Today is the last day of The Fringe. No more uni-cyclists. No more one-woman Anna Kareninas. No more “cancellations”. Some people assure me the cancellations aren’t actually happening; others tell me they’re rife. I can also see for myself that Graham Linehan had to perform in the street during the Fringe this year. So something’s going on. Let’s see shall we.

What happened to Linehan – the creator, famously, of Father Ted and The IT Crowd – was pretty clear really. He was booked for a gig in Edinburgh by the stand-up outfit Comedy Unleashed, but when the venue, Leith Arches, discovered Linehan was on the bill, they cancelled the whole thing. Comedy Unleashed managed to get another venue, but it too then cancelled, meaning the only place they could find for Linehan to perform was the street outside the Scottish Parliament.

The first venue’s justification – or should that be JUSTIFICATION (Leith Arches do like their capitals) – was that they “DO NOT support this comedian, or his views, and he WILL NOT be allowed to perform at our venue and is CANCELLED from Thursday’s comedy show. We are an inclusive venue and will not allow such views to violate our space.”

Exactly what was going on with their statement isn’t totally clear to me: was Leith Arches being refreshingly honest about what they were doing or hugely naïve given how intense the debate about cancellations is? Whichever it was, the Scottish nationalist MP Joanna Cherry said afterwards that what happened to Linehan (known for his gender-critical views of course) looks like a clear case of unlawful discrimination due to someone’s beliefs. She also said Edinburgh was in danger of becoming an anti-free-speech hotspot.

Ms Cherry’s fellow nationalist Kate Forbes also then got involved in the debate a few days later. The former candidate for the SNP leadership said it was a scary time to be a comedian and that “people pick a target and go after that target and they’re not content until they are destroyed”. She also said the art of stand-up relied in part on causing offence and that needed to be protected even though it’s hard when you’re the butt of the offensive jokes.

I must say I know what Ms Forbes is saying here because it’s something I went through myself at a comedy gig in Glasgow. One of the comedians on the bill was a local stand-up called Mark Nelson and for some reason he targeted me and my friends for jokes that couldn’t be repeated here. We tried to laugh it off at first, but it went on and on and got worse, even after some of my friends walked out. It was pretty nasty and offensive stuff in my opinion, based around age, sexuality and other issues, and I wish it hadn’t happened.

However, the point is that I would never suggest that, because I was upset, Mark Nelson or any other comedian should be prevented from doing what they do. As Ms Forbes says: causing offence is often part of a comedian’s work even though it isn’t easy when you’re the target of it. Or, as the Scottish comedian Leo Kearse once put it to me: “Anyone should be subject to a joke and the comedy stage has to remain an unsafe place.” And he’s right. He has to be.

The problem is that it would seem some of the people who run venues do not agree with this position, or at least they appear to believe that some beliefs, specifically ones around the LGBT issue, should not be the subject of certain types of comedy or criticism. I spoke to one of the guys that set up Comedy Unleashed, Andy Shaw, and he’s concerned not just by the cancellation of the Linehan gig but also by the lack of people sticking up for him. The reason? Self-interest of course; they do not want what happened to Linehan to happen to them.

However, Andy Shaw thinks something else is going on as well and it’s that people who are on the whole well-meaning and nice are essentially giving in to people who are active and motivated on particular issues. “What the activists do,” he says, “is they say that unless you comply and institute particular policies that are designed by us, you’re breaking the equalities law. Company directors are trying to run a business so they take the templates from Stonewall and so on and they feel an obligation to go along with it. When highly motivated activists threaten people, you feel defensive and it’s just much easier to stand aside, cancel the people and get on with life. Most people mean well.”

The effect of this, essentially, is that the Scottish comedy scene, and parts of Scotland more generally, have got into this mess because of people who are nice but weak, and the only solution may be for the same people to find a bit of the anger and aggression they’re faced with from the activists. Andy told me about his days in a punk band back in the day. “I got the tail end of punk and we just f****** did it,” he says. “We letra-setted fanzines, we shared tapes. It was mad, it was brilliant and it’s stayed with me.” He thinks there’s a lesson in there for the people who run public venues: trust your judgement and take a stand and if people don’t like it, they can lump it.

I appreciate this isn’t easy – it can look pretty scary when angry people are pointing at you and you’re worried about your business or livelihood. But what we’ve seen when venues do insist that events featuring gender-critical speakers go ahead is that the activists are more bark than bite and the furore tends to blow over. I’ve been at events when there have been protests and it’s turned ugly but I’ve also been at events that have gone ahead because the venue refused to back down. Good on them.

We should also remember what’s at stake here by looking over our shoulders at the recent past. Andy Shaw says those of us who reached adulthood in the 1980s and 90s lived through an era, without really realising it, that was really free. “The New Romantics, the dance scene,” he says. “They were 25 years of real freedom; we didn’t care about race, gender, sexuality, we thought all those problems had been dealt with and the bigoted ones were the older generation.”

But now in a way, it’s flipped and it’s the new older generation – all those former punks and ravers – who have a responsibility to assert the freedoms they once took for granted. As far as Andy Shaw is concerned, it’s quite simple really: make a stand and get on with it.