My family was never political – well, except my grandfather. My mum’s father was born in Motherwell in 1916 and before he became a teenager he was sent to a sanatorium. He was so thin that the doctors assumed he had TB. Miraculously, he left several years later still without TB and went to work as miner. He couldn’t have been more perfectly engineered to vote Labour if he’d been grown in a lab. Yet he read the Telegraph. One of my very few memories of him has his face peering over its flapping broadsheet pages. “Hen,” he would intone, “you have to know what the Other Buggers Are Thinking.”
Whether you’re talking about politics, or science, or chess, it helps to know what the Other Buggers Are Thinking – which is why the trend for students to complain about being exposed to unpleasant or unsettling views is concerning. The tactic of “no platform”, once reserved for violent fascists, is being extended stealthily to those with controversial opinions; universities, we are told, should be “safe spaces”.
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