We had a disappointing experience at Wexford Opera Festival this year, with three duds rather than the usual tally of one dud, one mediocre work and one gem.

For this reason I decided to look more closely at next year’s offering of operas in the main house. They are grouped together as ‘one for the heart, one for the mind and one for fun’.

The one for the mind must be ‘The Gambler’, an opera by Prokofiev based on a play by Dostoevsky. I was even able to watch it on YouTube if I wanted to. It is a two hour production in Russian (with English subtitles) from the Marinsky Theatre.

Then there was ‘Iris’ the one for the heart, an opera set in Japan and written by Pietro Mascagni. Apparently, Puccini liked the music but didn't think much of the drama itself. On the other hand, his Madame Butterfly came out a couple of years later – coincidence?

The one for fun therefore is ‘L'equivoco stravagante’ by Rossini, a work written in 1811. It was his first complete opera and only had a couple of performances until it faded into obscurity. So then not very promising. It turns out, however, that the Wexford audiences loved it when it was put on in 1968. In fact the reason for its ‘neglect’ was that the Italian censors didn’t like the way it poked fun at the aristocracy. So then it may be a good choice after all.

Mind you, quite how Mozart got away with the Marriage of Figaro in 1786 in Vienna is a puzzle: maybe the Austrian thought police had slightly less rigid views or perhaps Mozart had become too popular to ban the work.

In July 1968 in this country, we finally saw the abolition of the role of the Lord Chamberlain as the UK’s official censor for the theatre. That his work was confined to the theatre was an indication of the origin of the role more than two hundred years previously. In 1736 Sir Robert Walpole introduced his ‘Playhouse Bill’ a popular measure in parliament and on its way to becoming law when the Earl of Chesterfield made a speech that resonated with playwrights down the ages. He said:

‘If poets and players are to be restrained let them be restrained by the known laws of their country. Do not let us subject them to the arbitrary will and pleasure of any one man. A power lodged in the hands of one single man to judge & determine without any limitation, without any control or appeal is the sort of power that is inconsistent with our constitution.’

As other media emerged, various forms of control were imposed, such as the film classification system. The statutes setting up the BBC required accuracy and balance in what could be said. Now, however, the controls created are withering away.

Unlike the TV, the radio or the press, social media are run by companies who are not ‘publishers’ and so are free from the need to fact-check or provide any balance. And we now have an AI generated video on Truth Social of Trump flying a plane from which he drops excrement on those who oppose him. We can see in that video a real revolution in western attitudes towards free political speech.

In many respects this was the triumph of one man, Elon Musk, albeit with the co-operation of a certain Donald Trump.

Many politicians, particularly on the right, now speak entirely differently because of it, even if they aren’t openly fantasising about following Trump in how they show their displeasure from altitude.

Musk bought Twitter, now X, because he believed it had become the main incubator of a “woke mind virus” infecting the West. He seems to have believed that content moderation on social media was dragging politics leftwards, boosting cancel culture, promoting cowardly liberal acquiescence and hobbling the development of western civilisation.

Unfortunately, there is truth in what he believed. Over the last few years, cancel culture has meant that gender-critical voices in particular have felt the online pressure to conform, to acquiesce in censorship by social media; to use a panoply of personal pronouns which many of us simply don’t understand. What is Xie?

Musk’s solution, however, was to scrap moderation altogether. He is a believer in an absolute right to free speech. Other platforms willingly followed his lead. Most - Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta group, for example - had never been wild about moderation in the first place but had been pushed by public opinion and state pressure into doing it. And often the censorship was very poorly defined, amounting to the opinion not of one man as with the Lord Chamberlain, but one algorithm. Post Trump and post Musk, with one bound they were free.

But this means that, online, nobody is now policing anything. Which was, and remains, a problem. That’s not just a problem from a left-wing perspective, however: it has come back to bite the right as well.

In America, the ‘Maga’ attorney-general Pam Bondi said last month that “there’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech”, this after internet trolls celebrated the murder of the activist Charlie Kirk. A couple of weeks ago the White House revoked the visas of six foreign citizens on that basis. The American right wing insists on absolute free speech except when they are its target.

Theoretically, Americans are protected by the First Amendment. Yet JD Vance, the vice-president, has also called for ‘wrong-speakers’ to be denounced to their employers. Some will be public figures, such as the comedian Jimmy Kimmel who can get their fans to support them. Others will just be posting on platforms where, until recently, the most likely danger was merely that they’d get kicked off.

In this country, a pernicious form of censorship grew from, well, I’m not entirely sure where. It was the censorship intrinsic in the investigation of non-crime hate incidents. Something which never made any sense to the man in the street - or me. Initially, I suppose that the perceived justification was that it was a means of keeping track on expressions of hate which might evolve into the criminal version of it, that associated with violence or against protected categories of people.

They were though used to a ridiculous degree - at least 13,000 in a year - and so were always a recipe for disaster.

The Graham Linehan case, in which the Irish comedy writer (Father Ted, etc) was arrested by five armed police after landing at Heathrow, was a really appalling example and brought it all to a head. In the light of the outcry, the Met Police, with the support of the government, have finally decided to retire from the business of censoring non-crime hatred. Presumably, that frees them up to do more useful things for society, like tracking down real criminals.

But it is without doubt that what Linehan said would not have been published initially in the mainstream media. Why? Because they are publishers and so have to comply with their various codes of conduct as publishers. Once the police felt his collar then of course the press could justify publishing his remarks as the context. But no such constraints affect social media, i.e. X, where he made his rather rude comments.

Even for the short period they felt compelled to pretend otherwise, the attitude of tech companies has always been that the speech they enabled might be a problem for society, for governments, and even for the police, but absolutely is not a problem for them. They have no responsibility to anyone, except towards their shareholders. And as we know, encouraging traffic is what leads to profit. And it is controversy which produces traffic on social media.

I have no solution to propose, but note that one element of the axis of evil, Mr Trump, has net approval figures on all aspects of his performance on a bigly downward trajectory. So there is yet a faint hope that people will come to their senses.

28th October 2025

Paul Buckingham