Things have come to a pretty pass when the secretary of state for education has to threaten a new law to guarantee freedom of speech in universities.

Our universities, once the bastions of free speech, have been taken over by left-wing professors and immature students whose mantra seems to be that ‘freedom of speech’ should only apply to those who agree with them.

The principle of freedom of speech was encapsulated by the English writer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall (who wrote under the pseudonym of S.G. Tallentyre), who penned in her seminal work The Friends of Voltaire, first published in 1906, “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”.

Someone needs to remind the narrow-minded snowflakes who masquerade as students at our institutions of higher education that their puerile attempts to gag those whose beliefs do not coincide with their own are the basic building blocks on which the most repressive regimes were and are founded.

Robert Readman

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