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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week we're going to be talking about one of the most fundamental issues in the public conversation,

how we argue, how we disagree, and what we can say in public. I'm joined by two guests.

One is Andrew Doyle, better known as the alter ego of Titania McGrath, the intersectional poet, whose new book is called Free Speech and Why

It Matters. The other is Ian Leslie, whose new book is conflicted, why arguments are tearing us apart

and how they can bring us together. Welcome both. Hello.

Hi Sam.

Hi, you both. Andrew, if I can start with you, your book is a very sort of elegant and careful

restatement of the case for free speech. And in it you say that one of the things that's

happened recently is that free speech, which used to be a thing that was championed by the left, has now become an issue whose guardians tend to be on the right.

Why do you think that's happened? Why has that changed?

Well, that's something I would be delighted to know. I can only speculate why that has happened. I mean, I make that point because I wanted to be clear that I don't think free speech is a partisan issue.

You know, when I was a kid, it was the right-wing tabloids that were pushing for censorship all the time.

They wanted David Cronenberg's film Crash Band, for instance.

I remember that one quite vividly.

And then today, the more censorious publications are things like The Guardian and the New

Statesman, the sort of the ones who identify as left, even though they're not really. But,

you know, those sorts of people who are pushing for that. And I think the reason I pointed that out,

as I say, is that I do think this isn't a partisan issue. Why it might have gone that way is,

I think, because of the rise of identity politics and specifically this kind of social justice ideology, this postmodern ideology, that ultimately, at its heart, mistrusts language.

...