Founder of LGBTQ+ group Stonewall backs spaces safe for disagreement after Dowden's 'woke psychodrama' swipe

Simon Fanshawe, founder of LGBTQ+ group Stonewall, responding to former Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden’s comments that "woke psychodrama" threatens western values, says he wants to create spaces safe for disagreement not from disagreement.

Speaking to Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster on GB News, he thought debate on contentious issues can be split into three broad categories, “thoughtless, malicious and careless”, he said.

Mr Fanshawe suggests that although some people deliberately set out to cause problems, there is an “ambiguous” area where there is a danger of applying motive to someone’s potentially careless remarks, and “cutting off dialogue”.

He said differences of opinion between people “bring richness” to stories and highlighted the need not for spaces “that are safe for disagreement, not from disagreement".

In a recent speech on so-called “cancel culture” hosted by the Heritage Foundation in the US, Oliver Dowden dubbed “woke” ideology as a “dangerous form of decadence” at a time when “our attention should be focused on external foes”.

He said a West “confident in its values” would not be “obsessing over pronouns or indeed seeking to decolonise mathematics”.