Cancel culture exists - I proved it the hard way

Newspapers are betraying their readers by submitting to arbitrary censorship by Twitter.

I've been in countless Twitter storms in the past over nationalism, hate crime, gender. It’s what Twitter does. So when the editor of the Herald, for which I had been a columnist for over 20 years, rang to say I was suspended I thought he was joking.  Joshing me about my “poison fan club” as it’s been called.

He wasn’t.  It had come from upstairs. I was out.

What on for?  Had I libelled someone?  Nope. Broken the law? Nah. Had I been accused of groping?  'Course not. I hadn't even offended Twitter's notoriously woke algorithms. I had used a word that is “not acceptable” and that the Daily Mail (shock horror) had asked for a comment.

I pointed out that publications including  The Guardian and Newsweek had recently published articles about how black Tories are unfairly labeled “coconuts” by the left. My quote tweet  “A coconut cabinet?”. Was clearly an allusion to this and not an accusation or an insult directed at anyone in particular.  It was a sarcastic rejoinder to another tweet suggesting that the presence of black ministers in the Conservative cabinet does not make it truly “diverse”.

When the Labour MP Rupa Huq said Kwasi Kwarteng was “superficially black” she meant it. I did not. The people who denounced me on Twitter knew this perfectly well.

Attention seekers on social media deliberately misconstrue what people say to generate contrived outrage. When Gordon Beattie, the chairman of Beattie Communications tweeted :“We don't hire blacks, gays or Catholics. We sign talented people and we don't care about the colour or their skin, sexual orientation or religion. ” everyone knew what he meant. But he had to “stand down” from his own PR company because he‘d used the words “we don't hire blacks”. 

When politicians talk about a “decapitation strategy” they don’t mean that they intend to execute the rival party leader. If someone says  “I’ll bloody kill you if you do that again ” it’s not a reason to call the police. Though come to think of it under the Scottish government’s Hate Crime Act it could be.

Now I’ve been “let go” before in my long career.  I was a BBC TV and radio presenter for 25 years. I’ve been a columnist for everyone from the Observer to the Big Issue; the Scotsman to the New Statesman.  It’s part of the game.  But this was something else. It was an assault on my integrity.

The Herald stated publicly that there was no “racial intent” on my part. That I have written “sensitively on racial matters” for over twenty years. They knew that that I’d been stitched up. But the matter was out of their hands. The gods of social media had to be appeased. 

The Herald is one of the oldest newspapers in the world, published daily since 1783. It has had fearless editors like Arnold Kemp, who revelled in the ancient Scottish tradition of hyperbolic abuse and offense-giving called “flyting”.  But this venerable Scottish institution is now subject to a higher editorial authority composed of censorious figures on social media who don't even read the paper. 

How did these people become so powerful? These guardians of moral and political probity have been elected by no one. They aren't accountable, they aren't even identifiable in many cases. Only a minority of the population has a Twitter account and only a tiny minority of those accounts actively tweet.

The Herald isn't alone in living in fear of the social media and  journalists are addicted to Twitter which is part of the problem. But free speech, and Independent journalism, is finished if we submit to the caprice of doctrinaire online zealots. Newspapers are, to use another no doubt unacceptable metaphor, cutting their own throats. 

I didn't help matters by saying that a paper that allows itself to be edited by Twitter isn’t worth writing for. I've moved on. But at least I’ve proved that cancel culture exists.

(A version of this article appeared in the Spectator.co.uk)