Standing up for cultural freedom

A curious mix of emotions hit me on the evening of Monday 26th April, attending the launch of The New Boycott Crisis report from Freedom in the Arts (FITA). Anguish, sorrow, hope – all in the mix. Along with the complimentary wine, in the splendour of the Churchill Room in Westminster, it was a heady combination.

Anyone who remembers an arts world that wasn’t characterised by censorship campaigns, fear, and the inadequate cultural leadership the report highlights — who can recall, as it states, “an ecology that was once built on talent, artistic judgement, meritocracy and creative risk” — likely felt the same.

The 37-page document, compiled by FITA’s founders Rosie Kay and Denise Fahmy, co-written with Professor Jo Phoenix, is the bleakest account of the situation facing  UK-based artists to date. 

An interconnected cultural cowardice maintains the injustices and discrimination facing too many artists

Drawing on survey data and in-depth interviews, it confirms with brutal clarity how corrupted the sector has become. An interconnected cultural cowardice maintains the injustices and discrimination facing too many artists targeted on the basis of ideological beliefs, rather than artistic principles.

Personally, it also confirms that had the cultural landscape remotely resembled its current state when I was cutting my teeth on raucous poetry and live literature stages in the early noughties, I’d never have managed to build a successful poetry and events career to be cancelled from in the first place. 

There were several “cancelled” artists in the room that evening. Some were contributors to the report. Others, like me, featured in FITA’s May 2025 report, Afraid To Speak Freely. Alongside MPs, peers, journalists, and interested parties, including those working for freedom of expression organisations, we listened to invited speakers including singer-songwriter Roisin Murphy and Josh Breslaw, the drummer of Jewish band Oi Va Voi. 

“Gender-critical” views remain a top reason for artistic cancellation. But what the report highlights — and Breslaw hit home in a powerful address — is that Jewish artists are increasingly being targeted on the basis of their identity, rather than anything they have done or said. 

In fact, even if Jewish artists and writers have said nothing about Middle East politics, that in itself is taken to be suspect; a justification for venue cancellations, protests, and accusations of “Zionism”. This is a mere cover for Jew hatred. 

As I write this, on Wednesday 29th April, BBC News 24 plays in the background. News of an antisemitic knife attack on two Jewish Londoners blasts across my screen. 

I’m thankful to remember an arts world that was a powerful antidote to political and social ills, not somewhere propping up the very hatred that tries to justify or minimise acts like this. 

“Something has gone wrong in the arts. Not at the margins, not in isolated incidents,” FITA’s report states, but “structurally”, affecting artists primarily, but also venues, institutions, and cultural leaders who often know they’re betraying the artists their organisations are supposed to support.

Anyone paying attention already knows this, but the report’s condensing of the issues makes for stark reading. The ideological conformity expected of artists — such as conformity to some truly outlandish ideas like “gender identity” — has filled column inches for years. Refusing to conform, opposing the corruption of a once rich and diverse cultural ecology (yes, it did exist, we didn’t imagine it) has been punishing in the extreme.

I rarely admit this, but despite managing to somewhat write my way through my own cancellation in the Scottish live literature sector, being targeted as a “TERF” and losing my former poetry career has often felt like having a limb cut off. 

Saying so feels vulnerable. It’s the curse of cancellation: you must remember how unjust your treatment is, try to rise above it and keep your head, while simultaneously dealing with inevitable mockery for daring to have an emotional range other than that of a gerbil at the sadness, stupidity, and inhumanity of it all. 

But here’s the hope: over post-event pizza with Josh Breslaw, Rosie Kay, Denise Fahmy and a few others, we shared a common bond due to our varied experiences. As Rosie has said elsewhere, “Nobody gets to choose the times they live in,” and, despite the genuine trauma of cancellation from former vocations and livelihoods, I know my own life has been enriched by having women like Rosie in it.

In 2021, after 18 months of floundering in the “gender wars”, we were put in touch by a mutual acquaintance. Rosie was about to go public with her story of cancellation by her own dance company for committing a similar “crime” as I had — a disbelief in gender identity ideology. Our mutual wondered if I had any advice having spoken out about my own situation a year earlier?

I did not, really, other than emotional support — something repaid in abundance many times since. 

The New Boycott Crisis report is accompanied by a much-needed toolkit for venues and institutions facing the “new normal” of anticipated — and real — protests, with the aim that “artistic freedom is not quietly surrendered” in its entirety. 

I want to emphasise how rare an artist Rosie Kay is. Yes, I am biased due to our friendship, possibly. But she is someone who demonstrably cares as much about the arts generally, as she does finding ways to navigate her own deeply illiberal, unfair “cancellation” as a dancer/ choreographer in a difficult field. I admire her, and respect her wisdom more than I can say. 

We mightn’t get to choose the times we live in, but we choose how to respond. Rosie Kay, through co-founding Freedom In The Arts, chose defiance, and helping others in crisis. Cultural institutions must do the same.