The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
DOUGLAS MURRAY
(BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM, 288 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

This is a brave book, because it deals head-on with issues about which ­reasoned debate is closed down in our culture. It is also a dispiriting one, because it charts so many instances of intimidation by the self-appointed guardians of the virtue-signalling, victimhood-affirming norms, and so much pusillanimity on the part of so many who should be prepared to confront these guardians, but instead collaborate and collude with them.

Douglas Murray’s chapter headings promise an examination – fearless, as it turns out – of the shibboleths that mark the boundaries of what can be said in the areas fraught with danger: “Gay”; “Women”; “Race”; “Trans”. As he did in his earlier writing on the influence of Islam in the West, The Strange Death of Europe, Murray itemises the constraints on free speech imposed through intimidation, on a spectrum from abusive name-calling (bigot! ****phobe!) to opprobrium in polite society, to hounding by social media mobs or indeed street mobs. He illustrates the ease with which sentiments deemed “problematic” (a catch-all buzzword, deliberately ill-defined so that it can be employed to silence opponents who rely on reason and freedom of speech) can, when expressed publicly (and everything is public), rapidly end a person’s career.