From Kay Burley to Tim Hunt, free speech is precious – and online mobs have no right to police it

I disagree with Hunt and agree with Burley – yet I celebrate their right to say it

Kay Burley has been accused of being confrontational (Rex Features)

The wonderful thing about freedom of speech is, while I can write what I like (within the law), you equally have the right to say it’s claptrap. With Twitter and, increasingly, online petitions, everyone can have their say. This is wonderful – I even applaud the guy who occasionally sends me tweets, copying in my editor, calling for my sacking because I’ve written something that offends him.

Yet not everyone is a fan of freedom of speech. Now 800 years after Runnymede, we have Magna Twitter, where sackings are demanded daily if people speak out of line. I am the last person in the world who hasn’t commented on Sir Tim Hunt, so here goes: his remarks were clearly a joke – made to an audience of women scientists and journalists. For after-dinner speeches, sending up the audience is part of the formula. Yes, they were stupid and crass, but worthy of losing his academic post, after a Magna Twitterstorm? No.

Kay Burley, the Sky News presenter, has also been the subject of a torrent of hate. A petition on Change.org now has more than 57,000 signatures calling for her sacking after conducting a “rude and patronising” interview with Nick Varney, the Alton Towers chief. Burley’s crime was to keep interrupting Varney and, also, “further trying to damage the company thinking she was clever”. The petitioner, Gareth Pugh, even equates Burley’s interviewing style with the rollercoaster accident in which four people sustained serious injuries, including one young woman losing a limb: “What happened at Alton Towers was awful and it shouldn’t have happened but what happened at your Sky studio was awful too and shouldn’t of (sic) happened.”

Those who would like Burley sacked are probably an entirely different set to those who hounded Sir Tim – not least because of the sexist tone of the Burley petition (all that “thinking she was clever”, how dare she?) and the fact that John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman pursue robust lines of questioning without someone firing off a clickable petition. But the overlap between them is their common demand for consequences for offence taken.

As it happens, I disagree with what Hunt said and I agree with Burley’s line of questioning – yet in both cases I celebrate their right to say it. In the case of Burley, I believe it is not just about her as a woman – much of the outrage seems to be centred on her very job, which is to ask questions and get to the truth. Ofcom, rightly, did not see the need for an investigation, ruling that Varney had plenty of opportunity to respond. Yet post-Leveson, we journalists are seen as the lowest of the low, even though most of us have never hacked a phone. I remember watching EastEnders in the 1990s, shortly after I’d got my first job as a reporter, and being horrified at the wildly exaggerated portrayal of a local journalist who stuck his foot in someone’s door and refused to leave. The current perception is even more inaccurate. How dare we journalists, asks the Magna Twitter mob, ask questions?

I am not asking for sympathy. I am also not opposed to online petitions – Change.org has raised awareness of important issues and given a voice to people normally denied a platform. But when tweets and petitions demanding sackings, as in both Burley’s case and the calls for the resignation of the Telegraph journalists who reported leaked documents about Nicola Sturgeon, I feel a chill sweeping from Fleet Street to the Sky News centre in Isleworth and down the Thames to Runnymede. A society that demands journalists face consequences for asking questions is more redolent of Turkey – where Sedef Kabas, whom one might call the Kay Burley of Turkish broadcasting, was detained by police for a single tweet – rather than the freedoms envisaged in Magna Carta. You can disagree or even launch a petition. Just be thankful that we live in a country where you can.