Who's on the wrong side of history now?

Joanna Cherry's landmark victory against the Stand comedy club is the beginning of the end for cancel culture

The victory of Joanna Cherry against the Stand Comedy Club is highly significant. It is the first time that a performer has seriously deployed the Equality Act against a venue that had “unbooked” them for their beliefs - in Cherry’s case that biological sex is immutable. Threatened with a court case and damages running into tens of thousands of pounds, the Stand backed down, apologised unreservedly and restored her participation in the planned “In Conversation With…” event at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 10th.

This episode has left many on the left who thought they were on “the right side of history” discovering that they were on the wrong side of the law. Perhaps self-styled “progressives”, like the Scottish minister Lorna Stater, who insisted that the Stand were in the right, should now submit themselves for unconscious bias training. Woke censorship has just become a lot more difficult, as I explain...