SJXT

@VladVexler This is very well put. An Isaiah Berlin reader. Glad I found your feed through it.

For Western civilisation not to implode politically, we need to return to the idea that your views about politics, society, and art are not your identity. Your views don’t define who you are. They inform who you are. But they do so at the level of your character, not your identity. Unlike identity, character can evolve. Being asked to give up your identity is an attack on you, being asked to evolve your character is not. This has a completely surreal consequence: everyone wants to have an opinion on everything. If opinions are identity, then having an opinion on everything is an essential way of locating yourself in the world. This turns human conversation into an absurd “I’ll show you mine, and you can show me yours” ritual. A ritual of self-expression takes the place of engaging with the world and engaging with others, and precludes growth.

@SexMattersOrg @OldSqChambers @TheLawyermag Totally deserved. The arguments were a model of clarity. No hedging with alternatives. Just 'there is only one point here, and this is what it is. This is the answer.' From a professional perspective, so admirable. I am sure it swung the case.

Congratulations to Ben Cooper KC of @OldSqChambers for winning the Barrister of the year award from @TheLawyermag for his role in representing Sex Matters in the landmark Supreme Court case For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers. The Supreme Court specifically thanked Cooper in the judgment for his written and oral submissions on behalf of Sex Matters, “which gave focus and structure to the argument that ‘sex’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ should be given a biological meaning”. 🔗 thelawyer.com/the-lawyer-awa…

@JChimirie66677 @ppainsworth Tks. I get the public think otherwise but I think experience in this case is a strong advantage. Especially failure, which is often the best teacher. You are not so easily fooled/bought off. A bit like Thatcher having experienced the Barber Boom.

Phil, that's the pattern and it repeats with every party that approaches power. May proposed leaving the ECHR as Home Secretary, then discovered as Prime Minister that the permanent state, the legal establishment and her own backbenches made it politically impossible. Cameron promised a British Bill of Rights for years and never delivered it. The Conservatives included ECHR withdrawal in various forms in multiple manifestos and found reasons not to proceed each time. The grandees you mention are part of it, but they're a symptom rather than the cause. The deeper problem is that any incoming government, Conservative, Reform or otherwise, inherits the same civil service, the same judiciary, the same legal aid infrastructure, the same BBC instinct to platform every retired lord who can be found to argue that leaving the ECHR would make Britain a pariah state. The resistance isn't primarily parliamentary. It's institutional, and it's been there waiting for every government that has tried to move on this since the Human Rights Act was passed in 1998. Philp's proposal is the right one. The question isn't whether a Conservative government would face opposition implementing it. They would, from inside their own party, from the Lords, from the courts and from the media simultaneously. The question is whether any government that actually wins power will have the mandate, the majority and the nerve to absorb all of that at once and keep going. History suggests the answer is no, until the alternative becomes worse than the resistance.

