When Did Free Speech Start to Decline?

Some days ago, Anna Soubry MP was subjected to harassment and intimidation for expressing her views on Brexit.  As this was a MP immediately outside Parliament it got more attention than Luciana Berger or Laura Kuenssburg;  let alone people without media links.

Some people on both the hard right and the hard left seem to see this kind of intimidation as their right, when it appeared to me to be them interfering with other people's freedom of speech.

I first noticed it as a deliberate tactic during the Scottish independence referendum.  Nick Robinson, Jim Murphy and others complained back then of "protests" being used to bully and silence people.  It is effectively a kind of Twitter pile on in real life.  There was also a widespread suspicion that all this was being organised by the Yes campaign at that time. 

However on a small scale it has been routinely and sometimes quite smugly practiced before then.  Indeed it has been sometimes practiced at Brent Council meetings, new least by the library litigants at the height of their campaigning.  I generally ignored this trait at the time, although some of the activities of people were quite odd.  One was that they tried to hijack every single meeting for their own cause, another was the sheer peculiarity of some the behaviour, such as the insistence by one campaigner on literally kissing the shows of the chair of the first consultation meeting.  Still another was some of political positions taken.  One particular "hard left" character attacked me for at one point criticising the government for cutting Council funding.  However, generally the tactic was not any form of engagement but simply an intent to try to blot out any explanation of the opposing arguments being put forward.

I suppose it is a consequence of the growing narcissism of our society