A TWO-DAY conference at Southampton University, on “International Law and the State of Israel,” due to be held this month was cancelled on health and safety grounds.

It’s unlikely that the lecture hall was dangerous, but certain politicians and the Israeli lobby pressured the university to stop the event.

Our higher education establishments are now so timid that they back down at the first sign of controversy. Eric Pickles and others described the conference as “anti-Semitic: a provocative, hard-line, one-sided forum that would question and delegitimise the existence of a democratic state.”

So what do they call brow-beating a university into submission? Is that not hard-line or provocative? There was a great hue and cry about freedoms after Charlie Hebdo.

The Guardian said that if there’s a right to free speech, there had to be “implicit within it, the right to offend.” So why no protests and no media coverage?

Carmel Townsend, St Julians Road, Newport