An Iraqi Too Westernised to Deport. A Nigerian Too Possessed. An Albanian Not Extreme Enough. This Is the System Philp Wants to Dismantle. Chris Philp announced something this week that deserves more attention than it has received. Leave the ECHR. Repeal the Human Rights Act. Abolish the immigration tribunal system entirely. Replace it with Home Office decisions subject to a quick internal appeal. The only remaining route to court would be judicial review on a single ground, that the government had acted outside its legal powers. Philp estimates this would remove 98 percent of immigration cases from the courts. Judge the policy on its own terms, because the cases Philp cites are real and devastating. An Iraqi drug dealer avoided deportation because a judge ruled he had become too Westernised to safely return. A Nigerian armed robber assessed as presenting a high risk of serious harm to the public won his appeal because mental healthcare in Nigeria was deemed inadequate and he might be considered possessed there. An Albanian burglar with 50 convictions was allowed to stay because a judge decided his offending was not very extreme. These are not edge cases. 93 percent of small boat arrivals whose claims are decided are permitted to stay. Only 12,000 failed asylum seekers were removed last year against 80,000 rejected applications. Twenty thousand foreign criminals who should be deported by law remain in Britain. Philp's diagnosis is correct. The problem is not that Parliament has failed to legislate. It is that whatever Parliament legislates, ECHR jurisprudence and a tribunal system staffed in part by judges with documented backgrounds in open-borders advocacy will find a way to reach the same outcome. Shabana Mahmood's reforms, restricting Article 8 to immediate family, a 28 week appeal limit, a single appeals body, operate entirely within that framework. Philp's point, that Labour is tinkering, is hard to dispute when the tinkering leaves intact the legal architecture that produced the Iraqi, the Nigerian and the Albanian rulings in the first place. Reform's own proposals go further in one respect, an outright bar on asylum claims for anyone arriving illegally. On the core mechanism, removing the courts from the centre of immigration policy and returning the decision to elected ministers, the two parties are not describing different destinations. They are describing the same destination by routes that converge. Which is why the silence around this announcement is worth examining. A policy this radical, more radical in its institutional implications than anything Labour has proposed, has been almost entirely absorbed into the noise of Belfast, Makerfield and the social media ban. The government's response, that this is far too late and that Labour has already announced a system addressing this, is not really a rebuttal of the policy. It is a rebuttal of the messenger, and it works because it's not wrong about the messenger. The Conservatives had 14 years and the Boriswave happened on their watch, with Philp himself serving as a minister inside that government. That history is real and it matters. But it doesn't make the policy wrong, and the people most likely to privately agree with it, Reform voters who have spent years insisting the Conservatives are part of the problem, are the least able to say so without seeming to concede the argument that got them to Reform in the first place. That's not a comment on the policy. It's a comment on how thoroughly trust has collapsed, to the point where the right answer and the credible messenger for it currently belong to different parties, and voters are left choosing between the two rather than getting both. Philp is right about the courts. Whether anyone believes him is now a separate question from whether he's correct.

@MForstater Tks. Bizarre case. Especially given this: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6062ddb1… The Sewell Report. Remember that? Published by the last govt a year after the facts that gave rise to the alleged misconduct. Denying widespread systemic racism in the British state.

This was the original conduct - a discussion with a colleague following workplace promotion of the idea of systemic racism with which Mr Garrett disagreed.

The belief discrimination case of Ricky Garrett v London Ambulance Service NHS Trust has been overturned on appeal. Mr Garrett was a litigant in person. The original tribunal found that he had been discriminated against for his belief that "we are all one (human) race" and his non-belief in systemic racism, when, following a complaint about an overheard conversation he was ordered to write an academically referenced written reflection on systemic racism.

@JournalismSEEN Not just journalism. It’s a flawed approach to epistemology full stop. The scientific revolution of the 17th century passed these people by. Still, it’s useful for people to identify that they are unfit to manage or work in an enterprise centrally concerned with reporting truth.

