A stepping razor

Free speech war reports from…. Oxford? Grown ups shouldn’t care about student debating societies. Or crave police crackdowns.

Previously: No one left to cry to
The Nick Cohen story is just one example of silence about alleged harassment in an industry that protects its friends.

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I did three things yesterday: 1) Tried to help someone going through a violent and retaliatory Section 21 eviction 2) Wrote about Nick Cohen 3) Dealt with trolling and got drunk. Which one of those was not a good use of my time? If you said option 3, you win… this tiny vial of respect (good condition, no cash value).

For all the airtime, column inches, and ink spent on the cancellation of the right — cancellation that always seems to bring a column, big interviews, and a book deal to cushion the social suffering — the people most likely to be silenced in Britain are on the left and actively anti-transphobia. It’s no surprise that Nick Cohen’s excuse to The New York Times was that he was being set up by a ruthless coalition of trans rights campaigners and… Vladimir Putin.

This edition is not, in fact, going to be about me or the metric tonne of total shit that flowed my way yesterday. Who cares? Well, I do quite a lot but I have to deal with it. Life’s hard in the NBA and a new podcast and other projects are coming soon. TBC when ICBA (I can be arsed).

Instead, let’s talk about the ‘war reporting’ around Kathleen Stock’s Oxford Union appearance. In The Times, under the headline We hid in a broom cupboard: my mad day at Oxford with Kathleen Stock, Janice Turner writes of the protest during the talk:

Then six police officers return, one of whom leafs through a laminated manual until she finds the right page and then speaks with the young protester — a very well-spoken they/them called Riz — as if the poor thing has fainted at a concert, not disrupted a public event. Softener is applied to the glue, the hand is released and Riz leaves to applause (both sincere and sarcastic) to rejoin the other “trans siblings” in triumph beyond the gates, from where the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams and megaphone chants drift into the hall.

I know Riz a bit — I spoke to them after a recent action — and it’s interesting to read between the lines of Turner’s words there.

“… a very well-spoken they/them” carries with it the usual sigh that someone who speaks in a certain way cannot undertake activism. Then there’s the liberal snarl for police violence in their favour (“[the officer] speaks with the young protestor… as if the poor thing has fainted at a concert, not disrupted a public event…) The police behaved relatively nicely because there were cameras on them, not because they generally use kid gloves with protestors.

Turner concludes:

Armed with the rest of the red wine, Rob and Stock are heading back to London, laughing and catching up on philosophy world gossip. I take the train, thinking about this strange, if amusing, waste of a day. A battalion of police, three security guards, a tube of glue and a broom cupboard. Just for one woman to state what most of us already think.

The Times: Supporter of free speech as long as it’s speech that agrees with it.

At The New Statesman, Will Lloyd — latterly of the unreadable Unherd — writes under the headline Kathleen Stock’s adventures in wonderland that:

It was nearly 3pm. A delegation from what was being called “the other side” was expected to turn up at any moment. There was talk of 500 drag queens – no, 1,000 drag queens! – descending on the union’s debating chamber. To do what? Nobody really knew. Online I read that the other side were already outside the walls of the union protesting – well, they might have been outside, but they were nowhere near the union. A newspaper’s live blog said that Stock’s talk was “set to be one of the angriest rows to rock Oxford in recent years” but the streets around the union were quiet.

There is no doubt which side Lloyd is on:

It took ten minutes for the day to collapse in on itself. Stock was patiently explaining her position on whether trans women should be allowed to enter single-sex spaces such as bathrooms and prisons when it happened. A single clear voice, before a deluge of other voices: “Trans rights are human rights.” It was the thin student – Possnett – who had stood near me in the queue. They stood up, squirted glue into their left palm, walked calmly to the space in front of the stage, sat down and affixed themselves to a floorboard. “Oh dear” said a voice behind my seat. Another protester at the back of the hall unveiled a trans flag. A third protester handed out leaflets (“Kathleen Stock is not welcome here…”). Those two were ushered out.

But what to do about Possnett? They sat there in front of Stock, and the pair looked oddly similar. Possnett might have been her child. Later it would be reported that the protesters “stormed” the chamber. Wrong. They had walked in with the rest of us. After weeks of controversy and obvious security concerns, the union had completely failed to protect the event, or Stock.

The history of The New Statesman is littered with writers and editors sneering at peaceful protest and younger generations; Lloyd is in a ‘fine’ tradition of gleefully taking the establishment line while pretending to be a radical. His sympathies lie with… a girl in pearls:

Waves of screams and bellows and applause and boos washed around the room. Possnett sat there, as quietly and as impressively still as the marble busts of famous union members ​​(Gladstone, Asquith, Macmillan, Salisbury) who watched on in judgemental silence. Stock looked on too, her arms folded. The philosopher rubbed her forehead, and you could imagine what the last five years had been like for her – the death threats, the open letters, the legal issues, the no platformings, the feuds, the relentless media requests, all the venom and spite and animus, having to say the same things over and over again about the same set of issues – and now whatever this was. Ultimately, she just seemed bored and tired. The committee member I had spoken to earlier, the girl in pearls, was flushed. She looked like she was about to cry.

On his 1977 album, Equal Rights, Peter Tosh has a song called Stepping Razor. The title means a person who is not to be fucked with; a dangerous person. Tosh sings:

If you are a bully
Treat me good
If you are a bully, a bully
I beg you treat me good

I'm like a stepping razor
Don't you watch my size
I'm dangerous, dangerous

The British press is full of people who think sharp opinions don’t harm but clarify. They think they are safety razors — clean cuts done without blood — but they are stepping razors. To fight back, we have to be stepping razors too.

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