Chickens? Roost?

Sp!ked: Irving and Livingstone: what liberal backlash?

These are, as we know, illiberal times, when you can hardly smoke acigarette, celebrate a goal or hate religion/homosexuality/theWelsh/whatever without the risk of having your collar felt. Yetsuddenly it seems as if everybody wants to sign up to a 'liberalbacklash'...Over the past week or so, however, many who previously took little orno interest in these issues suddenly began howling with outrage at thetreatment of Irving and Livingstone. Confronted with these extremeexamples of the ugly illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies inpolitics today, they recoil in horror. Yet these cases are in fact onlya logical extension of the broader political climate we live under now- a climate which many of the alleged back-lashers have helped tocreate and institutionalise.