How war over trans rights is killing free speech at The Guardian
by Stephen Glover, Mailonline:
An exodus of women writers amid bullying allegations. A male columnist lashing out at anyone who disagrees with him. And an editor who’s letting him get away with it.
The father of the late journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once advised him: ‘Never work for a liberal. They’ll give you the sack on Christmas Eve.’
Perhaps because Muggeridge was once employed by the Guardian, this piece of advice has been taken by some to refer to that great, though sometimes infuriating, liberal newspaper.
On the surface it appears virtuous and high‑minded, but underneath there is a good portion of dirty washing, which it is not keen to share with the rest of the world.
An obvious example is Guardian Media Group’s use of an offshore tax shelter in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying tax on the £302 million in profit it realised from the sale in 2007 of some of its shares in Auto Trader. The paper invariably decries tax avoidance in others.
I’ve written about many controversies at the paper over the years, but they largely pale into insignificance in comparison with the convulsions that have seized it for more than two years — and recently come to the boil.
The Guardian has been accused by one of its columnists of ‘censoring’ important discussions about gender identity. Hadley Freeman, who worked for the newspaper for 22 years, has resigned to go to another title.
In a valedictory letter to Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief, which was leaked to Private Eye magazine, Freeman criticised the paper for abandoning its tradition of balance (which some may think has been more honoured in the breach than the observance).
Freeman alleged that the newspaper’s once‑willing embrace of complex questions had disappeared with respect to the ‘gender issue’. She also recalled being ‘repeatedly warned off in the Corbyn era [from] writing about Labour from my perspective as a Jew’.
In normal circumstances, the resignation of a columnist, even one so relatively well‑known as Hadley Freeman, would hardly be deemed headline news.
But her embittered departure is the latest episode in a culture war that has been raging at the newspaper for more than two years. It is no exaggeration to say that Freeman is a casualty of ‘cancel culture’ in the ‘gender wars’. As we shall see, she is far from being the only female Guardian journalist who has felt censored.
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