosen for a new musical. It may seem an odd departure for the

Saturday

Pratinav Anil

The rise of Indian cancel culture

In 1975, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended democracy. The so-called ‘Emergency’ was largely of her own making, giving her the power to rule by decree. Hundreds of prominent writers and journalists, not to mention opposition leaders, were bundled off to jail. Remarkably, that was all it took for the rest to fall in line. Newspapers stopped printing stories that offended their ruler’s sensibilities. Shivarama Karanth, one of the doyens of the modern Indian novel, took off to ‘compose ballets with lilting music’ in the Canarese countryside. The Illustrated Weekly of India, meanwhile, began running acrostic love letters spelling the name of the premier’s balding, bovine son. How did the