We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

by Nesrine Malik

Both in the US and the UK, ‘no-platforming’ is regarded by both those on the right and the left as an epidemic. In 2015, the libertarian website Spiked published a Free Speech University Ranking. The only conclusion to be drawn from the data it harvested was that there was a plague of free speech suppression. This conclusion was a result of massaging the data. Times Higher Education (THE) called it ‘misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential’. Upon closer analysis the THE found that: ‘about 85 per cent to 90 per cent of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policies and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law. Spiked offers no evidence that these policies have ever been applied in a fashion that repressed free speech, or that they have generated discontent among staff, students or the wider public.’ This did not stop the Spiked research from being widely quoted. The Telegraph newspaper republished the results without question, as well as running an op-ed entitled ‘The poshos pushing campus censorship’ which was written by the ‘neutral’ pen of Spiked assistant editor Tom Slater. ‘You’d have to have been living under a rock’ he writes, ‘not to know that British universities have in recent years turned into a cross between Stalinist Russia and a soft-play area.’ During a British parliamentary select committee looking into free speech issues in higher education, three of the four witnesses ...