Last week, the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson issued a written statement to the House of Commons saying she intended to sabotage the Freedom of Speech Act. She told the Commons, with obvious pleasure, she was ready to “consider options, including repeal”.
“In short, the Act is dead,” writes Prof Andrew Tettenborn for The Spectator. He continues:
This matters a lot. If activated, the new legislation would have explicitly protected students and staff from being disadvantaged because of their ideas or opinions; made it illegal to discriminate on ideological grounds in the provision of university spaces, such as meeting rooms; protected the right to invite controversial outside speakers; and made universities potentially liable in damages to anyone whose free speech was infringed.
Put another way, it would have greatly reduced the wiggle-room currently available for university apparatchiks to tell those with awkward views to put up or shut up – or to allow coteries within colleges to make life so uncomfortable for them that they either became isolated or left in disgust.
It would also have made it much harder for universities to exercise discreet control over which outside speakers might find themselves invited by academics and student societies. Instead of sheltering, as at present, behind HR clichés, such as the need to ensure all their students and staff felt safe, or the principle that conflict ought to be avoided, college authorities would have had to engage actively with the issues of free speech involved. If they did not, they would have faced serious legal and financial sanctions difficulties.
As it is, however, the educational blob need not be worried. People in universities will continue to be protected only by the existing largely platitudinous duty imposed under 1986 legislation to protect “freedom of speech within the law”, a prescription lacking both precision and teeth.
The result is already fairly predictable. Those with controversial views – the gender-critical, the aggressively conservative or the strongly pro-Israel – will continue to find life on campus hard. Although some university teachers have succeeded in legal claims against their institutions after being forced out on the basis of their expressed views, employment law provides only limited protection for them; broadly, if universities get the procedures right, they have little to fear unless the claimant can produce a slam-dunk case of discrimination in respect of philosophical views protected under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Employment law, of course, will do little to protect students.
This bleak episode neatly sums up Labour’s attitude to higher education. For all their faults, the Tories realised that academia had to be shaken up and the dead hand of the academic establishment dealt with. In a nice reversal of roles, Phillipson has shown herself to be deeply reactionary, frightened of change and inclined to appease a complacent senior management.
Worth reading in full.