Wikipedia founder: Both sides of the trans debate have been toxic’ This is the man cited by the new BBC Director General as an expert on trust. With reference to ‘the transgender issue’ (in an all staff Q and A when he arrived in the job a couple of weeks ago) Matt Brittin said he’d got to know Jimmy Wales really well, and that it was a benefit having pages being edited by ‘people from the extremes’. In fact he said: ‘These are some of the best pages on Wiki’. He cited the book referenced in the article: The Seven Rules of Trust. To say it’s a flawed approach to journalism is an understatement. Truth is not determined by consensus, nor by which extremists on the day have the time and the right access to fight hour by hour for the upper hand online. ‘Wales highlights the polarising and often depressing nature of online interactions by mentioning the culture wars over gender identity as an example [note: it’s not a culture war @thetimes] ‘He said: 'The trans issue has been very toxic in the UK on all sides. It’s not a place where reasonable people want to have thoughtful conversations. It’s just a lot of screaming, unfortunately, which means not much progress is made on that.’' That’s profoundly shallow, as well as insulting to women, LGB people and child safeguarding experts. The one-sided and power-filled nature of the screaming is *exactly* what made Wales make this 'both sides' comment. The screaming (and threats) spring from the male desire to access any and every female space, and Wales is too afraid (or too misogynist, but let's not presume) to say so. Or perhaps his ignorance results from an over-reliance on his own supposedly authoritative resource, Wikipedia. Matt Brittin said he believes the BBC can learn lessons from Wiki on 'some of these big hot topics' where 'every word has been fought over'. But Wiki does have its own policy - it doesn’t allow accuracy to win in this fight. Just like the BBC, it caves to self-ID and cites ‘dignity’ as a reason for pronoun compliance. Jimmy Wales, Matt Brittin, the BBC, everyone who contributes to Wiki, all of us know there are two immutable human sexes. Some choose to lie. That is not a culture war, or a healthy and contentious debate. It’s top-down dishonesty dressed up as respect. While one side is methodically dismantling this mountain of untruth, the other side, the side that wants the legal status of sex and LGB erased, is screaming at them. It would be very due for Matt Brittin to understand that a Wiki rumble is not an appropriate framework for editorial decision-making, on this subject least of all. Because everyone - everyone - recognises the lie. A few screenshots will follow. thetimes.com/uk/scotland/ar…

@DAaronovitch @Docstockk @FT @KateClanchy1 @prospect_uk Kate’s article is good but so is yours, David. Always interesting to disagree with those you admire. And I admire Kathleen a lot. But in this case disagree with her I do. Tks. I count myself and those I love lucky to live in a society where we have the option.

I wrote my own review of @Docstockk's flawed and overpraised polemic against assisted dying for @FT. @KateClanchy1 has done better for @prospect_uk partly because she occupies moral ground that I couldn't.

@KateClanchy1 Nice poem. Reminds me of Sandberg's 'Grass'. And, for a more ambiguous take as to whether we are through it or not - I am not sure we are - Larkin's 'Whatever Happened?'

I am quite serious. I think this is as good at it gets. The war is over, the damage is huge, the clean up begins. poetryfoundation.org/poems/52955/th…

When I agreed to do 'Anatomy of a Cancellation' I wrote a memo to myself: 'The very most you can expect is a half-hearted acknowledgement from a woke person that they might have gone too far. Be happy that day'. So it's today, and I'm happy.

@void_if_removed V. Good. Tks. ‘How to Be a Liberal’was an ok book. Not great but ok. Even the bit on identity politics. Tribalism allied to pecuniary interest is amazing. It can turn you inside out without you noticing. I am sure he still thinks he is a liberal. Incredibly enough.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his podcast depends on his not understanding it" voidifremoved.co.uk/p/ian-dont

@HJoyceGender This is superb. Actually the argument about how gender ideology was calculated to validate pre-existing progressive identities and key into the social dynamics of groups organised around such narratives explains the vast bulk of how the ideology garnered support from ‘allies’.

This is really good

@salltweets @STILLTish We will win in the end. I know it can’t feel like it at the moment, but every step, even this, is a step towards that. You are a hero and the fight goes on.

I am absolutely devastated Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia. It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us. But in a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow & men will still not be women.

@ObhishekSaha Excellent. I'd just add liberalism is inherently pluralistic both critically (Popper) and morally (Berlin). But to say there is no one right answer is not to say all answers are equally valid. Pluralism ≠ Relativism. It requires a moral commitment to reason and liberal ethics.

9/ Liberalism is a broad tent. It is a higher-order value. Different people can approach it from different political moralities. My own approach, for example, is not identical to Helen Pluckrose’s, even though we broadly agree on what liberalism is. Different liberals can reason from different emphases, traditions, or moral intuitions. That variation does not make liberalism incoherent, nor does it mean that liberal rights are not universal. But it does mean that universalism should not be confused either with universal agreement or with the absence of conflict, ambiguity, or disagreement in application. /End hpluckrose.com/p/liberalism-a…

1/ What does it mean to say that liberalism holds universalism as a core value, and that the rights and responsibilities associated with liberalism are universal? 🧵

@EasyPeasy_3 It’s being walked back. See Warmonitor3.

