In an important victory for common sense, Maureen Martin, the housing association employee who was fired from her housing association for expressing orthodox Christian beliefs in an election leaflet when she stood for the mayoralty in her London borough, has just won a substantial out of court settlement from her former employer (Mail on Sunday).
I spoke about the need to remedy this injustice last year on GB News (here), as well as writing about it for the Mail on Sunday (here), so I’m delighted for Maureen. It takes guts to stick up for yourself in the way she has, and the result is she’s struck a major blow for free speech. Her substantial out-of-court settlement sends a clear message to employers who disapprove of an employee’s orthodox Christian beliefs: sack them at your peril.
Under the Equality Act 2010, it’s unlawful for employers to discriminate against employees based on a protected characteristic, and that includes religion or belief. Unfortunately, woke companies often disregard that when it comes to expressions of orthodox Christian beliefs, hoping their victims will go quietly. In Maureen’s case, they picked on the wrong woman.
This demonstrates exactly why the FSU is campaigning for an amendment to the Employment Rights Act 1996 to make it impossible for companies to discipline staff for saying non-woke things outside of the workplace.
Christian Concern did a great job in helping Maureen take legal action against her former employer. But taking your case to an Employment Tribunal is a lengthy and often costly process. (The barrister Allison Bailey had to raise more than £500,000 to fund her recent legal case, for example.) That’s why we believe the Employment Rights Act needs amending to make it impossible for employers to sack employees who say something lawful outside the workplace.
As part of that amendment, we’d like to see a statute of limitations on what people can be investigated for, even if it’s something they said in the workplace. In recent times, we’ve seen the rise of what the author Freddie deBoer has called “offence archaeology”, where people go back many years to try and find things people have said that are supposedly offensive in order to get them disciplined, sacked or cancelled – as happened, for example, in the recent, high profile cases of the then leader of Northern Ireland’s UUP Party, Doug Beattie (Telegraph), schoolteacher Christian Webb (Spiked) and American comedian Kevin Hart (Spectator). Like libel and slander, we’re campaigning for a 12-month statute of limitations on what you can be investigated for.
