DOUGLAS MURRAY, an author and director of the think-tank, The Centre for Social Cohesion, had been invited to chair a debate at the London School of Economics (LSE) called “Islam or Liberalism: Which is the Way Forward?”

An official statement from the LSE said that Mr Murray had been dropped in the interests of public safety. It was suggested that Mr Murray’s mere presence might give rise to violence and disorder. But everyone knows that the real reasons why Mr Murray was “disinvited” are that he is a noted critic of militant Islam and, generally, a journalist who supports right-wing causes.

Double standards are in operation here, as students from LSE have just concluded a week-long siege in protest against Israel for responding to terrorism by attacking Hamas in Gaza. That student siege did not merely risk promoting public disorder: it was itself an instance of public disorder. Besides, it is disingenuous and cowardly of the LSE authorities to allow a group of its home-grown loud lefties effectively to use blackmail in order to deny freedom of speech.

Mr Murray himself said: “This is back to the bad old days of the LSE – where the most violent get to dictate people’s education. It is worse than censorship – it’s intimidation.”

The LSE has for a generation been dominated by the rent-a-mob brutality of the lumpen intelligentsia. There, back in the late Sixties, the daily life of the institution was brought to a standstill by violent protests and sit-ins. These were instigated by students who advertised themselves as revolutionary Marxists, but who were, in reality, only the usual infantilised crowd of pampered narcissists – paying for their antics on daddy’s credit card. They were only playing a small part in the nihilistic violence which was spreading throughout the universities on the west coast of the US and in Paris.

I even remember the pretext for these uprisings.

The students claimed the university authorities were keeping secret files on them.

When the authorities denied this, inviting students to examine their offices, the offer was rejected on the grounds: “Of course we won’t find any files – they are secret.” A pure example of the identity of indiscernibles.

At least since the 1960s there has been this infestation of our educational institutions by the paranoid fascist left, and I was personally involved in a nasty example of it in York University in 1985. A conservative academic, Professor Roger Scruton, was invited to give a public lecture. The assembled student thugs would not let him speak, but booed and screamed and shouted him down every time he made the attempt.

Ironically, the title of Prof Scruton’s lecture was “Freedom of Speech”. The left claims always to be in favour of free speech, but only when the speakers are in agreement with them. It is a far cry from the words of the genuine radical-liberal, Voltaire: “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

What is sickening is the gutless capitulation of the university authorities in the face of this sort of monstrous intimidation. They always cave in to the thugs. If universities will not defend our intellectual and democratic freedoms, we are indeed imprisoned in the totalitarian nightmare against which the rabble-rousers claim to be protesting.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.