"This public intellectual has no right to speak!"

Friday June 10, 2011

Patrick Hayes witnesses a debate on arts funding with AC Grayling going up in a puff of smoke when hijacked by anti-cuts protesters

The mischievous, juvenile mood was evident as soon as you entered the room. The average age of the 100 strong audience packed into The Gallery at Foyles’ bookshop was a good decade lower than it would usually have been. But it seemed even lower still – many were acting in a way that would have embarrassed a twelve year old. People were tittering and giggling to one another and looking around naughtily. When the villain of the piece walked out to take his seat, many hissed at him. One shouted her indignation that there were just ‘four white men’ on the panel and that it was unrepresentative.

A few days before, no-one would have imagined that a discussion among some ageing academics and artists about cuts in the arts was going to be the hot ticket in London one summer evening. Even the presence of renowned philosopher and public intellectual A C Grayling on the panel wouldn’t have been a guaranteed draw.

But the announcement that Grayling, alongside a group of other celebrity academics, was to set up a new private university in London – called the New College for the Humanities – charging £18,000 a year, changed all that. Within minutes, in the eyes of many student and left-wing activists, Grayling went from being a deeply respected public intellectual to public enemy number one. Twitter and Facebook were ablaze with messages about his ‘betrayal’, his ‘selling out’ and his ‘odious’ actions.

Grayling’s first public appearance since the announcement was at Foyles on Charing Cross road on Tuesday, discussing cuts with a panel of academics and artists. Keen to seize upon the earliest possible opportunity to express their contempt for him, word spread rapidly among radical student groups that the event would be picketed. On Twitter, Foyles reported a ‘sudden surge of interest’ in the event, which promptly sold out.

While the other panellists spoke, discussing how the cuts would affect the theatre and the arts, many in the audience were restless, tweeting on their iPhones and Blackberries and whispering to one another, waiting for Grayling to speak. Ten minutes in, the chair turned the discussion to cuts in higher education and the humanities and Grayling was finally asked to comment.

And then they pounced.

Before Grayling got a single word out, a young man piped up: “you have no right to speak on this issue!”

Others started shouting and the activists in the room erupted with chortles and claps.

Grayling began: “Rather like the arts, education and higher education is a soft target for the cuts, so when governments…”

“And for venture capitalists!” a student interjected crudely.

Another chirped up: “which you stand to profit from….”

“Cuts suit your pocket don’t they?” shouted another.

A couple of audience members, who had been there genuinely to debate the issue of cuts in the arts, got up and left. The interventions and sniggering continued throughout, getting worse during the audience questions, when activist after activist got up on their soapboxes in order to pour bile over Grayling.

This culminated when a young man with a particularly self-righteous voice said that he didn’t have a question for Grayling, the ‘pantomime villain’, but rather for the other two speakers, award-winning historian and broadcaster Christopher Frayling, and philosopher and theatre director-cum-playwright Mick Gordon.

“I’d like to ask you two, not our ‘villain’, who has quite clearly lost all moral authority to speak, that if this is not simply the case of the narcissism of small differences, will you not take this opportunity to DENOUNCE this man?”

If you don’t denounce Grayling like a heretic, the logic seemed to go, you’re as bad as him and as equally deserving of our contempt. In a desperate attempt to steer the debate back to the issue at hand – on cuts in the arts – and away from the establishment of his university, Grayling implored the activists to reserve their questions for him until afterwards, when he would happily stay around and discuss their issues.

This he was fully prepared to do, until an anti-cuts activist set off a flare, which filled the room with thick red smoke, leading to a chaotic evacuation of the building and the abrupt end to any possibility of debate on the issue.

It began as a pantomime, turned into something resembling a show trial and by the end any possibility of discussion was snubbed out completely by self-righteous, indignant, so-called ‘radicals’. And the self-congratulatory response afterwards was telling, with one self-styled ‘political agitator’ on Twitter defending the action, arguing: “A campaign of protest and disruption, rather than genteel debate [is] needed at this point.”

At this point? Grayling’s new university had only been announced a matter of days beforehand. Few details about it had been announced and this was the first real opportunity to have any kind of public debate, and the hysterical ‘radical’ campaigners did everything to shut it down. So convinced were the activists that they were in the right, many seemed to believe Grayling shouldn’t even be allowed to speak to plead his case. Further protests are planned against Grayling and others involved in the university, such as humanist Richard Dawkins.

Regardless of what you think of Grayling’s new university, this deeply intolerant closing-down of debate by pompous, self-righteous individuals marks a worrying new stage in the protest movement against the cuts. This censorious turn is an anathema to liberty and should be opposed by anyone who believes in a free society and open debate.

Patrick Hayes works at the Institute of Ideasand is a reporter for the online magazine spiked. Visit his personal website here.

Photo courtesy Patrick Hayes