Toby Young: Free Speech and the 'No Debate' Left

Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, opens CPAC Great Britain with a critique of progressive “no debate” culture — from climate reporting to campus no-platforming.

Introduced as Lord Young of Acton, President of the Free Speech Union — he corrected that to general secretary — Toby Young opened the conference proper after tributes and a minute’s silence.

He recounted a Guardian journalist confronting him at ARC over climate “denial,” then argued that much of the progressive left refuses engagement: from Stonewall’s “no debate” posture to NUS no-platform rules that, he said, treat ordinary right-of-centre views as beyond the pale.

Young’s thesis: opponents are cast as morally blind or misinformed rather than argued with — and that isolationism is a recent habit, not the older socialist culture of robust disagreement he associated with his father.