FREEDOM LOVERS may recall that issue 1 of Free Speech took its cue from Mick Hume’s excellent and thought-provoking book Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? Therefore, it highlighted several areas (such as the internet, comedy and football) where the right to free speech (and assembly) is under threat from illiberal ‘liberals’ and ‘Reverse-Voltaires’.

Trigger Warning was published in June 2015. Now Hume has produced Revolting! an equally polemical, thought-provoking and timely book. The sleeve notes describe the theme of the book:

‘We live in strange days in the history of democracy. Every serious politician in the Western world supports it. Yet when the EU referendum and American election both delivered the ‘wrong’ result, elites challenged the merit of the people’s will, and some even tried to block it. Preferrimg unelected institutions, from technocrats to the courts, self-appointed higher minds questioned whether voters are fit to be trusted with their futures.

And yet the answer will never be to impose limitations. Popular democracy must offer better choices, rather than removing choice altogether. It’s time to defend democracy and fight for more of it, with no ifs, buts or backtracks’.

The article reproduced below is adapted from Revolting! It originally appeared in the Daily Mail of 25^th February http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4258522/A-poisonous-conviction-taking-root-Left.html However, we’ve taken the decision to to reproduce it in four sections – as we feel this is the best way to stimulate debate and highlight and reinforce our belief that the Establishment itself is the real enemy of free speech and thought.

It goes without saying that there are no official links between Mick Hume, the Daily Mail and Free Speech.

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Tyranny Of The Minority: How the most sinister trend of our age is a poisonous conviction taking root on the Left and among the elite that ordinary people are too stupid to be trusted with voting

Mick Hume (top right) is a journalist and author of Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? and Revolting! Revolting! looks at how the Establishment are undermining democracy and what they’re afraid of. Two recent events have shook the Establishment to the core – the UK Brexit vote and the election of US President Donald Trump (bottom right). Revolting! represents a short, sharp intervention in the crucial debate about the future of democracy.

Back in the 18th century, political reformer Henry Fox was advocating giving the vote to more people. But only, he insisted, to what he called ‘the better sort’. Not ‘the mob or the mere dregs of the people’. Heaven forbid!

Now, in the 21st century, such derogatory sentiments about ‘the people’ are dangerously back in fashion — ever since they dared vote for Brexit in Britain, and for Donald Trump in the United States.

Questions are being asked in high places about whether ordinary voters are fit to make decisions on major issues.

As a result, democracy — the cornerstone of our way of life — is being undermined, its very survival put at risk. Its modern enemies are mustering from all corners — but most worryingly from the Left, the very area where its stoutest defenders should be.

As a long-standing person of the Left, I fear that democratic freedoms are now in danger of being abandoned as elitists in our midst attempt to restrict them.

Every serious politician and thinker declares his or her belief in democracy. Yet, in practice, they seek to separate power from the people. The mantra has become ‘I’m a democrat, of course, but …’

Over Brexit, this profoundly insidious attitude was exemplified by John Major, former Tory prime minister, who denied the referendum result was binding and declared: ‘The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy.’

Some of us might naively have imagined that majority rule was the very essence of democracy. But not, it seems, when millions vote against the wishes of a tiny political elite.

It was, of course, George Orwell in his 1945 novel Animal Farm, who described how ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’

Fast-forward to today and we find many Remainers similarly convinced that anyone who voted to leave the EU is too stupid to have the vote. The response was the same in America when voters failed to elect Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s victory, one U.S. professor declared, was ‘the dance of the dunces’, the result of ‘uneducated, low-information white people’ being given the vote. He added: ‘Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?’

The fury against the 17.4 million UK voters who dared to back Brexit — and the 62 million Americans who had the temerity to vote for Trump — brings frightening anti-democratic poisons bubbling to the surface of our societies.

The sheer bile that erupted from political and cultural elites in Britain after the Brexit vote revealed a deep-seated contempt for the people and for democracy. The Establishment reacted as if the ground had disappeared from beneath their feet. How could this have happened?

After all, the Remain campaign had marshalled every authority in the Western world to warn that a Leave vote would lead to economic ruination, a descent into barbarism, world war and, worse, falling house prices.

The people had been told to vote Remain by leaders of all Britain’s mainstream political parties, the governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of Germany, the then President of the U.S., and every celebrity from David Beckham to Johnny Rotten.

Yet a majority of voters actually disobeyed!

• To check out a review of Free Speech click here: http://nationalliberal.org/review-of-issue-1-of-free-speech

• Check out Free Speech: How Do We Protect It? Click here:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1607711629485795/

• For an excellent review of Trigger Warning click here: https://countercultureuk.com/2015/07/26/trigger-warning/

• Check out Revolting! Click here:  https://www.amazon.com/Revolting-Establishment-Undermining-Democracy-Theyre/dp/0008220824/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490209013&sr=1-1&keywords=mick+hume