News from the New Party

It is one thing for British faith schools not to be allowed to teach deprecatory views about adherents of other faiths to their young charges. It is altogether another for a single undergraduate to publish a view that might offend or upset adherents of some faith, not because it insults them personally save by implying them to be fools rather than knaves for believing as they do.

Resort to use of imagery and satire to convey such thoughts about a faith is but a variant form of expression of such views. As such, one would have thought there was an unanswerable case for allowing publication and distribution of such imagery and satire in a non-incendiary context. Publishing them in a Cambridge college weekly fly-sheet hardly counts as taking the image and message onto the streets of Dewsbury, Luton and Tower Hamlets.

If it is asked: 'What about the possible offence that their publication in that college fly-sheet might give Muslim students at the college?', one could just as well argue that all its students should have to sign up to a code of conduct that required them to tolerate publication of views that might offend them, as long as they did not incite violence or hatred towards them for what they believe or who they are. How can there be a genuine liberal education in a University where there is not freedom of thought and expression?