British values are under attack from every angle - what has become of us? Asks David Campbell-Bannerman

I often watch not just on TV but listen on the radio when working. What a disgrace it is that woke corporate advertisers, jealous media rivals and Leftist politicians are seeking to destroy our way of life to replace it with an idealised universal homogenous super-diverse experimental view of the world that Klaus Schwab’s WEF would approve of.

All of the usual tenants of our life – the British sense of humour; unique and special in the world, being killed off by a puritanical pursuit of politically correct thinking. TV series within recent memory are suddenly censored or banned: ‘Little Britain’ requires its creators to go on bended knee to apologise for the fun they gave us; Monty Python attacked for being too clever and not diverse enough – and how wonderful it was to see the brilliant John Cleese, a hero of mine, addressing free speech issues so honestly on GB News.

Even the classic ‘Dad’s Army’ and ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ are swept from the airwaves like embarrassing offensive relatives not trusted to be in the company of today’s society. Modern comedians live in fear of one gag that ends their career in a flash. This is nothing but extreme Puritanical censorship – a return to the nonsense of the Lord Chancellor banning ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ to protect the public or Cromwell’s Parliament banning Christmas. What happened to free speech; free expression, free thought – to all our individual freedoms?

It is now a crime to offend. Not just in Scotland with the appalling Yousaf’s new hate crime laws, including the sex club where snitchers can report fellow citizens in true East German Stasi style (where one third of the population reported on the other two thirds). Our right to speak freely has been surrendered on the altar of not causing offence. New terms have been invented to become crimes – such as ‘Islamophobia’.

In various interviews I challenged those pushing this term how to define it. No one could – the chair of the Labour Party (my former MEP colleague) Anneliese Dodds couldn’t do it on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme nor could a host of critics. For me a phobia (Greek word phobia meaning anxiety disorder) is an irrational fear of something, not a twisted vehicle to ban all criticism of a religion. Arachnophobia is an irrational fear of spiders but doesn’t mean one hates spiders and is not a crime (yet!). You can’t prosecute people on the basis of loose ill formed notions – that is Stalinist.

Technical definitions really matter – for example Mayor Sadiq Khan calling Lee Anderson’s remarks on him racist is a nonsense when he wasn’t talking about a race but a faith. But this mass hysteria is worthy of the Salom Witch Trials and the play ‘The Crucible’ – which reflected the censorship of McCarthyism, ironically which was aimed at finding communist ‘reds under the bed’. Only personal courage and determination can reverse it – and we see much of this from GB News.

Traditional Britons are being treated as extremists when the real extremists are those who want to destroy all we stand for and believe in.

In all sincerity, there has been a Cultural Marxist ‘march through the institutions’ that we are reluctant to acknowledge. This is not about race, religion or identity – it is really about revolution; about bringing our society, and all it believes in, down. We have seen it literally with relentless attacks on our statues – including the liberator of the free world, Churchill.

These insurgents are now ingrained in all our institutions – from academia (witness how low great universities have fallen - such as Harvard and Pennsylvania (which I attended for an exchange year) - behaved over antisemitic attacks being excusable, and led by people there allegedly mostly to satisfy diversity agendas and not academic rigour.

It’s the same in our schools, media, amongst our politicians and officials, our judiciary and police even, with the last bastion of our Armed Forces now under threat where white male fighter pilots, who saved the free world in 1940, are now considered undesirable. This is as mad as Salom was mad – irrational, emotive, fearful, out of control, over the top which led to many unjust executions.

Eventually common sense returned – but it took brave people to stand up to it and to expose it as nonsense.

We need our GB News champions to fight back more than ever now.