Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government claims to have “turned the tide” against cancel culture even as a player on England’s national cricket team has been suspended for tweets sent as a teenager.
“I think that we have seen a turn of the tide [against cancel culture],” claimed Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick MP in an interview with The Telegraph, in reference to new protections which the Tories claim will protect statues and other memorials from being destroyed or displaced by leftist politicians and officials in municipal governments.
“You’re finding organisations who were subject to abuse, often from a small but very vocal group of people, being able now to know that they’ve got the backing of the law… there is due process that has to be followed. And the Government now has a very, very clear position,” Jenrick claimed.
Even as the Tory minister made these statements, however, the statue of Edward Colston, a Christian philanthropist and former MP, which was torn down by a Black Lives Matter mob in Bristol while police chose to do nothing has been put is being put on display, flat on its back and covered in carefully preserved graffiti, at a publicly-funded museum — and a player on England’s national cricket team has been suspended after activists dug up tweets he sent as a teenager in order to be offended by them.
Ollie Robinson will be unable to play in the upcoming Test match against New Zealand on June 10th as a result of the suspension, which follows media members publicising politically incorrect tweets he posted all the way back in 2012 and 2013 when he was still a teenager.
England captain Joe Root said of the 27-year-old player, who is new to the national team, that “From a performance point of view, on the field, he’s had an exceptional debut” — but for the England and Wales Cricket Board the possibility of teenaged speech crimes trumped athletic performance, with a disciplinary investigation and Robinson’s immediate exit from the England training camp being announced swiftly despite a fulsome apology.
The Johnson administration has offered some mild pushback on Robinson’s cancellation, with Culture Secretary Robert Jenrick saying that the cricketer’s tweets were “a decade old and written by a teenager. The teenager is now a man and has rightly apologised. The ECB has gone over the top by suspending him and should think again.”
He could not resist opening by branding the tweets “offensive and wrong”, however, and did not indicate that the government had any plans to use its powers to strip publicly-funded bodies like the ECB which engage in cancel culture of funding, or indeed of providing people with protections against having their jobs for exercising their free speech, offensively or otherwise, in a way their employer does not like, even at times when they were not under contract.
Whether Johnson’s ostensibly anti-cancel culture government will make any intervention beyond voicing polite disagreement on Twitter remains to be seen.
Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
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