Is free speech really so difficult to understand?

A recent discussion on “The News Agents” podcast demonstrates the widespread ignorance of this most fundamental of principles.

Free speech is a global and historical aberration. We are immensely privileged to live in a society in which our liberty is still valued. But, as the old saying has it, “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, and so the case for free speech must be restated in each successive generation.

This is a point that appears to have escaped many in the media and political class. I have written previously on this Substack about our government’s flippant attitude towards free speech, but those who know anything about the recent history of the British left will not find it all that surprising. It is quite a different matter to see journalists display such brazen ignorance on the subject.

Enter The News Agents. This podcast by three exiles from the BBC – Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall – has somehow managed to showcase all that is wrong with the very middle-class leftist commentariat, what Orwell called the “anti-Blimps”. A short clip from their latest episode went viral this week, but for all the wrong reasons.

It features these three seasoned broadcasters blithely demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of free speech. They appear never to have heard any of the key arguments in this debate, which makes it all the more remarkable that they would spend so much time talking about it. As such, it is a useful snapshot of just how much work still remains to be done if we wish to safeguard freedom of expression.

Let’s go through this point by point…