Oxfam & The New Elite

Oxfam is back in the free speech news, for all the wrong reasons. We begin today’s episode wondering why the charity keeps tripping over itself in the culture wars and highlight the deleterious effect these clumsy moves have had on numbers of volunteers and donors, as well as the charity’s finances. The case of an Oxfam employee who felt she had no choice but to resign due to the hostile environment she faced after expressing perfectly reasonable support for JK Rowling leads us into more general discussion of employee speech codes. There is now hardly a workplace without a speech code (often disguised as an EDI policy), and we ponder how a single individual can now be subject to several codes at the same time, yet none of them ever seems to be applied in an even-handed way. It is also very rare to stumble upon a speech code that differs from the new orthodoxy.  We briefly discuss how HSBC has shut down three accounts of the League of Social Democrats, one of the few remaining pro-democracy parties in Hong Kong that dares to protest China’s draconian security law and free speech crackdown.  Finally, we share thoughts following last week’s FSU panel event centred around Matt Goodwin’s new book on the new elite. It was a great discussion, and we were particularly happy to take Matt’s final word to be sure to keep the debate going in the bar afterwards.