How so-called liberals have stifled free speech and become the very censors they should abhor



There is an old tradition of newspapers publishing fanciful or outrageous items on April Fool’s Day and inviting readers to spot them.



The trouble is that nowadays there are unbelievable stories in almost every issue which would qualify. Amazingly — and depressingly — they are true.



Yesterday’s Mail reported that a health watchdog has had its funding withdrawn by Wiltshire Council after its chairwoman used the phrase ‘jungle drums’ to describe gossip.

Spreading of gossip: The harmless use of the phrase 'jungle drums' was assumed to be a racist expression by zealots

Anna Farquhar had noted that talk about NHS changes was spreading within the health service, remarking: ‘You cannot help the jungle drums.’



Sitting as a member of the general ­public in the local scout hut where the meeting took place was Sonia Carr. She objected strongly to the phrase ‘jungle drums’, regarding it as racist.



Mrs Farquhar immediately apologised for any offence caused, but Mrs Carr, a member of the Wiltshire Racial Equality Council, was unsatisfied, and submitted a complaint to Wiltshire Council, which launched a lengthy inquiry.



Six months later the council — which, believe it or not, is Tory — has produced a ten-page report upholding Mrs Carr’s complaint.



Mrs Farquhar and fellow members of her independent watchdog have been banned from council meetings and premises as though they were common criminals rather than people trying to improve their local health service.



The council has also withdrawn funding that covered the group’s administrative costs.



It can’t be true, can it? I’m afraid it is. It may sound like a parody or send-up or an elaborate and not very good joke, but this is a fairly normal event in modern Britain — so relatively unexceptional that most of the media have ­chosen to ignore it.



Time and money has been wasted, and the peace of mind of a decent woman and her group shattered, all because a silly woman and a nincompoop council took offence at the term ‘jungle drums’.



Offended: Sonia Carr objected strongly to the phrase 'jungle drums'

There is, of course, nothing remotely racist about it. In the pre-telegraph age, jungle drums served as a very good method in parts of Africa and elsewhere of communicating messages over a long distance. That’s a fact.



The phrase does not make us think badly of Africans, nor does it diminish them or anyone else in our eyes. It serves as an effective metaphor for the rapid and sometimes mysterious way in which gossip is transmitted.



Though on one level the story is farcical, at a deeper level it is disturbing. One of the greatest threats to all of us in life is ­stupid people who are unaware of their limitations.



They can cause a great deal of damage. When their stupidity receives the backing of the law and the support of one of the institutions of the State — which is what Wiltshire Council is — it assumes a threatening, even sinister quality.

How did supposedly liberal people turn into petty tyrants? I believe that is what Mrs Carr, and many other people who regard themselves as enlightened, have become.



The intellectual history of the past 250 years has been one of increasing freedom of expression in politics, religion and literature. In the past 50 years that ­process has accelerated, so that it seemed there was practically nothing that could not be said or written.

Except when it offended the sensibilities of people who ­proclaim their liberalism but seek to censor others who say things they deem offensive.



Even merely to hold views that diverge from the new orthodoxy on issues such as global warming or religion or traditional morality is to risk at best ridicule, at worst censure and contempt.



In short, the bigots who bear down on dissent have shifted from the Right or the portals of the old Establishment to the liberal Left and the new Establishment.



Of course, not all ­liberals are intolerant, any more than all members of the old Establishment were. But when we consider what we can or cannot say or write, we no longer think of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Lord Chamberlain, but of the politically correct brigade who may declare — as in the case of ­‘jungle drums’ — the mildest and most inoffensive thought out of bounds.

Am I resting too much on the slender shoulders of Sonia Carr and Wiltshire Council? I wish I were.



Yesterday’s Mail also ­carried a story about Dr Hans-Christian Raabe, a Christian GP, who has been fired as a government adviser on drugs for having expressed ‘embarrassing’ views about homosexuality.



‘The law makes it clear that what matters is not the intention of the person who uses the phrase but whether anybody is offended by it’

It turns out that Dr Raabe and several colleagues wrote a ­scientific paper six years ago in which they concluded that there was a ‘disproportionately greater number of homosexuals among paedophiles’.



Now I actually think he may be wrong, but equally I should have thought that his views on homosexuality had very little, if anything, to do with his ­competence to serve as a drugs adviser.



But in the unreasoning, bigoted society in which we live he is simply deemed unsuitable.



Naturally, no one bothers to inquire whether there might be a scintilla of truth in what he wrote about paedophilia. The point is that it offends against what the politically correct crew believe has to be true.



The two cases are admittedly different in several respects but my point is that there is a new liberal tyranny which seeks to shut down debate and dissent.

So-called liberals exhibit the very narrow mindedness they used to abhor, and an absence of that broadness of mind that was once the very essence of liberalism.

One phrase used by John Thomson, deputy leader of Wiltshire Council, particularly struck me. He said: ‘The law makes it clear that what matters is not the intention of the person who uses the phrase but whether anybody is offended by it.’



If this is true, we really are on the path to censorship by the ignorant. Anyone can be offended by anything.

Under some new law, or for all I know under an existing law, the Sonia Carrs of this world may object to the word ‘blackboard’ and, who knows, we may sooner or later be forbidden to order ‘black coffee’.



In literature, Kipling’s Jungle Book will be proscribed on the grounds that it is racist and demeaning. The whole of Kipling will surely have to be banned, along with books by Dickens and the novelist Wilkie Collins that are judged anti-Semitic.



And what about Shakespeare’s Othello? That must be outlawed because it portrays a black man as a ­murderer — implying, in the minds of the very stupid, racial stereotyping.



When journalists wonder whether they too will one day be subject to censorship for expressing unfashionable views, I tend to chuckle to myself.



Racist? The way so-called liberals think, they could end up banning Jungle Book

But who would have dreamt even ten years ago that an upstanding 70-year-old woman, declared by her friends to be untainted by racism, who was trying to serve her community, could be humiliated and stigmatised purely for using the innocuous phrase ‘jungle drums’?



Every day I read or hear some mild remark that offends me. I can always take issue, of course. There is nothing wrong with good old-fashioned ­argument.



But tolerant and broad-minded people do not run off to the law and try to get someone banned.



This kind of inverted ­McCarthyism is the action of bigots and tyrants — of people who want us all to hold their views and who will not tolerate dissent.



The world they are shaping is monochrome and rather frightening. It is the very opposite of what liberalism was supposed to be but, alas, it is what so-called liberalism has become.