Jeez.

@ObhishekSaha This is an excellent post. Precise and to the point. Thank you.

I very much admire and support the work Living Freedom is doing. But I will say that neither culture nor law is sufficient on its own: we need both. The interaction between free speech law and free speech culture is complicated. But, at least to a first approximation, they reinforce each other. A good example illustrating this is the US First Amendment. In a nice talk at Battle of Ideas in 2024, @NicoPerrino explained how a culture of free speech that produced far-sighted judges and legal scholars was key to modern First Amendment jurisprudence and its highly speech protective nature. Here culture -> law. But this view understates two things. First, I think modern First Amendment jurisprudence probably wouldn't have been possible if the actual text hadn't been so unambiguous. (Imagine if an equivalent of ECHR Art 10 (2) was part of the First Amendment!). Secondly, despite wonderful US Supreme Court judgments in cases like Brandenburg vs Ohio, NY Times vs US, Texas vs Johnson, etc., the US public has consistently been strongly against some of the most speech-protective elements of the First Amendment, as borne out by polls. Speech protections at the absolute boundary do and always will rest on law, not mere culture. The US constitution helps protect such speech and perhaps more importantly helps ensure that the free speech culture needed to sustain its interpretation remains alive in the next generation, especially among those who matter. Here law -> culture. *** In a recent talk, I tried to address the question: what should universities do to sustain free speech and open debate on campus? I suggested four pillars: rules, neutrality, truth, and discourse. The first pillar is robust rules to protect free speech and academic freedom. We cannot have a resilient and long-term free speech culture without strong and enforceable protections. The second pillar is institutional neutrality. This means that universities should not take positions on political, social, or cultural issues unless those issues directly and materially affect the core functioning of the institution. A very helpful maxim here is: if an institution is not required to adopt a position in order to fulfil its mission, then it is required not to adopt a position. The third pillar is that universities must be clear that their core purpose is the pursuit of truth and the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. Unless universities are also laser-focussed on merit as the ultimate criterion for evaluation, the pursuit of knowledge is compromised, and the entire rationale for a free speech culture begins to weaken. Unless universities are explicit that truth is their telos, and act accordingly, it becomes difficult to sustain a genuine free speech culture, because conflicts with rival institutional values are inevitable. The final pillar is civil discourse. This is especially important for students, many of whom arrive from educational settings built on very different assumptions and norms. Universities therefore need to take active steps to initiate them into a culture of civil, open debate. This means valuing viewpoint diversity. And it means helping students learn the difficult civic arts of engagement, disagreement, reflection, compromise, and mutual respect.

@soppystern Excellent post. Thank you.

