Being cancelled took a heavy toll on my mental health. That's why I'm so fearful of Burnham's new Ministry of Truth: TOBY YOUNG

When was the last time you heard someone say, ‘It’s a free country’? It used to be the stock British response when a person complained about being offended by a controversial opinion. Not any more.

According to a recent report by Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties group, between 34 and 40 people a day are being arrested for speech crimes, including making risque jokes. Only about 20 per cent are found guilty, but those who aren’t risk having a ‘non-crime hate incident’ recorded against their name. The police are logging about 65 of those a day.

But it’s about to get worse. In a speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, Andy Burnham unveiled a new surveillance unit – the National Centre for Information Defence – designed to ‘stem the poisonous tide’ of disinformation. The Prime Minister identified Russia as the biggest threat, but the agency, dubbed Labour’s ‘Ministry of Truth’, will soon start spying on the domestic population.

By my count, this new centre takes the total number of shadowy Whitehall bodies monitoring our speech to ten. Anyone posting something intemperate on social media about, say, the small boats or drag queen story hour, could well find themselves up before a magistrate or put through a disciplinary process at work.

In 2020, I set up the Free Speech Union (FSU) to protect people who get into trouble for ‘wrongthink’ and we’ve now fought over 6,500 cases – the tip of the iceberg.

But what is not often talked about is the mental health toll that cancellation takes on its victims. To this end, I welcomed the opportunity to collaborate with two clinical psychologists – Carole Sherwood and Andrew MacLeod – on a survey about the psychological impact of being cancelled. Of the 255 victims in their study – all people the FSU has helped – 80 per cent said their mental health had been adversely affected, with 27 per cent reporting they’d had to take medication as a result.

Even more alarming, 20 per cent put themselves in the most severe depression category.

This comes as no surprise. The wellspring of the idea for the FSU came from my own experience of being cancelled in 2018.

In a speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, Andy Burnham unveiled a new surveillance unit – the National Centre for Information Defence – designed to ‘stem the poisonous tide’ of disinformation

At its most intense, cancel culture can lead to people taking their own life, as in the recent case of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor exposed as a fabulist in the Press

I was appointed to the board of the Office for Students, a new higher education regulator, and – as soon as it was announced – the offence archaeologists set to work, digging through everything I’d said or written, trying to find evidence I wasn’t a suitable person to serve on this esteemed public body. Because I’ve been an outspoken journalist for most of my career, it didn’t take them long to find a Tutankhamun’s tomb’s-worth of dodgy material. The things that got me into the most trouble were sophomoric comments on social media, such as a sick joke I made in 2009 following a BBC film about starving Africans on Red Nose Day.

Within weeks I’d had to step down from five different positions, including my full-time job running an education charity.

The first inkling that this experience was taking a toll on my mental health was when I stepped on the scales about seven days into my cancellation. At this point, a petition demanding that I be sacked from the Office for Students had attracted over 220,000 signatures. I looked down and discovered I’d lost half a stone. In a week! I wasn’t eating any less, but the sheer stress of being targeted in this way had led to rapid weight loss – the public humiliation diet.

I theorised that this was an atavistic survival mechanism dating back to the Paleolithic period. When you were ex-communicated by your hunter-gatherer band for breaching a sacred taboo, you needed to run away as fast as you could before you were ritually slaughtered – and shedding weight meant you could run faster.

One source of anxiety was that the haters who were wishing me dead on social media at a rate of about 100 a minute would materialise outside my home, like an actual pitchfork mob. So whenever I left the house I wore a fur trapper hat, which covered most of my face as a makeshift disguise. But of course, the would-be Torquemadas never appeared in real life. It’s a lot easier to join a pile-on in the virtual world than it is to confront someone in the flesh.

By the time the dust had cleared three months later, I began to notice that my perception of colours and sounds was more intense, so paintings became brighter and music more intoxicating. Was that a trauma response? I never sought a diagnosis, but heightened sensory perception is sometimes reported by people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A third of the sample in Carol and Andrew’s survey showed signs of PTSD.

One psychological reaction I experienced that I later discovered is very common was believing that I must deserve the misfortune that had befallen me. I carried out an internal audit of my behaviour dating back decades, searching for reasons why I should be made to suffer in this way. A psychologist later explained that I was clinging to the ‘just world fallacy’ – the belief, very difficult to shed, that the universe is just and nothing good or bad happens without a reason.

To preserve this illusion, those who’ve suffered a major reversal of fortune, as I had, look for things they’ve done that have brought this on themselves. I eventually discarded this belief, at which point I started to feel a lot better, and the first thing I say to people in the throes of cancellation is: ‘You haven’t done anything to deserve this and don’t start persuading yourself that you have.’

One thing that emerges from Carol and Andrew’s research is just how important family is when you’re going through one of these nightmares. Without the steadfast loyalty of my wife Caroline, I would have found my own cancellation immeasurably harder to deal with. I pity those who have to cope with such humiliation alone.

So I hope the report is a wake-up call to those who think cancel culture is nothing more than holding people to account for spreading hate or trafficking disinformation. Whatever they have said or done – and it’s nearly always said – they don’t deserve to find themselves wriggling at the end of a metaphorical pitchfork.

It’s a truly awful experience and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. At its most intense, it can lead to people taking their own life, as in the recent case of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor exposed as a fabulist in the Press.

Meanwhile, Whitehall mandarins are continuing to comb through our social media accounts, ready to refer some malefactor to the authorities at the slightest sign of dissent from progressive orthodoxy. It’s as though the Labour government is acting like a colonial power occupying a foreign country and has built a surveillance apparatus to manage the unruly indigenous population.

Got to keep a close eye on Johnny Native and nip any potential uprisings in the bud!

• Ripped Apart (Cancel Culture: The Cost To Mental Health) by Carole Sherwood and Andrew MacLeod is available to read on the Free Speech Union website.