Tiptoeing through the delicate broadcast ecology

It’s almost exactly a year since PayPal cancelled the FSU’s account and so Tom & Ben kick off today with some thoughts around how much of an existential threat the move was to the organisation. Sadly, though, it was just one example amongst many ‘financial exclusion’ cases to have been reported more widely since then, the most high-profile being the cancellation of Nigel Farage’s account by Coutts bank.

On Monday 9 October, Toby and Nigel will be discussing their experience of financial censorship at a live event in London; tickets are available here.

A fantastic piece of free speech news this week is the victory in court of one of our members, Sean Corby. In a ground-breaking judgment, the Employment Tribunal has ruled that Sean, an ACAS employee, was expressing a legitimate philosophical belief when he challenged Critical Race Theory in his workplace. As such, his belief amounts to a characteristic that will now be afforded protection by Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010. We hope it won’t be long before the ruling is being referenced by employment judges sitting at the Employment Tribunal.

During the episode we discuss the double-edged sword of using the Equality Act to advance the cause of free speech when a future UK government could sweep away the legislation at a stroke, potentially replacing it with something even more muddle-headed. We head outdoors next into the wilds of the broadcast ecology which, according to some pundits, is far too fragile to cope with an upstart channel like GB News. The soviet idea of shutting down news channels that don’t accord with the expectations of our media elite has gained a worrying degree of traction in double quick time. But we finally emerge back into the sunlight and the heartening news that Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert is to be re-platformed at an FSU event on  Monday 16^th October; FSU members can grab their tickets here.