Brunel became the latest university this week to diminish the standing of free speech as students turned their backs on rent-a-gob Katie Hopkins and then quit the lecture theatre.
Footage uploaded to the Internet showed the incident, which took place on Monday as Hopkins and other panellists debated the future of the welfare state as part of the university’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
You might recall that way back in, er, October the United Nations published a report on Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls.
Two things happened. First much of the media regurgitated its claims without question, and then a few bloggers started pulling apart the report, which was replete with errors, phoney assertions and even a citation that linked to the author’s C Drive.
The whole saga was catalogued by the feminist writer Christina Hoff Sommers, who debunked the stats and slammed the “totalitarian” recommendations of the report.
Left Unity, a fringe left political party, decided over the weekend that it would not run candidates in next year’s elections, but back Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn instead.
Explaining this decision Simon Hardy appeared on the Daily Politics alongside Labour grandee Alan Johnson, with the former home secretary using the opportunity to belittle the fringe party.
https://youtu.be/BZ4LhNJ4Kck
Johnson began by describing Hardy’s spiel as the same “rubbish“ he has heard his whole political life, adding that “this guy despises the Labour party, and he’s got no place in the Labour party.”
Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s sole MP, has put together a spoof social media guide for Labour in the wake of bad online discipline following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the party’s leader.
The advice from the Kipper comes after Labour’s National Executive Committee condemned the “very damaging way in which social media is being used” by the party. It reads as follows:
Image Credit – Douglas Carswell, May 2009 by Steve Punter
It perhaps says something about the differing ambitions of Britain and America that successful standup comedians are awarded quite different prizes either side of the Atlantic.
This side of the pond limeys can expect at best a regular seat on a panel show, the barbs now coming from their colleagues after years of heckling on the comic equivalent of the musicians’ toilet circuit.
