How could this censorship of such a crucial issue have been allowed to happen? Consider the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who wrote this week that the BBC “has a duty to moderate our national conversation”. George Orwell would have loved that slippery use of “moderate”. Or “suppress”, as it’s also known. For Alibhai-Brown, and the impeccably liberal folk who run the BBC, you are free to express any view, so long as it’s the same as theirs. If you’re a lady in Sheffield who is fed up with Roma peeing in her petunias, you can shut up, you nasty old bigot.