The Left Is Clearly a Greater Threat To Free Speech

Toby Young
Toby Young is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Sceptic and the general secretary of the Free Speech Union and an associate editor of the Spectator, where he has written a weekly column for more than 20 years.

On Thursday, I took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union. The motion was: “This House believes the right is today’s greatest threat to free expression.” Below is the speech against the motion I intended to give – and, for the most part, did give, although I was slightly derailed by having to deal with about half-a-dozen interventions from the floor, as well as respond to the points made by previous speakers. Also on my side were Professor Douglas Headley and Professor Eric Heinze. On the other side were two student speakers and Dr Steven Thrasher, an American academic and journalist. I thought our side had the better arguments, but – predictably – we were defeated by 95 votes to 65.

The motion before us tonight is that the right-wing is today’s greatest threat to free expression. I want to begin with an obvious but rather important question: what geographical area are we actually talking about?

If the answer is the entire world, and the proposition wishes to cite present-day America as its trump card, as it were — evidence, apparently, that the right poses a greater menace to free speech than the left — then I see your America, and I raise you China, North Korea and Cuba.

But if we confine ourselves to Britain, the evidence that the left poses a greater threat to free speech than the right is pretty overwhelming.

Let’s start with some data. A YouGov/Policy Exchange poll in 2020 found that right-leaning academics are significantly more likely to self-censor than their left-leaning colleagues. Think about what that means. In the institutions supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of truth, scholars with conservative views are afraid to say what they think.

And it’s not just universities.

A 2025 survey for Freedom in the Arts found that 84 per cent of respondents said they “never, rarely, or only sometimes” feel free to publicly voice their opinions – and 78 per cent agreed that people working in the arts wouldn’t dare own up to right-of-centre political views. The taboo topics are well known: gender identity, race, immigration, DEI, the Israel-Palestine conflict. These are not subjects on which the right has imposed silence. These are subjects on which the left has made honest disagreement professionally suicidal.

A More in Common survey in 2023 found that people with socially conservative views are far more likely to self-censor than those with socially liberal views. Among those who believe immigration has been bad for the country – a view held by a significant minority of the British public – 33 per cent report self-censoring, compared to just 10 per cent of those who take the opposite view. An earlier poll found that 76 per cent of Britons believe there is “pressure to speak a certain way” about immigration. That pressure is not coming from the right.

What about Cambridge? I’ll give four examples of Cambridge academics being cancelled for expressing right-of-centre views, and mention one attempt to cancel a student group which has, happily, so far failed.

And I issue this challenge to the other side: produce one example – just one – of an academic at Cambridge being cancelled for expressing left-of-centre views.

My first example is Dr Noah Carl.

In 2019, an open letter signed by more than 1,400 academics and students demanded that St Edmund’s College sack Dr Carl, a young research scholar, for wrongthink. He was accused of being “ethically suspect” and of producing “racist pseudoscience”. His sin was to have published a paper showing a correlation between public hostility towards different immigrant groups and those groups’ propensity to commit violent crimes. It was a piece of empirical research and it showed that those groups the public is most suspicious of – Turks, Romanians, Nigerians – are among the most likely to commit violent crimes, whereas those they’re most well-disposed to – Canadians, Australians – are among the least likely. The critics didn’t take issue with Carl’s methodology. It was his findings they objected to. Even if this was true, it shouldn’t be said out loud.

St Edmund’s held two inquiries. The first, conducted by a senior judge, completely exonerated Dr Carl. The second, an internal investigation, declared his position “untenable” and forced him out.

My second example is Dr Jordan Peterson.

In 2018, he was offered a Visiting Fellowship by the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity. Three months later, the invitation was rescinded. Peterson’s offence? He had been photographed at a public event with his arm around a man wearing a T-shirt saying: “I’m a proud Islamophobe.” The vice-chancellor welcomed the cancellation because Cambridge is “an inclusive environment” and inviting him in the first place was “antithetical to Cambridge’s value”. The students’ union agreed, noting that Peterson’s views were “not representative of the student body”.

God forbid students should have to encounter views they don’t agree with. At a university! Whatever next?

Had the same standard been applied to earlier generations of Cambridge scholars, what would have become of Charles Darwin? Would he have been hounded out for questioning the account of the origins of man in the Book of Genesis? What about John Maynard Keynes? No-platformed for casting doubt on neo-classical economics? As for Watson and Crick, no doubt an ‘open letter’ would have been circulated denouncing them as ‘eugenicists’.

My third example is Dr David Starkey.

In 2020, at the height of the BLM imbroglio, he gave an interview with Darren Grimes in which he said: “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived.”

He later apologised, but by then the die was cast. He lost nine positions, including his Honorary Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College, his publishing deal, and a string of academic honours.

Contrast his fate with that of Dr Priya Gopal, who around the same time tweeted: “White lives don’t matter… as white lives.” Did she receive similar treatment? On the contrary, Cambridge issued the following statement: “The university defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial.” A few months later, she was promoted to a full professorship.

My fourth example is Dr Nathan Cofnas, another early research scholar, cancelled for a blog post in which he too supposedly engaged in “racist pseudoscience”. More than 1,200 people signed a petition demanding his dismissal. The university vice-chancellor and the master of Emma initially defended his right to freedom of expression, only for the master to change his mind and ask a committee to investigate him. This kangaroo court concluded that his blog post “could reasonably be construed as amounting to a rejection of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies”. Heresy, in other words. Even though the Faculty of Philosophy exonerated Cofnas, concluding the post was an acceptable expression of academic freedom, he was dismissed as a College Research Associate by Emma.

I think the evidence is pretty conclusive that in Cambridge, as in Britain as a whole, the left poses a greater threat to free expression than the right.

But I want to end on a more hopeful note. The Cambridge University Women’s Society (CUWS) was recently set up by three gender-critical feminist students. Gender-critical views are, as everyone in this room will know, routinely labelled ‘right-wing’ – a rhetorical manoeuvre designed to make them easier to suppress. When CUWS was established, it was immediately condemned by the Labour Club, the Left Society, and every LGBT group on campus. A petition was launched demanding the university ban it. The founders were smeared as violent, bigoted fascists. At the society’s inaugural meeting, the windows had to be covered lest the protestors outside identify the heretics within.

But here is the good news. Both the students’ union and the university have now registered the society – the SU noting, somewhat grudgingly, that it was legally obliged to do so despite the fact that CUWS “contradicts” its ethos.

I’m happy to say that the CUWS is part-funded by the Mactaggart Programme, a fund set up by the Free Speech Union, funded by the Ian Mactaggart Foundation, which gives grants to students and student societies promoting free speech – and if any students here would like to apply for a grant for their society, they can do so at grantapplications@freespeechunion.org.

The evidence from Cambridge, and from Britain as a whole, points in one direction. It is the left – not the right – that poses the greater threat to free expression today. Don’t be gaslit by this motion. Stick to the facts and vote no.

This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.