Cancel culture is having a “chilling effect” on free speech, Baroness Claire Fox has warned.
The author and politician described the growing clampdown on dissenting voices as “censorious.”
In March, the peer was uninvited from taking part in a student debate at Royal Holloway, University of London after accusations she was transphobic for reposting a joke by comedian Ricky Gervais.
She had been due to talk at the student event about the importance of debate, and was set to touch upon cancel culture.
However, a students union backlash led to Fox being pulled from the event, despite being previously cleared as a suitable speaker by the university authorities.
“As soon as the debating society put up the posters announcing that I'd been given a clean bill of health, certain student societies objected and they objected on the basis that I was transphobic, which, of course, I’m not,” Fox said.
“And they used as evidence some of my tweets, one of which was [a retweet of a] Ricky Gervais clip. I felt almost insulted that they'd cancelled me for something that I retweeted rather than one of my brilliant, brilliant speeches I’ve given over the years.
‘Too Much Like Hard Work’
Fox said the debating society “panicked” and pulled the peer from the event.“And consequently, people misunderstand cancel culture because it wasn’t that I was cancelled, what was actually cancelled was the freedom for a students society to decide who they wanted to listen to,” Fox said.
The baroness said she has been targeted in a similar campaign over a planned speech at an upcoming literary festival
“I’m going to go and speak at the Swindon Literary Festival next Friday. There’s been a newspaper campaign to get me cancelled saying they shouldn’t have invited me.
“And people, you know, writing in saying I’ve got vile views, why has that woman been invited to the city, it’s a waste of taxpayers money.
“As it happens, the organisers of the festival have just said, well, we have lots of people speaking, she wrote a book called ‘I Find That Offensive,’ we’ve asked her to come and speak about it, end of.”
The author said the real impact of clamping down on dissenting voicing reaches far beyond the individual.
“If I get invited on to TV with any questions before I’ve even done the programme, there’s the kind of huge pile on on social media, and the pile on is usually aimed at the presenter of the programme or the producer of the programme saying why have you invited this woman on?
“And then people say, ‘I am not inviting her on again, it’s too much like hard work,’ right?
“You get a chilling effect beyond the individual and I think that is very much the way cancel culture works.”
The politician said she fears that cancel culture could be fuelling self-censorship, something she described as “one of the biggest challenges we have.”
She said: “If you were a gender-critical, young woman at Royal Holloway, it wasn’t that you were deprived of hearing me, well, you could probably live with that.
“But what is the lesson you learned from that really unpleasant incident that’s gone on and bullying and there’s been a lot of controversy?
‘Tyrannical’
Speaking about social media abuse, Fox said it showed her a “side of morality and citizens” that she didn’t like to see.“But I also have to remember that there’s a converse argument to this which is that social media has also created huge communities and people in solidarity,” she said.
“And for every pile on there’s also an opportunity, in a democratic sense, of people to have a voice, who want to speak out to find each other.”
Fox, who founded the Academy of Ideas debating organisation, also spoke about the “tyrannical” atmosphere created by opinions during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
“We did have access to other opinions, because we had the internet we were able to join virtual communities,” she told the programme.
“And so people started to ask questions: ‘Is it right that we close down all civil liberties in order to deal with a virus? How serious is this virus? Is it affecting everybody?’
“And as soon as people started asking those questions, they were demonised and delegitimised.
“And what that did was it created a tyrannical atmosphere where you could not investigate the society that you were living in and what Parliament was doing, what politicians were doing, but also what the scientific dissenters were saying to people that you might want to explore all things.”
