Pre-Cancel Culture and the Silenced Majority

It’s almost impossible for someone from an under-privileged background to reach the ‘elite’ and acquire a platform. This is the real ‘cancel culture’ scandal, argues Sam Bright

“The Stepford Students”, they were labelled by the Spectator magazine in 2014. According to the periodical, once edited by Boris Johnson, leftie university undergraduates and high-minded student unions were rabidly ‘no platforming’ the people they disagreed with – mainly conservatives of various persuasions.

These allegations of McCarthy-style censorship from students and the left, that have punctured politics at regular intervals ever since, are to a large extent hyperbolic.

It’s true that right-wing speakers have faced protests on campus and have even been sidelined by the media. The former Breitbart editor and alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, is now a pariah – banned from Twitter and unwelcome on campuses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Likewise, Katie Hopkins’ descent into far-right trolldom has been accompanied by her political marginalisation. Formerly a columnist for The Sun, Hopkins must now be content with lurking around obscure social media platforms, in search of her next xenophobic grift.

The debate involves endless navel-gazing from very prominent people about their own prominence.

Yet it can hardly be argued, from a free speech perspective, that Hopkins and Yiannopoulos have been badly treated. Their views are so incendiary that, when given a platform, they actively obstruct the freedoms of others. Hopkins, for example, once wrote that she would “use gunships” against migrants crossing the channel to Dover, while Yiannopoulos penned the headline: ‘Would you rather your kids had feminism or cancer?’

Others who claim to have been ‘cancelled’ – right-wing commentator Toby Young, for example, who lost a Government job in 2018 after people protested his history of sexism and sympathy towards eugenics – have not really been cancelled in any meaningful way. Young has a sizeable Twitter following, writes regularly for prominent publications and recently set up a “trade union” to ostensibly defend free speech, whose trustees include a number of high-profile journalists and academics.

This juxtaposition was epitomised last week by an online fracas between Guardian columnist Owen Jones and the actor Laurence Fox, who claims to have been cancelled following a BBC Question Time appearance during which he accused Prince Harry’s wife Meghan Markle of playing the “racism card”.

Jones claimed that the term “cancel culture” is meaningless, since so many allegedly “cancelled” individuals complain about their apparent ostracism in the country’s leading newspapers. In response, Fox suggested that this is evidence people are now “refusing” to be cancelled. Whatever that means.

This just serves to demonstrate the absurdity of the debate, not least because it involves endless navel-gazing from very prominent people about their own prominence. And, in the process of engaging in this feud, they invariably increase their own profile, regardless of the stance they take (as Fox himself acknowledges).

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The real ‘cancel culture’ exists beyond the cocktail party wars of the political establishment. The fact is you have to hold a position of power to be cancelled; positions that are invariably, predominantly, held by people from privileged backgrounds.

Indeed, both Jones and Fox are themselves representative of Britain’s class system in different ways.

Though Jones was born in Sheffield, brought up in Stockport and didn’t have a particularly privileged upbringing, he was educated at Oxford, and began his career as a parliamentary researcher for future Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Fox, meanwhile, is from a more traditionally elite background. He was born into a theatrical family and was educated at Harrow School – one of the country’s top private institutions.

It takes a large amount of privilege to be cancelled. The upper reaches of academia, journalism, politics and business are all dominated by white, privately educated, men. The vast majority of people outside this system, who are unfamiliar with the gowns of Eton and the spires of Oxford, are effectively pre-cancelled. Their opinions can’t be shut down, because they’re simply not heard in the first place.