This whole "Freedom of Speech" thing

See, I'm doing it myself. I put the term in inverted commas.

It seems that these days, freedom of expression has gone out of fashion on the left and among progressive campaigners in the UK. Instead it's been replaced by quiet acceptance of censorship, as long as it helps stop people from feeling "offended". In fact, "I find that offensive" is practically the automatic trump card in everyday arguments, before we even get to the level of the "incitement to religious hatred laws" (*cough*blasphemy laws*cough*) that the government has recently been putting through the commons.

It's a joke, really to see how a concern not to offend conservative religious lobbies has enabled the right to co-opt this debate. During the infamous "Danish cartoons" thing we were subjected on the one hand to right-wing newspaper editors smugly republishing inflammatory images that fed into a general climate of demonisation of Muslim Arab and South Asian people in Europe. At the same time, we saw arguments from clerics calling for the things to be banned on grounds of their being "offensive" (ie, blasphemous).

It's a difficult line to draw, but it seems to me that the much-maligned mainstream press in the UK took more or less the right line - ie they condemned the death threats made towards the cartoonists, insisted on a legal right to free speech, but then used their own editorial control to refuse to publish themselves. Freedom of expression is freedom of expression, but the right to publish is not the same as the obligation to do so.

And the left? Well, the left by and large... errr... kept quiet, other than to say that the cartoons themselves were racist. Which, whilst certainly true in the sense that they fed a climate of anti-Muslim racism, does little to actually intervene in the debate about whether images should be made illegal on the grounds that they are against a particular belief system.

On a different note I'm glad to see that Asia House's closure of the exhibition of MF Husain's art (which was deemed "offensive" by a group called "Hindu Human Rights") was met with strong opposition from a substantial group of progressive South Asian academics and campaigners in the UK. They show that it is very much possible to be consistently anti-racist, progressive, and in favour of free expression.

Indeed, in my view free expression is essential to a truly effective anti-racist politics. I just wonder sometimes how many on the left still believe it. It's weird for someone like me to find themselves nodding along with some of what the libertarian right have to say on social issues, whilst still radically disagreeing with them on economic ones.

Perhaps there's a case for the libertarian left to wake itself up.