This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

I enjoy being banned, or demonstrated against, by intolerant students. In some ways, I wish it happened to me more often. So should we worry much about the Policy Exchange report showing that a huge number of today’s students are either against fully free speech, or too easily persuaded to give up on it, on the grounds of ‘sensitivity’?

So far, the problem seems trivial. Many universities still hold to proper free speech. When they don’t, it is usually quite easy to make them look foolish and crabby. It’s even possible to get round it with a bit of ingenuity. I did this once by holding the meeting in the open air.

And it’s not new. The first time it happened to me was at a student conference in Blackpool 20 years ago. Even then, I was still trying to argue against the mad policy of legalising marijuana. Some jack- in-office switched off my microphone and ordered me from the stage because I had been falsely denounced by a screeching group of zealots – who reminded me all too much of my own Trotskyist days in the 1970s. My fellow-speaker and fierce opponent, the convicted drug-smuggler Howard Marks, responded like a proper British gentleman by declaring in his lovely rumbling voice: ‘If he’s going, I’m going too.’

He then put his arm round my shoulder and marched beside me through the protesters. I almost wept. Much as I disagreed with Howard, I ever afterwards regarded him as a fundamentally decent person, however much I differed with him about drugs. He placed liberty of thought and speech above practically every other possession of our civilisation, and instinctively defended it.

So no-platforming can be fun. But I am also frightened by it. Slowly, it is winning. When these mini-censors begin to fan out into the law, the media, the Civil Service, the legal profession and schools, they will be a real threat. Unlike Howard Marks, they have never been taught to value their liberty. They genuinely think their own opinions are so virtuous that they are entitled to silence others. I have read the attacks on me that have been circulated in these seats of learning, and they are enough to make the blood run cold. They look like charge sheets in some revolutionary show trial – a trial which I increasingly fear I may one day face in reality. Someone has usually spent days looking for things that I have said in the past, and then twisted them to give a false impression to the ill-informed.

The people involved clearly think they are doing a good thing. They sincerely feel that I should not be allowed to say the things I say, or write what I have written here. Many of them, I am sure, would like to see me punished for having said them, preferably after a public confession of wrongdoing. Interestingly, many of the passages they have twisted come from some years back, when speech in this country, especially on the sexual revolution, was undoubtedly freer than it is now.

And that scares me too. How much that we can freely say now will be regarded as borderline illegal ten years hence?

And I suspect my opponents do not have any objections to prosecuting people for things which were legal when they did them, but are not now. And when they come hammering on my door, I fear there’ll be no Howard Marks to take the side of liberty.

*******

In a few short words the diaries of the deceased old gossip Kenneth Rose have said far more about David Cameron than his breezeblock of a biography ever will.

‘I am deeply disturbed by the conduct of David Cameron, the PM, who has declared a planning free-for-all in the construction industry, apparently in return for huge donations to the Conservative Party. He is not a true Tory at heart but a spivvy Etonian entrepreneur.’

I think the concreting over of so much of our countryside will be Mr Cameron’s main memorial, remembered with a bitter sense of irrecoverable loss long after all the rest is forgotten.

********

Don't scream, but Olivia HAS got a Left-wing face

My old friend Charles Moore, biographer of Margaret Thatcher, has been in a bit of trouble for saying that the actress Olivia Colman has a Left-wing face. Of course she does. And she has now declared in the Radio Times that she has a Left-wing mind behind it. I once said the same thing about another thespian, Andrea Riseborough, who was hopelessly miscast on TV as the young Mrs Thatcher a few years ago.

You can’t easily explain it but perhaps people like me (who certainly have Right-wing faces) are especially able to tell. It’s one of the reasons why I won’t be watching Colman, left, portray the Queen in the new Netflix series of The Crown. It simply isn’t believable, and all the signs are that this fancy soap opera will once again be seeking to rewrite the past.

At first I thought this habit, of portraying the past through a politically correct and generally radical lens, was mildly annoying. Various aspects of it couldn’t be criticised without risking stupid, false accusations of bigotry. So weird things, way out of their right time and place, which would normally have been mentionable became unmentionable. But now I have begun to think it sinister, another aspect of a fast-accelerating cultural revolution in which almost everything I value in this country is being wiped out of existence and memory. Most of our history is simply not taught to most children, so it is easy to introduce rubbish into their minds.

As George Orwell wrote in words often only partially quoted from 1984: ‘If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” ’

More painfully, he also described his hero, Winston Smith, despairing ‘within twenty years at the most… the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable’ and the new revolutionary rulers could insist that they had improved life ‘because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested…’

That is what comes to mind when I see dramas that portray a Britain that never existed, and when important books that I know well, such as War Of The Worlds, are altered and edited to wipe out all memory that the past was different from now. This is what is going on. It is not as trivial as it looks.

Welby still won't do the right thing

It is a shocking thing to say, but it is true that it is fortunate for the late Field Marshal Lord Bramall, who died last week, that he was falsely accused while he was still alive. Had the attack happened years after his death, as was the case with the comparably great Bishop George Bell of Chichester, the law would not in the end have rescued his reputation.

You can say what you like about the dead, and nothing will happen to you. The accusations of terrible sex crimes made decades after his death against Bishop Bell have been comprehensively shown to be mistaken, to put it charitably.

But some people, most notable among them the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, Justin Welby, continue to refuse to admit they were mistaken when they first accepted them.

He claims sulkily that there’s still a ‘significant cloud’ over Bishop Bell. By behaving in this way, Mr Welby shows he does not properly understand the faith of the church he heads.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down