Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote a  biography of Voltaire entitled The Friends of Voltaire, in which she used the famous phrase: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. This is the gold standard for free speech in our society, one of our fundamental rights. Yet less educated people seem to think that free speech applies to what they themselves think, but not to what other people think. We get this imposed on us by the state with the horrendous socialist dogma of political correctness and their enactment of invidious thought crimes on the whole of society.

Just now we are just coming to the end of an independence referendum campaign in Scotland, home of The Enlightenment, an outpouring of intellectual accomplishment. Yet sadly this campaign has been characteristic by thuggery, bullying and intimidation from one side, the YES campaigners, as they seek to silence the arguments of the NO campaign. This is horrendous, it is uncivilised, it is undemocratic and it is ignorant. What makes it even worse, it has been cheerleaded by the leaders of the YES campaign, who really should know better.

I have written two articles about Scotland in this blog: Should we kick the whingeing Jocks out of the UK? and The Scots aren’t very bright. Both of these are designed to provoke thought and to point out the absolute fact that Scotland is far, far better within the Union. An independent Scotland really would be Venezuela with Buckfast. For those who don’t know what this means, Venezuela is a very oil rich country that suffers from socialism and had a charismatic leader. And the whole country is one big, slow motion, train crash.

So back to the YES campaign thuggery, what have they been doing?:

• Intimidating canvassers in the street.
• Trying to intimidate the press into favouring their case. They have targeted individual journals and broadcasters and they have even gone after individual journalists.
• Removing and defacing posters and other election material belonging to the NO campaign.
• Shouting down NO campaign speakers.
• Physical intimidation such as jostling and egging NO campaign leaders.
• Using the mob at every opportunity to intimidate, bully and drown out all opposition.

You can understand why the YES campaign are behaving so disgustingly, their campaign has zero intellectual credibility, they are just Braveheart with smartphones, they have no valid case to make. So they try and destroy the very good case that their opponents do have. Yet you have to wonder why any decent, educated, fair minded person would ever vote YES. Who would want to live in a country run by people with this disgusting attitude?