York Union Review: Brendan O’Neill in free speech showdown

There exists very real and very damaging structural oppression against marginalised groups. Gay and transgender people and women are the subjects of hate crimes or glass ceilings that prevent them from living free and safe lives. The cause? A culture of intolerance perpetuated by unchallenged stigmas and prejudices. Fortunately, however, we have the power to make change happen. Through democratic decision-making in institutions such as students’ unions and our local communities we can eradicate hatred, break down barriers and create a genuinely free and equal society…

You couldn’t make this bollocks up.

Or at least not according to the free speech absolutist Brendan O’Neill. According to O’Neill “structural oppression is bullshit” and “people should have the freedom to be racist.” Bold stuff. But what do the students who attended the York Union’s polarising debate on free speech on Tuesday night make of it all?

Watching the audience trickle into the auditorium at 6:30pm was a bit like that scene in Mean Girls where the protagonist is introduced to all the high school cliques in the lunch hall. “There’s The Yorker, there’s Zahir, I think those are the Tories,” my friend sitting next to me exclaimed. It seemed like the Union had managed to attract all the student politicos and budding media hacks to one room (I couldn’t spot the Liberal Democrats but I think he’s on holiday).

In his opening speech O’Neill addressed the motion ‘This House Believes Freedom of Expression is Under Threat at British Universities’ very matter-of-factly. He set up his premise that if there is any instance where the endorsement of any idea is met with punishment in any way on campus then freedom of expression has been violated. He then went through examples one-by-one of instances when this has happened in British universities. The shocking example of members of the LSE rugby club being forced to hold placards in the street declaring their repentance after the club was found distributing a flyer with vulgar sexist jokes on it stuck the most.

His opponent, Tom Cutterham, a postdoctoral history researcher at Oxford, hit back, declaring that free speech “is more complicated than that” and that the impact of social structures on minorities should not be ignored in the debate. The problem was that O’Neill’s simple and effective opening speech made the issue not seem more complicated than that at all.

The debate continued in this vein with O’Neill invariably reiterating that any censorship is bad and that structural oppression doesn’t exist anymore. Cutterham for his part tried to turn O’Neill’s argument on its head by insisting that what he called “genuine free speech” is only possible when democratic institutions tear down structural disadvantages.

The debate almost began to feel like a broken record half an hour in. Cutterham would quote hate crime statistics and O’Neill would respond by making a distinction between the speaker who inspired a crime and the person who actually committed it. Cutterham would deny this distinction again, citing social structures which allow the circumstances for violent hate crime to occur to arise.

It was obvious that the main cause of contention between the two speakers was based on differing views on the human condition. O’Neill firmly held to the conservative-libertarian view that individuals were ultimately responsible for their beliefs and actions whereas Cutterham was committed to the quasi-Marxist position that social structures determined what people thought and did. The two never directly addressed this, which was clearly the root cause of why they disagreed on free speech in particular.

Both parties were to blame for the debate remaining superficial. O’Neill made what was effectively the same speech multiple times which boiled down to “you couldn’t make this bollocks up” (his words not mine) and Cutterham, the academic, didn’t explicitly identify the aforementioned deeper divide. Perhaps he didn’t want to call himself a Marxist. There were probably a few in the room though. Everyone else turned up after all. Even UKIP was there. I didn’t even know they had a youth wing.

There was a third speaker in the debate too but he barely registered. Haydar Zaki from the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank, could simply have been replaced by someone reading out the organisation’s “About Us” page on their website. It would have been much cheaper for the Union too. His answer to every question was to encourage more debates. How to handle controversial speakers? More debates. How to balance free speech and student safety? More debates. Does the classical economic model still hold up despite the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy? More debates. If God exists, why do bad things happen to good people? More debates. Did no one tell him he was at a debate?

Despite the intellectual superficiality of some of the debate and the robotic repetitiveness of many of the responses on both sides it was a genuinely enjoyable event and there were some truly great moments. Early on in the debate, Ashley Reed, a transgender student, gave an impassioned account of the harassment she receives on social media. Later on, another member of the audience pointed out to Cutterham that democratic institutions can impose sanctions on minorities which is exactly what Cutterham purports they are designed not to do. O’Neill made great capital out of this moment naming specific examples of ways in which Cutterham’s solution can completely backfire. Just before closing statements this was devastating. Zaki advocated more debates.

It was hard to gauge the general sentiment of the audience, probably partly because everyone was sitting with their tribe. There wasn’t much spontaneous clapping either. O’Neill got a few laughs here and there though, which cannot be said for Cutterham (or Zaki for that matter). I recall at least one distinct “hear, hear” – notably not from the Tory bloc. Let it not be said however, that the debate was not vastly superior to anything the YUSU hustings had to offer nor that it wasn’t a great joy in its own right. Good show.