Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch on the Oxford Union/Kathleen Stock debacle:

In seeking to force the Oxford Union to rescind Stock’s invitation, the authoritarians within the OSU [Oxford Students’ Union] have placed her in the same category as the likes of Holocaust denier David Irving and British National Party leader Nick Griffin, both of whom Oxford students tried to No Platform in 2007. Indeed, so demonised has Stock become that the university’s LGBT society has planned a protest rally to coincide with her appearance.

It’s hard not to look at these zealous, flag-waving bullies berating someone like Stock without seeing a hint of the Red Guards. These were the students mobilised by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Their bloody mission was to destroy the ‘Four Olds’ – old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. Thankfully, today’s culture war has so far only cost livelihoods, not lives.

These student zealots are not as radical as they think. The trans-rights movement is far from anti-establishment. It has the backing of international funders and the full-throated support of pharmaceutical companies. And no wonder. In the US in 2021, cosmetic ‘sex-reassignment’ surgeries alone were valued at $1.9 billion, with a predicted compound annual growth rate of 11 per cent from 2022 to 2030.

It would be comforting to think that Oxford students, as super-smart people, might be well placed to question the assumptions of gender ideology. After all, that is what university debating societies are for – to allow bright, idealistic youngsters to voice, interrogate and challenge views and opinions. This process strengthens reasoning and helps untangle facts from feelings. Because of that, these societies have often proven useful training grounds for participation in democratic life. But it seems that many students today are all too happy to abandon the principle of free speech on which these societies were founded.

It would be easy to dismiss this debacle as petty student infighting. But it’s far more important than that. The students now raging at the Oxford Union are threatening one of the few remaining beacons of intellectual freedom in the UK. In doing so, they threaten the liberty of us all.