The Vindication of Kathleen Stock

Please deliver me from good.

The good people. I mean the people who think they are good. I feel surrounded by them at times and the harm they do is never really accounted for is it?

In the part of North London I live , people hang Palestinian flags in their windows, just as they put up Remain posters. I never really understood who this was for but each other. Was a Brexiteer going to walk down my road and suddenly change their minds? Unlikely. I guess it’s a tribal thing. As everything is in its own way, whether we own it or not. ‘We are on the right side and we need everyone to know that’ is I suppose all some of my neighbours are saying. Why should it irritate me so much?

Perhaps because over the last few years what has been done in the name of being “caring” or “good” or “progressive” has so clearly been such absolute bulshit that I recoil from pronouncements of righteousness.

It is easy enough to wave a flag, wear a badge, sign an open letter. It takes so very little.

Increasingly, I do not care about what people believe, I care about how they behave.

This week it was announced that the University of Sussex is to be fined £585,000 by the higher education regulation body ,) the Office for Students (OFS)) for failing to uphold freedom of speech in regard to transgender policy . This was in many ways a vindication for Kathleen Stock, a doctor, a professor who now unsurprisingly no longer gives a damn about academic titles and has renounced her’s.