Now doctors are No Platforming people

Medical censors now. Julia Hartley-Brewer’s disinvitation is a new low for the culture wars.

RADIO host Julia Hartley-Brewer has been disinvited from the Royal College of General Practitioners’ (RCGP) annual conference. Just when you thought the culture war couldn’t permeate more areas of modern life, we now have doctors No Platforming journalists.

A petition, signed, at the time of writing, by 749 medical practitioners, accuses Hartley-Brewer of expressing ‘views that are highly controversial regarding immigration’, including that ‘she could not see anything in [Enoch Powell’s] “Rivers of Blood” speech that he had got wrong’. One doctor wrote that he would leave the RCGP if Hartley-Brewer spoke at the conference, as it would be ‘platforming someone who defends fascism’.

The RCGP caved. According to Hartley-Brewer, writing in the Spectator, RCGP chair Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard emailed her to rescind the invitation and trotted out the classic ‘free speech, but’ line: ‘We believe and uphold the principles of free speech… however, I cannot ignore the strength of feeling among my own membership.’

Hartley-Brewer, a vocal Brexit supporter, says this is a politically motivated smear job. And she’s clearly right. The people pushing the petition are a mix of Corbynistas and Stop Brexit zealots who like to sound off on Twitter about ‘racist’, ‘brownshirt’ Brexiteers. For her part, she points out that the tweet, from 2016, wasn’t defending Powell as such, but rather suggested that what he predicted came to pass.

But it is an act of tremendous, shameful bad faith to say that Hartley-Brewer is a racist because she takes the view on Powell that she does. Nothing she has ever uttered in public could even remotely be considered racist. Which is probably why her critics seem to be relying on one by-the-by Twitter discussion to smear her.

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More on the speech that you must not say anything good about here