When it announced its ban on Kate Forbes, which it now says isn’t a ban, Summerhall Arts promised ‘robust, proactive inclusion and wellbeing policies that prevent this from happening again’.
The happening in question was an on-stage chinwag with the Deputy First Minister during the Edinburgh Fringe.
Summerhall explained that it was concerned about ‘attracting those who share Kate Forbes’s views’. I thought the Edinburgh Fringe was nothing but people who share Forbes’s views, but Summerhall was not talking about the Highlands MSP’s support for the national impoverishment plan more commonly known as ‘independence’.
No, they were referring to her
gender-critical views. Summerhall said: ‘We do not believe LGBTQ+ rights, nor their existence, is up for debate.’
It cited concerns for ‘the safety and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ artists, staff and audiences’ and said ‘a designated relaxed space’ would be available for anyone affected.
Anyone affected by Kate Forbes? Are we talking about the same Kate Forbes?
5ft 2in? Likes the Bible? So young she makes Ross Greer look middle-aged?
It’s hard to imagine a functioning adult who would require a safe space to protect them from Forbes. Summerhall was going on like it was hosting Hannibal Lecter rather than the most senior woman in Scottish politics.
This is the sort of fankle you get into when you believe, or pretend to believe, that political speech – and mainstream political speech at that – is violence and oppression and literally genocide.
There are people who feared Scotland would become McGilead if Forbes, a practising Christian, was elected First Minister, who also think women should be shunned for wilful disbelief in the doctrine of self-identification. That is what this is ultimately about: heresy.
Forbes does not accept that the material reality of sex is transformed by the assertion of an invisible inner essence called gender identity.
For that, anathema is pronounced upon her and she is to be excommunicated from polite society. Kate Forbes is not the fundamentalist here. One would have thought even that clanjamfrie of self-regarding midwits, the Edinburgh arts world, would have learned its lesson from the Joanna Cherry incident.
Two years ago, the Stand Comedy Club tried to cancel a Fringe event
featuring the former Nationalist MP, blaming staff disquiet over her views on women’s sex-based rights.
Cherry, an advocate of some standing, gently suggested the club seek some legal advice since what it was proposing amounted to unlawful discrimination.
The Stand duly consulted a Rumpole or two, only to be told Cherry was right.
The ferret not only reversed but did so while reading a grovelling letter of apology. Talk of cowards who would rather placate crybully censors than stand up for free expression brings us inevitably to Amina Shah, the chief executive of the National Library of Scotland (NLS).
NLS was originally intending to include The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht in its ‘Dear Library’ exhibition.
Edited by journalist Susan Dalgety and civil service insider Lucy Hunter Blackburn, it’s a collection of essays penned by the women who fought against Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
The authors include people with sharply contrasting political views. If you want the definitive, behind-the-scenes account of what the Scottish Government tried to do and how they were stopped, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht is it. I heartily recommend it.
Amina Shah seems less enamoured. Upon learning the book would be part of the exhibition, some LGBT+ activists on the NLS staff allegedly demanded it be removed as it contained ‘hate speech’ and its display would pose ‘severe harm’ to library employees.
We have library employees in Scotland who are afraid books might hurt them.
Every day, it becomes less and less baffling that we burned so many witches in this country. Rather than suggest these people seek help, or at least alternative employment, Shah dropped the book from the exhibition.
It’s not so much that Scotland’s chief librarian caved into censors, it’s that she did so with a book whose authors risked everything rather than shut up when they were told to.
You can’t always judge a book by its cover, but when the cover reads ‘The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht’, you can probably judge the authors.
They kicked up a fuss – rightly so – and Shah has been hit with criticism and, it is said, a donor boycott.
That these women were bolshie is commendable but what matters above all else is that they were right. The most powerful people in every sector of public life, enterprise, academia and the arts insisted they were wrong, and not just wrong but cruel, and not just cruel but bigoted. Their meetings were disrupted, their events cancelled, their jobs threatened, and their reputations tarnished on social media. They were exaggerating and misrepresenting.
They didn’t understand the law and should be disregarded. But they were right. The Supreme Court ruling in favour of For Women Scotland didn’t make them right, it merely confirmed they had been all along.
I happen to broadly agree with the book’s authors, but even if I didn’t – and especially if I didn’t – I would want to learn exactly what they believe, and how they went about turning those beliefs into one of the most successful political campaigns in modern British history.
Instead, there is a pronounced incuriosity, not only an intolerance towards ideas but a total indifference. Ideas are interactive; that’s the point of them.
One idea meets another and you take the best from both to form an even better idea. Not any more.
Now, there are good ideas and bad ideas, and the bad ideas should not be considered. In fact they must be suppressed, because they have the power to harm and to corrupt.
Orthodoxy is back, baby. Only it’s no longer forbidding clerics or moral
crusaders demanding filthy, dirty books be put on high shelves, it’s people who imagine themselves to be enlightened and rational and liberal.
For dark comedy, nothing at the Fringe can compete with the spectacle of social progressives inadvertently forming a Mary Whitehouse tribute act.
Summerhall Arts relies heavily, and the National Library almost exclusively, on taxpayer subvention. Arts funding can be controversial. Some think it subsidises the cultural pursuits of affluent and otherwise privileged people.
The search for truth, beauty and humanity should not belong to any one class or sector. It is the hallmark of a liberal society, a society in which liberty is used not only for transient gratification but to better understand the human, the ideal and the transcendental.
Unfortunately, our cultural sector seems to be overrun with leaders who believe themselves already in possession of the truth, and uninterested, if not instinctively opposed, to the exploration of other ideas. An arts sector so ideologically prescriptive that it will not countenance wrongthink in its venues or on its bookshelves is one that has forfeited any claim to public funds.
Institutions like Summerhall Arts and the National Library of Scotland should not benefit from the spoils of liberal society while having at its load-bearing walls with doctrinal sledgehammers.
Defund them, let them close, and invest in new institutions that value free minds and free expression.