A Conservative MP has said that children are too “coddled” nowadays, during a panel on free speech.
Miriam Cates said that young people are sheltered from emotional distress which means they find it hard to hear opposing or offensive ideas.
The MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge said that her young children needed to have a risk as assessment before visiting the park with school.
Free speech is a hot topic at Tory party conference in Birmingham and at a separate panel a professor claimed the country was facing a cultural “Cold War”.
Cates told a debate hosted by the Young Conservatives that young people did not have a “good reputation” in terms of welcoming free speech.
She added: “I want to say it’s not your fault and I blame the parents.
“I think one of the things that your generation has been subjected to is this kind of coddling.
“I’m getting most of my ideas from a fantastic book called The Coddling of the American Mind, which I very much recommend to you. But the premise is that from a very young age, young people have been coddled physically.
“My grandfather, who’s 90 next week, when he was four he and his twin brother would be kicked out of the house every day from breakfast time, told to have some fun and come home for tea.
“So that was in the 1930s. When I grew up in the 1980s, we didn’t have anywhere near that amount of freedom.
“But, for example, I went on a school trip to France when I was 11, we got kicked out on the coach at 8 o’clock in the morning and none of us spoke a word of French and we were told to come back to 6 o’clock and our teachers went down the pub. That was just a normal school trip.
“Now my children – who are in primary school – have to have a risk assessment and I have to sign permission for them to go to the local park.
“That involves crossing one road on a zebra crossing with the teacher.
“So you’ve been coddled physically and not exposed to physical risk. And that has hampered your ability to face challenge, to make decisions and to face defeat or failure and to rise back from that.”
Cates said there had been a “mission creep” from physical safety into emotional safety. She said we protected children from emotional distress, which meant young people find it difficult to hear opposing or offensive ideas, adding: “So I think the future of free speech is not necessarily strong.”
In another debate on the first day of Tory conference, panellists were asked: “Is the UK a safe space for free speech?”
Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, claimed that the country was in a cultural “Cold War”.
He told a panel, organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs and TaxPayers’ Alliance, that “wokeness” and “cultural socialism” was becoming a dominant theme among young people, especially younger women.
“We are in a fight for the future of Western civilisation, for British civilisation,” he claimed.
Winston Marshall, former Mumford & Sons’ banjoist, also took part in the panel. He quit the band last year amid a storm after he tweeted his admiration for a book by controversial right-wing US journalist Andy Ngo.
Marshall told the panel: “It seems to me in the arts industry, where I am, there is a serious problem which is completely paradoxical because it’s an industry of people who rely on being able to express themselves and they are censoring themselves and it’s almost every week.”
