Who gets to exercise free speech, and what happens when powerful voices think they have been silenced? Assembling a diverse group of commentators, activists and academics, this book explores the contemporary free speech wars to try to understand how this issue has become increasingly charged. It asks how the spaces and structures of 'speech' - mass media, the lecture theatre, the public event, the political rally and the internet - shape this debate. The contributors examine how acts such as censorship, boycotts, and protests around free speech developed historically and how these histories inform the present. The book explores the opposing sides in this debate: beginning with a defence of speech freedoms and examining how speech has been curbed and controlled, before countering this with an exploration of the way that free speech has been weaponised and deployed as a bad faith argument by people wishing to commit harm. Considering two key battlefields in the free speech wars - the university campus and the internet - this book encourages the reader to be suspicious of the way that this topic is framed in the media today. The free speech wars offers context, provocation, stimulation and - hopefully - a route through this conflict. -- .

Imperial Island shows how the end of empire and its ever-present aftermath have divided and defined Britain over the last seventy years. 'Masterful ... you won't look at Britain in the same way ever again' OWEN JONES 'Incisive, important, and incredibly timely' CAROLINE ELKINS 'An eye-opening study of the empire within' SHASHI THAROOR 'Clear, bold, refreshing' LUCY WORSLEY 'A thought-provoking delight that absolutely everyone should read' STEPHEN BUSH 'Immaculately detailed and impeccably researched' HELEN CARR After the Second World War, Britain's overseas empire disintegrated. As white settlers from Rhodesia returned home to a country they barely recognised, Commonwealth citizens from Asia and the Caribbean migrated to a motherland that often refused to recognise them. Race riots erupted in Liverpool and Notting Hill even as communities lived and loved across the colour line. In the 1950s and 60s, imperial violence came home too, pervading the policing of immigrant communities, including their sex lives. In the decade that followed, a surge of support for the far-right inspired an invigorated anti-racist movement. These tensions, and the imperial mindset that birthed them, have dominated Britain's relationship with itself and the world ever since: from the jingoism of the Falklands War to the simplistic moral equation of Band Aid, from the rise of the gap year abroad to the invasion of Iraq. Most recently, in the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, we see how Britain's contradictory relationship with its past has undermined its self-image as a multicultural nation, helping explain the Windrush deportations and Brexit. Drawing on a mass of new research, from personal letters to pop culture, Imperial Island tells a story of immigration and fractured identity, of social strife and communal solidarity, of people on the move and of a people wrestling with their past. It is the story that best explains Britain today.

Who gets to exercise free speech, and what happens when powerful voices think they have been silenced? Assembling a diverse group of commentators, activists and academics, this book explores the contemporary free speech wars to try to understand how this issue has become increasingly charged. It asks how the spaces and structures of 'speech' - mass media, the lecture theatre, the public event, the political rally and the internet - shape this debate. The contributors examine how acts such as censorship, boycotts, and protests around free speech developed historically and how these histories inform the present. The book explores the opposing sides in this debate: beginning with a defence of speech freedoms and examining how speech has been curbed and controlled, before countering this with an exploration of the way that free speech has been weaponised and deployed as a bad faith argument by people wishing to commit harm. Considering two key battlefields in the free speech wars - the university campus and the internet - this book encourages the reader to be suspicious of the way that this topic is framed in the media today. The free speech wars offers context, provocation, stimulation and - hopefully - a route through this conflict. -- .