"Freedom of Speech"

Been meaning to link to David Renton's website for some time, mainly because he's been hassling me to do so... but it's worth a look, lots of interesting stuff - including this nugget, posted on the 7 February, that caught my eye. Dave's discussing one of the organisations that called reproducing racist cartoons a "free speech issue":

...In a previous incarnation, 'Spiked' was the magazine Living Marxism, the publication of a party called the 'Revolutionary Communist Party'. As the RCP started to go down the pan, in the mid-1990s, it dissolved its activities into a series of front organisations, pushing the issue of free speech. I remember being in Sheffield in 1995-8, when the main activities of the group were to promote showings of such films as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Leading BNP activist Mark Collett always boasts that he joined the BNP, through the activities of one such RCP front, 'When I came to Leeds University I joined the Free Speech society to fight against political correctness. Then a BNP speaker got expelled, which I thought was absurd. He invited me to a BNP meeting in Burnley and I felt right at home. They were my kind of people.'