Why cancel culture is the real threat to freedom of speech

Nelson McCausland

Reaction to GB News’ launch was typical of so-called ‘liberals’

New channel: The breakfast show presenters on GB News

July 01 2021 06:00 AM

GB News was launched on June 13 as a British free-to-air television news channel, available on Freeview, Sky, and Virgin Media. Its chairman is the veteran broadcaster Andrew Neill and the presenters come from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Some are experienced broadcasters, such as Simon McCoy, Colin Brazier and Alastair Stewart, while some come from political backgrounds, including former Labour MP Gloria de Piero and former Brexit Party MEP Alex Phillips.

Michelle Dewberry, a former winner of The Apprentice, hosts one of the programmes and the archaeologist and TV presenter Neil Oliver always provides thoughtful insights.

We already have two British “news channels”, with BBC News and Sky News, but GB News is aiming to provide a wider range of views and a broader platform.

That is welcome, because a healthy diet should be a varied diet. Unfortunately, some people do not like that idea and are determined to put the station out of business.

Channels such as GB News rely on advertising income, unlike the BBC which is funded through a compulsory licence fee, and that revenue soon became the target for those who wanted GB News cancelled.

In February, a small, but well-resourced, pressure group called Stop Funding Hate called for advertisers to boycott the station.

That was four months before the station was launched and so they had never seen a single programme, but that did not matter. They were determined to silence it.

It was a good example of prejudice, which is a great time-saver, because it enables you to form an opinion without taking the time to find out the facts.

They portrayed the new station, which they had not even seen, as a purveyor of hate and portrayed themselves as the opponents of hate. They had already targeted newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, but now they had GB News in their sights.

They demanded that commercial companies refuse to advertise on the new station, thereby cutting off advertising income.

The intention was to close it down and they ran a campaign to pressurise companies on the basis that they would not want to be associated with hate.

They are still at it and they tweet out lists of companies that advertise on GB News to encourage their followers to complain to the companies. Their hope must be that these companies will bow to the bullies.

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden MP described the boycott campaign as “worrying” and Julian Knight MP, chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee at Westminster, said, “This is the worst type of cancel culture.”

Unfortunately for Stop Funding Hate, their boycott campaign has drawn attention to their own organisation and this week’s Jewish Chronicle has accused an SFH strategy consultant of “militant prejudice” and an “extreme far-Left worldview” after checking his Twitter account.

It rather bursts the nice, loving, caring image that Stop Funding Hate try to create and may well lead to further scrutiny.

Of course, cancel culture is nothing new and a decade ago Queen’s Festival in Belfast withdrew an invitation to Professor Geoffrey Alderman to take part in a panel discussion because of his pro-Israeli views.

Universities and colleges are a popular battleground for the cancel culture warriors, who prefer to coerce rather than discuss and new examples of this coercion emerge almost every week.

Not so long ago, it was the popular author J K Rowling who became the target of the fanatics when she dissented from the new transgender ideology, which radicals want to turn into an established orthodoxy. She became the victim of a torrent of abuse on Twitter as they tried to silence her.

It’s not just the famous who become targets. Last week, the police in Huddersfield had to pay compensation to a street preacher for wrongful arrest after he was accused of “hate speech”.

Now, with support from the Christian Institute, he has been vindicated and compensated, but his arrest came after he was targeted by a handful of activists.

Those who do not subscribe to every word of the cosy consensus of the liberal elite soon discover how illiberal these so-called “liberals” can be.

They are prepared to bully contrary voices into silence, whether by shutting them down, threatening them on Twitter, getting them sacked, having them banned, organising a boycott, or having them arrested.

It’s the tyranny of a rabid minority and it’s deeply unpleasant and dangerous — a threat to the principle of free speech.

Why cancel culture is the real threat to freedom of speech

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