In her Reith lecture on freedom in 2022, the great Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned of the ‘unconscionable barbarism’ of cancel culture. She herself had felt its flames lick at her feet when she refused to bow to that truthless credo, ‘trans women are women’. ‘It was like being accused of blasphemy in a religion that is not yours’, she said.

To carry a candle for freedom as the idiot wind of censorship swirls all around takes courage

To carry a candle for freedom as the idiot wind of censorship swirls all around takes courage

She decried the malice and savagery of cancellation. It is a betrayal of our humanity to seek to disappear those whose only offence is dissent, she said. To the scalp-hungry army of little Torquemadas who insist some ideas are so wicked they must be crushed, Adichie said a firm: ‘No.’ That is ‘barbarism’, she said. It is a ‘virtual vigilante action’ that inflicts a terrible double wrong on society: it both ‘silences the person who has spoken’ and ‘creates a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking.’

This week, we heard yet more testimony on the pitiless inhumanity of cancel culture, this time from the mighty Róisín Murphy. She was the frontwoman of Nineties dance duo Moloko who has since become one of the best-regarded solo auteurs of electro-pop on these isles. Her thoughtcrime was not dissimilar to Adichie’s: she expressed........

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