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Free speech is still in peril on campus

Labour’s watered-down Freedom of Speech Act will do little to tackle the scourge of cancel culture.

Joanna Williams

Joanna Williams
Columnist

Topics Free Speech Politics UK

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The sorry saga of the UK’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act reached a desultory conclusion this week. While it had been passed in parliament under the previous Conservative government in response to growing concerns about cancel culture on campuses, it had not been implemented by the time of the General Election. Within days of the Labour government taking office in July, it was dumped by the new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson. Following a backlash from academics and threatened legal action from the Free Speech Union, the Freedom of Speech Act has now been revived, albeit in a watered-down form. Whether this new, de-fanged version will be enough to put an end to the No Platforming, cancelling and self-censorship that plagues our universities remains to be seen.

Last summer, when Phillipson announced her decision to ‘stop further commencement’ of the Freedom of Speech Act, Labour sources denounced the legislation as a ‘hate-speech charter’. University managers, critical of the act from the outset, spread panic that it would lead to institutions becoming embroiled in expensive legal proceedings if they stopped Holocaust deniers from speaking on campus. Yet more government sources fanned these flames, branding the Freedom of Speech Act an ‘anti-Semite charter’. This ‘pause’, Phillipson told parliament, would allow the government time to consider whether the legislation should be repealed entirely.

Six months on, the act is back. And Phillipson is now seemingly all for free speech. Academic freedom is ‘much more important than the wishes of some students not to be offended’, she declared earlier this week. ‘I have a message for vice-chancellors who fail to take this seriously’, she warned, ‘protect free speech on your campuses or face the consequences’. These are strong words indeed. But before liberty-lovers pop open the champagne, it’s worth reflecting on Labour’s track record on free speech so far.

Let’s not forget that this government has overseen the mass incarceration of citizens for objectionable social-media posts, is prepared to police banter and debate in pubs, and is looking to crack down on so-called misinformation online, on the basis of what seems like a personal spat between the prime minister and Elon Musk. Call me a cynic but I find it hard to believe that anyone prepared to serve in a government that has gone down this path truly believes in free speech.

So why is Phillipson now having to summon the rhetoric of academic freedom? One reason is the backlash from academics over the decision to shelve the act. Groups such as Academics for Academic Freedom, the Free Speech Union and the Committee for Academic Freedom mounted a response that included almost 700 signatories to an open letter warning that many university staff had been ‘hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked’ for stating their beliefs.

Even in the past six months, while the Freedom of Speech Act has been on pause, stories of cancel culture running amok on campus have continued to hit the headlines. There’s the case of Connie Shaw, a student at the University of Leeds, who was suspended from her role at a student radio station following complaints about her gender-critical views. There’s jazz tutor Martin Speake, forced out of his post at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Students boycotted his classes because he had argued that black musicians were not discriminated against in the UK’s jazz scene. Shamefully, senior leaders not only failed to come to his defence and order students back to class, but they egged on the boycotters, too.

But there is another reason why Phillipson may have decided a rhetorical u-turn was in order and that the Freedom of Speech Act needed to be revived. The Free Speech Union launched a High Court case against her attempt to shelve the act, with a judicial review set to take place later this month. They argued that Phillipson’s unilateral decision to pause the legislation breached her ministerial powers. Losing this High Court case would have been humiliating for the government. Enacting the legislation now avoids this risk.

Whatever the reasoning, we shouldn’t get carried away. The resuscitated legislation is a shadow of the original version and contains numerous changes and omissions. Perhaps most significantly, the ‘statutory tort’, which would have allowed anyone who felt their free speech had been restricted to bring legal action against their university, has been revoked. This threat of legal action would have compelled universities to take their duty to promote free speech seriously. This would have helped Speake when staff in his institution decided to side with students against him, putting so-called inclusion policies above defending academic freedom. In addition, students’ unions are now to be exempted from the legislation despite being both intrinsically connected to universities and the source of much of the No Platforming that occurs on campus. As students like Shaw are all too well aware, it is students’ unions that often create a climate hostile to free speech.

Without straightforward recourse to legal action, the onus for defending academic freedom will lie with lecturers and students. Perhaps the best thing to have come out of the years-long battle to get the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act through parliament is not the legislation itself, but the fact that, finally, significant numbers of academics have found the courage to speak out in defence of intellectual freedom. Legal changes were always going to be a poor substitute for changing the culture within academia. It now falls upon lecturers and students to do just that.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.

Picture by: Getty.

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