A gut punch for free speech - join the fightback

Claire Fox on Labour's decision to repeal the only pro-free speech legislation of recent years - and what you can do about it.

It’s a gut punch for anyone committed to free speech. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s decision ‘to stop further commencement’ of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 is an act of sabotage that has shocked many of us. I am furious, and have written an article for the Telegraph, reproduced below, explaining why.

I was recently asked if the new Labour Government represented a threat to free speech? I said ‘not immediately’, naively assuming that as there was nothing apart from the draft Conversion Therapy Bill in the King’s Speech. There was time to breathe. More fool me. Because who needs the King’s Speech when democracy - Labour government style – just exploited a timing technicality to repeal the ONLY pro-free speech legislation of recent years. The law itself was the culmination of a growing free-speech crisis on campus, and, despite denials from opponents of the legislation, even they – faced with a mountain of evidence from grassroots lecturers and students – conceded something should be done.

Now repeal is very much on the cards as further statements have emerged from the Department for Education, But it is worse than simply rolling back the law. Justifying the move, Phillipson uses all the buzzwords associated with attacks on free speech, saying enhanced free speech would be ‘damaging to the welfare of students’, ‘could expose students to harm and appalling hate speech on campuses’ and ‘could lead to providers overlooking the safety and well-being of minority groups’. Phillipson sounds as though she has eaten the whole Cancel Culture Dictionary of justifications for closing down debate and limiting opinion-diversity. You can be damn sure that this means many in universities will take this as a green light for clamping down on all dissent by rebranding it as hate speech, and all in the name of keeping minorities ‘safe’ from views labelled harmful. 

The education secretary has the nerve to note that ‘for too long, universities have been a political battlefield and treated with contempt, rather than as a public good’. But she has now ensured that battle will intensify and the public good of academic freedom will be sacrificed on a culture war that Labour has launched. 

Phillipson says universities should instead focus on ‘the core issues they face… with greater emphasis on ensuring the financial stability of the sector’. A self-serving plea for survival of vested interests and management apparatchiks. Saving universities without their core purpose of intellectual freedom, open-ended research and the pursuit of truth is guaranteed to alienate public support and further gut higher education of its special role. The sector might well rue the day it betrayed its own historic purpose for short-term convenience. 

Finally, don’t let’s be sectarian. The Conservative Party itself watered down its own legislation under pressure from the Higher Education blob, and Rishi Sunak's hubristic early election means the one positive Tory legacy law has now been scuppered. 

A proposal to all of the grassroot campaigns – the Committee for Academic Freedom, the myriad Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF) branches, Speak Easy and Living Freedom student groups, Alumni for Free Speech (AFFS), the Free Speech Union (FSU) and the 1,000s of students and lecturers who feel demoralised by this betrayal – we need to get together and plan our very resistance.

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Yes, this is a regressive move by the new Labour Government. But our philosophy is: ‘They knock us down, we get up again.’ And we at the Academy of Ideas have always argued this law was not enough to guarantee free speech, and news of it being shelved is a salutary lesson - we should not become too dependent on legislation or the courts to deliver freedom. This needs to be a bottom-up fightback.

For our part at the Academy of Ideas, the Battle of Ideas festival in October is one arena that is open to you all as a place of discussion and solidarity. See you there. In the meantime, this newsletter is open to you all as a one-stop shop for all free speech campaigners – sign up and help spread the word.

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Labour has just betrayed a generation of young people

Bridget Phillipson’s decision to cancel the commencement of the Higher Education Act brings shame upon the party

CLAIRE FOX 26 July 2024 • 6:06pm

Less than a week before the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 was to come into force – over a year since it was given royal assent in May last year after passing through two houses of parliament – the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has announced her ‘decision to stop further commencement… in order to consider options, including its repeal’.

I had to read her statement several times to believe it, thinking at first it might be an anti-Labour ‘deep fake’ designed to imply that the new government is callously indifferent not just to free speech, but the democratic process itself. 

When the Act passed last year, ultimately with cross-party support, I let out a loud sigh of relief rather than a cheer. It had taken months of exhausting arguments, hours of speeches, and the watering down of amendments just to modestly enhance the academic freedom duty on universities. This would allow a complaints scheme for students, staff and visiting speakers, who could seek compensation if they suffered a breach of a university’s obligations, and allowed fines or sanctions for higher education providers and student unions if they transgressed.

Despite all of this hard work, Phillipson has with undue haste speedily threatened to cancel a law itself designed to counter cancel culture. She didn’t even bother telling parliament face-to-face from the dispatch box, which would have at least allowed some push-back or heckles of ‘shame’, instead preferring that favoured messaging device of pen-pushers – a written communiqué from on high, on the eve of parliamentary summer recess. 

Like all good bureaucrats, Phillipson has exploited a loophole: the Act was democratically passed, but commencement – usually a technicality – was cynically manipulated in an act of bad-faith betrayal.

I had originally been surprised at how much visceral opposition there was to a liberalising law from the usually achingly liberal ‘great and the good’ in the Lords. That was until I realised that so many of them were vice chancellors, college heads or university trustees. It seems that the vested interests, lobbying behind the scenes, have now prevailed having initially lost the debate in the chambers of democracy. 

Phillipson justifies her decision by stating that she is ‘aware of concerns that the Act would be burdensome on providers and the OfS’. For a certain class of higher education senior managers and arms-length regulators, free speech is indeed ‘burdensome’. Labour clearly don’t want to disturb the status quo with piffling matters like students fearing the utterance of dissenting opinions in class, the process of having talks disrupted or cancelled, or gender-critical academics like Professors Jo Phoenix or Kathleen Stock being bullied off campus by a minority of activists – all while university management look the other way or collude with such disgusting harassment.

Labour might try and claim to be on the side of the workers, but you cannot work in higher education without the defence of academic freedom to protect pluralistic intellectual life. The government has cited concerned UCU and NUS bureaucrats, but that just demonstrates the vast chasm between the Cabinet and ordinary students and lecturers. Anyone on the ground in the real world can grasp that these ideologically captured unions have been more likely to have been culprits in silencing debate than engaged in the defence of their members in recent years.

Even more disingenuously, a government source told the BBC that the legislation would have allowed Holocaust deniers on campus and was an ‘anti-Semite charter’. What a nerve. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism has indeed disgracefully been rife on campus since October 7. But this is usually under the guise of the decolonising and critical race theory rubrics that college principals have endorsed and encouraged. 

The best antidote to such anti-Jewish bigotry and historic illiteracy is more debate, with uncensored open discussion and lecturers encouraging students to read widely and think freely, allowing them to understand that geopolitics is complex and nuanced. Instead, the government has opted to continue confining young minds to a diet of closed, simplistic, one-dimensional worldviews, with dissent demonised or silenced. 

In an interview on Monday, Bridget Phillipson declared ‘the culture wars on university campuses end here’. Now on Friday, she has declared war on the culture of free speech on campus. Let me assure her, as a parliamentarian and the director of the Academy of Ideas, surrender is not on the cards. The fight-back starts here.

Read this article in the Telegraph.