Not a lot of hate speech there. Even YouTube, at or near the top of the Cancellation Industrial Complex, hasn’t taken this down.

She simply styles her organisation as “pushing back against tyranny”. She thinks bankers are crooks. No argument here.

She worked on the Brexit campaign. Excellent. Digital currencies? Dead against them. The climate scam?  Tick. And they do not invite political Party speakers from their conferences. The one politician Liz likes is Andrew Bridgen. She regards all other politicians as bought, thick or both.

ATTACKED

For this, Liz Phillips, who is getting on in years, was physically attacked in Trafalgar Square during a peaceful COVID protest. By indoctrinated thug coppers. Lest we forget.

I do not recall a single Tory Cabinet Minister calling out the Met over that one.

The closest thing to hate speech among groups like the Great Resist is (often well-disguised) anti-Semitism, and Kathy Gyngell recently published a series by leading British Jewish figures decrying this tendency. So, nothing to see there.

Allowing imbecilic fact-checker types who bully corporations into taking their side of politics poses a dilemma for any free speech advocate.

At what point do the gloves come off?  Is it okay to use counter-cancel tactics that we would not normally contemplate?  If the Met can be called to account by a senior Government Minister, can corporations? What would counter-measures look like?

All questions worth asking. When the mob gets questionable people banned, we don’t like it even though we might not think much of the cancelled party.

In this case, they are banning a group that no sane person would call remotely questionable. In doing so, they have crossed a line. It should mean war. 

The question is also raised – who is behind the cancellers? Why would they bother with a lowly, people-power outfit, unless they are a front group for some element of the globalist establishment? Perhaps there are hints in the letter sent by the activists to the Holiday Inn.

It turns out some groups (Hearts of Oak and Students Against Tyranny) linked to the Great Resist are claimed by activists to be anti-gay, anti-refugee and anti-climate scam. Well, blow me down.

And that the LGBT brigade is trying to indoctrinate children. Well, of course they are. They have. It worked.

Damning a broad-based group by finding alleged thought crimes from among its disparate members is as old as the hills. But it works against spineless corporates.

Make what you will of their assertions. My only comment in response to this level and reach of offence archeology is that, if these people take the time to do all this “research” and then have the energy and persistence to execute, then there is little surprise that they are winning the war.

How many of “us” would do all this work? 

The activists finish up: “We respect that both the patrons and employees of the Holiday Inn chain represent many cultures, religions, races, sexualities and gender identities and hope that you understand how hosting an event that is happy to endorse those whose views would see such diversity as a weakness would damage the reputation of the intercontinental hotel group amongst many diverse communities.”

INACCURACIES

Note both the massive inaccuracies, the weirdly convoluted prose, the exaggerations, the generalisations, the straw man assertions, and, of course, the implied threat contained herein.

Liz Phillips calls them monstrous lies. It turns out that there is probably no one “behind” Liverpool against hate.

Liz Phillips says they are part of the Hope Not Hate group, whose charter is as follows: “At Hope Not Hate, our mission is to work tirelessly to expose and oppose far-Right extremism.”

They produce a “State of hate” annual report. Hilariously, they bill themselves as “anti-fascist”.

Branding these people – the conference delegates – as far Right, is ludicrous, of course. But with a certain kind of Leftist or middle management corporate shill, such trigger words work.

The Met has denied funding Hope Not Hate. As has the UK Home Office.

I think the Liverpudlians against hate are simply garden variety neo-Marxists undertaking a woke box ticking exercise and using the methods that have worked for them everywhere they go.

But why bother engaging these types with counter-argument and evidence? They use a big stick and don’t even bother trying to “win” arguments. This is an exercise in raw power.

They are probably surprised at just how easy it all was, and is. The door is so weak it is child’s play to kick it down.

But there are those who are not cowed, and will fight back. I suspect Liz is one of them.

The “case” against the Resist people is wafer thin, indeed it is non-existent. Just contrast the alleged crimes of one or two groups within the broader Resist movement noted above with some of the Armistice Day headlines coming out of Britain today:

• “Police warn of ‘messy’ Armistice Day as guard of Cenotaph begins”;
• “Met Police warn they will use force to stop Armistice Day being disrupted”
• “British Police ‘Are Giving in to the Mob’”
• “Teenagers charged after cenotaph defaced with ‘Free Palestine’ slogan”
• “Why must Jews watch their backs as London mobs cheer?”
• “It’s not safe to be Jewish on the anniversary of Kristallnacht”
• “Jews are not safe on Britain’s campuses”

Take your pick as to where the true hatred is, in this febrile swamp, and whether there is the remotest justification, when there is blood on the streets outside, for banning a conference of chin-wagging, peaceful people who are gathering because they oppose the totalitarian state, and where none of the items on the activist mob’s thought crime list are even being discussed. 

There is an imperative these days to refresh our defence of free speech, dust off the arguments and bloody well do something about it.

Given that much of the spleen venting comes from the young, impressionable, ideological and clueless, it is reassuring to see online groups such as Students Against Tyranny are actually out there, pushing back, getting their hands dirty, putting a bit of stick about.

JUDGE

So many of the rest of us don’t. If there are a few rough edges on what they do or say, well, as Pope Francis says, who am I to judge? And if a few snowflakes take offence, well, tough!

Free speech is still worth fighting for – as the Liverpool travesty shows.  As Liz Phillips says, provided we fight back, we’ll win.

In the meantime, I suggest we all let the Holiday Inn know they will never be included in any of our travel plans. And why!PC

– Paul Collits