I’ve delivered training to colleagues at Sussex several times in the past couple of years, and I can confirm that Kathleen Stock’s description of a “culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear” remains an accurate reflection of how colleagues there are feeling today. You can see it in their eyes. You can hear it in the slight, but constant, stutter in their voices. The descriptions of the problems staff use are hesitant; more is implied than described. “Some of the student interactions we have are…tricky, particularly in relation to, er, protected characteristics.” “We’ve definitely seen a shift when it comes to students, er, behaving, well, presenting in ways that can be, I guess, challenging.” “We’ve had some problems in recent years, which you’ll probably have heard about.” That kind of thing. Every now and again, you get someone in the group who is a hardcore believer ✊. They’ll be the first to test the waters by telling the room that they are also “mindful of neurodiversity”. And they won’t stutter as terms like “safe space”, “LGBTQ+” and “student voice” dance from their semi-grins. This colleague tends not to give their name on the feedback forms at the end of the training session, but I’ll know them by their comment that “The session tended to frame the student as the problem”, or by the one lonely tick in the “disagree” box under the question about whether or not the trainer was effective. However, the hardcore believers are surprisingly rare. Maybe they self-select out of my training in favour of other types of event. Maybe they don’t think they need training. Or maybe I am getting to work with a representative sample and the believers really are a surprisingly small minority. When they speak, I would generally describe the vibe among their colleagues in the room as tired. This is not just a Sussex problem. Other university campuses are very similar, if sometimes a little less hesitant about naming it. However, it’s a very real problem - and, as this @unherd article sets out, no court appeal ruling on the technical meaning of the term “governing documents” will do anything to change the reality of what it’s like to work in a university today. The planet goes on being round. If I am invited to deliver training on Sussex’s campus again, I know I’ll again walk under that underpass that takes me from the station to the buildings that I always need a map to tell apart. And, just as I’ve done on each recent visit, I’ll imagine it was my name on rows of menacing posters lining that tiled tunnel. I’ll imagine I’m walking to work, knowing that the reactions of my managers, all the way up, are almost certain to range from “I don’t want to get involved” to “You’ve brought this on yourself”, with not an ounce of humanity or liberty on offer. And I’ll know that no salary offer would ever be enough to give up my freedom and rejoin the ranks of the permanent university employee. Sadly, the OfS’ errors of process, probably combined with some overzealous interpretation work from the court, have empowered the people in the sector who deny there’s a free speech problem. This ruling will be spun and it will be misinterpreted as some kind of clean bill of health. But, trust me, if you ever find yourself delivering training to a room full of academics, a court judgment like this will seem very unreal indeed.

@IGMansfield I agree. And would add to that not only personal liability for administrators but also for cancellers. I think fines for institutions won’t work. The culpable, meaning both those who instigate and those who execute or permit cancellation, need skin in the game.

While the court ruling is a setback, the response to it is actually more significant. It demonstrates that too much of the HE sector remains committed to intolerant ideologies and group-think, at the expense of open inquiry and free speech. The struggle continues.

The reaction of Sussex University to yesterday's appeal demonstrates the commitment to censorship remains firmly embedded in our university system. For too many university managers, commitments to EDI, 'emotional safety', decolonisation and trans ideology trump free speech. 🧵

@MatkaTerf @SVPhillimore @Fox_Claire @OnChairs @joshxhowie Of course. That's free speech. Criticism for each side to be encouraged, as long as no one tries to shut down the other and so end the debate.

@SJXT1 @SVPhillimore @Fox_Claire @OnChairs @joshxhowie Free speech yes, not from criticism though

@MatkaTerf @SVPhillimore @Fox_Claire @OnChairs @joshxhowie The difference is functional, not audience. It depends on whether the speech is part of a professional or state function. If it's just a. n. other citizen giving their views, even if they have millions of followers, it is private and free speech apples.

@SJXT1 @SVPhillimore @Fox_Claire @OnChairs @joshxhowie It's not private when you share information with millions of followers.

Worth listening to both @OnChairs & @SVPhillimore to see what nuances are in recent argument over pronouns in GC circles. Centres on distinction between public & private. I lean towards Sarah's position but glad to hear both articulated well via @joshxhowie setting up discussion

@SVPhillimore @MatkaTerf @Fox_Claire @OnChairs @joshxhowie Sarah and JKR are right. Private speech is free speech & citizens rights. State speech is not. The state has no rights. It has functions. And is obliged to perform them rationally. Including by using rational language. There is no choice for the State. Classical liberalism 101.

@MatkaTerf @Fox_Claire @OnChairs @joshxhowie So what will you do to me if I don’t agree? What punishment fits this crime? Who will administer it? Do I have a right of appeal?

@MrMennoTweets @PITTpersons The error in the post is people's rights inhere in who they are, not who they say they are. Liberal theory 101.

@PITTpersons "Are they putting male r_apists in women's prisons #BecauseTrans?" "Yes" "There's the problem with 'trans'"

@ShaneConnor @WarMonitor3 Not so. Falklands. The Belgrano and HMS Conqueror.

@WarMonitor3 First time since WW2 that a submarine has taken down an enemy warship, too.

Insane Periscope footage of US Submarine torpedoing an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka.