In this blistering polemic, veteran journalist Mick Hume presents an uncompromising defence of freedom of expression, which he argues is threatened in the West, not by jackbooted censorship but by a creeping culture of conformism and You-Can’t-Say-That.
The cold-blooded murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in January 2015 brought a deadly focus to the issue of free speech. Leaders of the free-thinking world united in condemning the killings, proclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie’. But it wasn’t long before many commentators were arguing that the massacre showed the need to apply limits to free speech and to restrict the right to be offensive.
It has become fashionable not only to declare yourself offended by what somebody else says, but to use the ‘offence card’ to demand that they be prevented from saying it. Social media websites such as Twitter have become the scene of ‘twitch hunts’ where online mobs hunt down trolls and other heretics who express the ‘wrong’ opinion. And Trigger Warnings and other measures to ‘protect’ sensitive students from potentially offensive material have spread from American universities across the Atlantic and the internet.
Hume argues that without freedom of expression, our other liberties would not be possible. Against the background of the historic fight for free speech, Trigger Warning identifies the new threats facing it today and spells out how unfettered freedom of expression, despite the pain and the problems it entails, remains the most important liberty of all.

Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?

Politics & Social Sciences

Hume, Mick

Social Sciences

William Collins

A short, sharp intervention in the crucial debate about the future of democracy, which has been brought to a head by events from Brexit to the Trump phenomenon.
We live in strange days in the history of democracy.
Every serious politician in the Western world supports democracy. Yet when the EU Referendum and American Elections both delivered the ‘wrong’ result, elites challenged the merit of the people’s will, and some even tried to block it. Preferring unelected institutions, from technocrats to the courts, self-appointed higher minds questioned whether voters are fit to be trusted with their own futures. Ours is the age of “I support democracy, but…”
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 it, with no ifs, buts or backtracks.

Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of

Science & Math

Is there a Scottish solution?: The working class and the Assembly debate

Junius

The aim of this book is to a launch a polemic for the freedom of the press against all of the attempts to police, defile and sanitise journalism today. Once the media reported the news. Now it makes it. The phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry into the "culture, practice and ethics" of the media has put the UK press under scrutiny and on trial as never before. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Press questions many of today's distorted but widely-held views of the media, and turns the assumptions underlying the current discussion on their head. The problem is not that the UK press has too much freedom to run wild, but too little liberty. The trouble is not that the UK press is too far out-of-control, but that it is far too conformist. The danger is not that press freedom is too open to abuse, but that the British media is not nearly open enough. Mick Hume draws on the lessons of history and cross-examines the evidence from the Leveson Inquiry to take on the army of conformists and regulators who would further tame press freedom.

There is No Such Thing As a Free Press...: And we need one more than ever (Societas)

Societas

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Books by Hume, Mick