Bridget Phillipson is under pressure to revive university free speech protections by September after the FSU’s legal challenge prompted action.
Last year, we brought a High Court challenge against the Education Secretary after she halted the Freedom of Speech Act – a crucial piece of legislation aimed at combating cancel culture on campus – just days before it was set to take effect. Without these protections, students and academics remain at risk of being silenced for expressing lawful views.
This week, after Ms Phillipson announced that a watered-down version of the Act would be revived, the High Court confirmed that legal proceedings would be paused until July 1.
The Government now has time to fulfil its commitments, but the clock is ticking – we will be watching closely to ensure meaningful protections are in place before the next academic year begins.
The Telegraph has the story:
Toby Young, the FSU’s secretary general, said outside court that the agreement “puts pressure” on the Government to revive the protections, which are designed to protect academics from cancel culture, before the start of the next academic year in September.
“The court has agreed to adjourn the hearing on our claim until July 1, which puts pressure on Bridget Phillipson to bring in the Act before the start of the next academic year,” he said.
“It’s critical that students and academics shouldn’t have to wait another year before these free speech protections are put in place.”
The procedural hearing was told that lawyers representing the Government had agreed to a proposed court order adjourning the case with the FSU.
Tom Cross, for the FSU, told the court that July 1 would be a “trigger date for further action or non-action”.
He said Ms Phillipson had indicated the watered-down protections “are to be in effect by the start of the next academic year” and that by July 1, it would be clear whether she planned to “honour” that commitment.
“Of course, we have no reason other than to take the secretary of state at her word,” he told the court.
The court order is due to be formally issued in the coming days after Mr Justice Chamberlain, the judge in the case, indicated he would accept it.
In previous submissions to the High Court, the FSU suggested Ms Phillipson’s shelving of the legislation had granted her a mechanism for kicking the Act into the long grass indefinitely without needing primary legislation to formally repeal it.
In July last year, Ms Phillipson shelved the flagship Tory legislation in one of her first acts as Education Secretary.
It had been introduced after a series of rows over the cancellation of academics and students because of their views.
Ms Phillipson said at the time she would consider repealing the Act in its entirety, having insisted that the legislation was “not fit for purpose and risked imposing serious burdens on our world-class universities”.
But as first reported by The Telegraph, she about-turned on the decision on Wednesday.
Key elements of the Act may be removed, however, including a compensation scheme for those whose free speech is suppressed and a crackdown on anonymous donations to universities.
Ministers are understood to have been taken aback by the scale of the backlash from academics over the shelving of the Act.
Almost 700 academics, including Richard Dawkins and several Nobel Prize winners, wrote an open letter to Ms Phillipson last summer warning that many university staff had been “hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked” for exercising their right to free speech.
Worth reading in full.
