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“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Editor’s note: The following article, from former Mumford & Sons co-founding musician/songwriter Winston Marshall, was originally posted at The Spectator in February of 2022.
In March 2021, Marshall committed the cardinal sin of tweeting praise for the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by courageous journalist Andy Ngo. The ensuing leftwing outrage prompted Marshall to take a break from the band “to examine my blindspots.” But in June of that year he wrote an essay defending his support for Ngo and announcing that he would be permanently leaving Mumford & Sons to exercise free speech about politics without involving his former bandmates. He subsequently launched a podcast to discuss controversial issues with fellow figures from the artistic community.
In this time of “cancel culture” and “soft totalitarianism,” when artists risk violent condemnation for expressing opinions that dissent from the Progressive orthodoxy in pop culture, Winston Marshall’s intellectual independence and courage are a vital antidote and inspiration.
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“The mob’s going to want a chicken to kill and they won’t care much who it is,” wrote John Steinbeck. “Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.”
I’ve been thinking about those words in recent days as more “cancelled” headlines fill the news. I was a co-founding member of the band Mumford and Sons, which I quit last year. I praised a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States and all hell broke loose, so I decided better to leave my band and save my bandmates the trouble. Better that than stay and self-censor. Now that I am on this side of the parapet I thought I should use my voice to identify the totemic difficult taboo topics that we can’t talk about. That’s why I have launched a new show, Marshall Matters, on Spectator TV: I’ll be talking not to politicians but to musicians, artists, composers, comedians, everyone in the creative industries, and encouraging them to speak freely at a time when many feel they can’t.
You’ll have heard about the Jimmy Carr joke about gypsies and the Holocaust. It was distasteful, deliberately so, and I won’t repeat it here. What is strange is that it was broadcast more than a month ago online, yet the fuss has erupted only now. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who is pushing the online safety bill, called the joke “abhorrent and unacceptable,” adding ominously: “We don’t have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that. But very shortly we will.” You don’t have to find Jimmy Carr funny to be alarmed at a politician sounding so authoritarian.
