Cancellation ain’t what it used to be.

It’s fairly easy to be against ‘cancellation’ on principle. But it’s rather harder to apply that high-minded principle in practice.

Some of the most damning cancel orders of recent years have nothing to do with alleged racism, sexism or transphobia. They’re historical, but not in the same timeframe as, say, the Confederacy or the Atlantic slave trade.

I’m talking about the cancellation of figures in popular culture because of their convictions for sexual crimes.

No one wants to be in Gary Glitter’s gang any more. We don’t bat an eyelid at the idea of the BBC censorship of former editions of Top of the Pops presented by Jimmy Savile. I’m not sure there are any plans to revive It’s A Knockout any time soon.

When people we once celebrated are discovered to offend our values and or to have behaved in reprehensible or despicable ways, we don’t hesitate to press the cancel button.

I personally think there can no justification for celebrating the lives of people such as Edward Colston, who profited from the misery and degradation of others. And when academic David Starkey started ranting about ‘damn blacks’, I was only too glad that TV producers and illustrious academic institutions immediately start to distance themselves from him.

This is all entirely normal and it is usually a reflection of society saying one of three things.

The first might be: we thought you were ok, but subsequently discovered you weren’t.

The second is: we tolerated your views to a degree, but you have now overstepped a mark or crossed a line.

The third formulation is perhaps: we may have accepted ideas or behaviour like this in the past, but society has changed and we now view your actions in a different light.

It would be profoundly worrying if we lived in an environment where society couldn’t make these kinds of decisions and reappraise people, institutions, movements and ideas in this light.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Catholic Church was once revered and largely unchallenged. Now, it’s a struggle to find anyone who wants to become a priest.

In the UK, TV sitcoms with racist and sexist dialogue were a staple of my childhood in the 1970s. No one would write this stuff now. And if they did, no one would commission it. Good thing too.

Words that were normal in the past for describing people with disabilities have now rightly become taboo. Why? Because they reflected an attitude and culture that we, with hindsight today, find offensive. No complaints from me.

But then come the caveats and the problems.

What if the threshold for deciding whether people have transgressed is set way too low?

If a feminist expresses concern about women-only spaces, does that make them transphobic? Or are they a defender of hard-won women’s rights? You may well have a strong view on this issue one way or the other, but on what grounds do you cancel your opponent when this discussion is still in its relative infancy and there is perhaps no settled opinion in wider society?

And what if the people deciding on the ‘cancellation’ are actually a relatively small and tiny minority of the population? If their views do not reflect the opinion of the majority — or are seen by reasonable observers to be extreme — then we can expect many to react badly to the policing job they do. Which is where culture wars emerge.

It is very easy for a small group of people on social media to make a lot of noise.

It’s also very easy for institutions and commercial organisations to react quickly out of fear. A brand is told one of their sponsored sports stars has transgressed in some way. Do they fight a battle explaining why, actually, this person isn’t, say, homophobic, transphobic, sexist or what-have-you? Of course they don’t. Because it’s almost certainly going to be a losing battle.

Their predominant interest is going to protection of a brand’s reputation, protection of financial interests and perhaps protection of their employees from harassment and vilification. So the easy thing to do is to concede.

In the past, the people who decided on cancellation were often those in positions of political power. And so when the phrase #CancelCulture is raised, it conjures up a spectre of Mao’s cultural revolution or the persecution of intellectuals under Pol Pot. We think of Leon Trotsky being erased from photographs which pictured him near to Stalin.

Now, the democracy of the web and social media has shifted power on these issues decisively away from political leaders. Perhaps it’s the collective voice on Twitter which decides who survives and who’s decried? But then the challenge we face is that the people who populate Twitter are completely unrepresentative of wider society. And the people on Twitter who shout the loudest are often unrepresentative of even those signed up to the platform.

The debate isn’t whether we cancel or not. We always will. It’s over who gets cancelled, by whom and why.