PC GONE MAD: Universities ‘would BAN JESUS from speaking on campus today’, says Oxford don

BRITAIN’S attitude to free speech is so feeble that even Jesus would be banned from preaching on university campuses, according a top Oxford academic.

Leading professor Timothy Garton Ash said a combination of barmy Home Office legislation and trigger-happy student activists had led to our right to freedom of expression “being salami-sliced away”.

The farcical situation comes despite Britain having played a part in inventing free speech, said the professor.

He told an audience at the Hay Festival that the government’s punitive security legislation meant that “non-violent extremists” such as Jesus and Charles Darwin would be blacklisted today.

He said: “Some of you may know that in the new counter-terrorism legislation, the securocrats in the Home Office are trying to impose on universities a so-called prevent duty, which would call on us to prevent event non-violent extremists.

“Now non-violent extremists? That’s Karl Marx, Rousseau, Charles Darwin, Hegel, and most clearly Jesus Christ, who was definitely a non-violent extremist.

“The Home Office wouldn’t want him preaching on campus.”

The expert historian added that censorious students’ demands for “so-called safe spaces” also posed a serious threat to free speech.

He said: “We have a big problem at the moment in our universities, because on the one hand we’re under attack from our government like I said.

“And on the other hand there’s a certain push from below from our own students demanding so-called safe spaces.”

“It’s one group of students censoring another.”

The Oxford don’s passionate takedown of the student anti-free speech lobby comes just days after the university’s vice-chancellor said “cosseted” young campaigners at the university should be exposed to more extreme views.

Professor Louise Richardson said: “When I was a student in the 1970s there were chants of ‘no free speech for fascists’ and so on but my view of course is that a university is exactly where you should hear these views and part of education is about hearing them and countering them reasonably.”