It is remarkable that the Society of Authors has chosen to risk its 138-year-old reputation over a little social-media outrage. (Remember that the original criticism of Clanchy began in the comments section of the website GoodReads, which spilled over into Twitter and only then made its way into the national press.) As a union, it has a responsibility to defend its writers against threats of discrimination, pay disputes and all the other things your average union does. 

Moreover, in representing people whose trade is putting pen to paper, it should have a strong stance when it comes to freedom of expression, protecting the freedom of authors to write things that might excite, frustrate and (yes) upset. And as an organisation invested in cultivating a healthy culture around reading and writing, it clearly should have supported Pullman’s statement, however melodramatic his imagery, that reading and understanding a book should come prior to criticising it.

The Society of Authors is not alone in its failure to mount a robust defence of freedom of speech. The American Civil Liberties Union has recently besmirched its history of going to great lengths (and risks) to defend freedom, by capitulating to the demands of online trans activists that “offensive” or “harmful” speech be banned: it even rewrote a well-known quote about abortion rights by the late US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg, replacing her use of the word “woman’s” with “person’s”. And I gave up my membership of the National Union of Journalists back in 2017, when it backed the Government’s second Leveson inquiry, essentially greenlighting attacks on freedom of the press.