Mick Hartley

Jonny Best is a silent film pianist. A few years back he signed a letter in support of JK Rowling….

I had been accompanying silent films at the BFI Southbank cinemas for a year or so when the Rowling support letter was published. A day or two later, I saw there’d been a few tweets to the BFI mentioning me and demanding to know why a “transphobe” was working on the Southbank. I didn’t think too much of it, and I was looking forward to my next BFI show — the great MGM silent, The Wind, starring Lillian Gish. Covid put paid to that and, like many musicians, I was out of work for the best part of two years.

When BFI Southbank reopened, something had changed. Emails enquiring about work went unanswered. As I persisted, excuses started arriving — my emails had gone into the security vault. The cinemas are being renovated. Maybe next year? My contacts at the BFI are nice people, so I believed them. Over the next couple of years, as I saw every other pianist get gigs, it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t going to get booked again.

Suspecting you’ve been blacklisted is one thing; knowing for certain is another. Figuring it out involves piecing together fragments.

A few days after Rowling published her essay, the chief executive of the BFI, Ben Roberts, and the BFI festivals director, Tricia Tuttle, tweeted what they called “a note to our trans and non-binary friends”. They did not mention Rowling, but their meaning could not have been clearer:

Trans and non-binary members of our BFI communities … have come under renewed attack in this last week … with major cultural figures continuing to share thoroughly discredited anti-trans rhetoric as pseudo-concerns about the welfare of children and of cisgender women.

The tweet was deleted a few days later.

As I began to suspect I’d been blacklisted, I remembered the two-year-old tweet and re-read it. It epitomises the extreme identity politics that is suffocating the arts today with its performative kindness towards its preferred, sanctified minorities and the ruthless dispatching of dissenters. Here are two senior leaders at the BFI — a public institution — behaving with unconscionable cruelty towards Rowling, whilst publicly signalling their affinity with this political movement….

When an organisation becomes captured by this kind of politics, blacklisting is just one of the ways in which the political monoculture is protected. Dissenting employees who are already on the inside are coerced into silence, whilst those with approved politics can speak freely, happily bringing their politics into the workplace. This dynamic is widely reported by staff inside cultural organisations.

Those who are not silent risk punishment, either internally through the weaponisation of complaint and disciplinary procedures, or externally by the online mob. Silencing dissent is the proximate aim, but the larger goal is to foster a culture in which nobody but the favoured express themselves freely in the first place….

Blacklisting is usually done quietly and behind closed doors. In my case, BFI management instructed curation and programming staff not to book me and not to tell me why. As these staff were people with whom I had good relationships, this was awkward for them. They were expected to lie to me — and they did.

Whilst the most energetic blacklisting is done by those who are driven by their politics and determined to exclude dissenters, much of it is done by those who just want a quiet life. They’re not zealots — they’re just trying to do their work without being derailed themselves by this punishing political culture….

I first expressed dissent from the dogma of gender identity ideology in 2018. Since then, I’ve been thrown off academic conferences, dragged through a malicious disciplinary process by my university, had activists and former colleagues campaigning to prevent me working, and I’m now aware of multiple instances of blacklisting.

But I’ve had it easy compared to the experiences of women such as Jenny Lindsay, who laid out the grim details of her own punishment within the Scottish poetry community in her essay “Anatomy of a Hounding”. If you’re wondering just how bad it can get, read her account.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observed in her Reith Lecture a few years ago, this is an authoritarian movement which does not recognise its own authoritarianism. More than that, it is a movement which performs unctuous demonstrations of pretend love to its favoured minorities whilst its most gleaming-eyed true believers mete out dehumanising cruelty elsewhere. And it is a movement on the march, every year closer to a culture in which its politics is supreme, and everyone else is just afraid enough to be silent.