Writing for the New Statesman, Hannah Barnes discusses how creeping censorship has captured Britain’s institutions.
Barnes begins by arguing that: “Britain has a problem with free speech. The exploration of difficult ideas is being discouraged in the very places we would expect to see it flourish: our universities and the traditionally progressive spheres of the arts and publishing – areas that exist to expand knowledge and encourage debate, not shut it down. Even science is not immune. Research is suppressed if its conclusions are uncomfortable, books are sanitised or not published at all and academics are bullied out of their institutions. A creeping censorship has captured Britain’s liberal establishment. But the new government doesn’t seem to recognise there’s a problem.
“One of Labour’s earliest decisions in power was to put on hold a law that would have forced universities to promote and defend free speech on campus and deal with disputes quickly. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 received royal assent in May last year, but was due to come into force in August 2024. Defending the government’s move to stall its implementation, the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, argued that the duties required of the act were “disproportionate, burdensome and damaging to the welfare of students while not addressing hate speech on campuses”. Higher education sources told me that a number of university vice-chancellors had lobbied for a pause in the act’s implementation in part because they were concerned about putting off overseas students (and the money they bring).
‘More than 600 scholars have signed an open letter to Phillipson, urging her to reconsider and pointing out that, “Hundreds of academics and students have been hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked over the last 20 years for the expression of legal opinions.” The signatories – who number seven British Nobel laureates, as well as Kathleen Stock (who resigned from Sussex University in 2021, after a campaign to get her sacked over her stance on sex-based rights and gender identity), Richard Dawkins, Robert Tombs and Niall Ferguson – warned that failing to strengthen free-speech obligations on campus would continue to allow staff and students to be penalised for their legitimate, legal views.
“Some believe the crisis has long been overstated, and that the veneration of freedom of expression leads to the normalisation of harmful hate speech. “A moral right to express unpopular opinions,” Nesrine Malik writes in her 2019 book We Need New Stories, “is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence.” Opponents of the 2023 act – including many in academia – argue that it lacks proper guidance: a Russell Group spokesperson called Labour’s decision to pause the legislation “a sensible and proportionate step”. Others feel the very issue diverts attention from bigger problems facing the sector. The open letter, however, claimed that “nothing could be more false”. All is not well in the world of British higher education.”
Barnes goes onto contend that, “As with so much of British cultural life, wars over language, speech and behaviour are US imports. But many would see the ideas underlying this new condemnatory mood as having originated in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Everything, they said, could be deconstructed, made relative or reduced to the level of discourse; objective truth was impossible to establish. As these ideas permeated US campuses, new areas of study emerged, each striving to reveal and challenge power structures and foster social justice. But as these liberating, enquiring disciplines hardened into the orthodoxies of identity politics, they helped create a divisive, illiberal culture.
“Ian Pace, professor of music at City St George’s, University of London, and founder of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom, says he is “of the left”, but has become increasingly “dismayed” by this direction of travel: “Ideas of relatively objective truth and rational argument,” he said, have been abandoned, “in favour of a highly reductionist, identity-based approach.”
“What is dismaying is when some try to dismiss academic freedom as a ‘right-wing culture wars’ issue,” Pace said. “This is at odds with a long tradition of the left being those who have campaigned most arduously on the subject against right-wing censors.” For free speech to become seen as a “right-wing” issue would be a disaster, agreed Skidelsky – “but it’s also a disaster for the left, because it makes them appear censorious and intolerant”.
“That freedom of speech is seen as a culture-wars issue is, in part, a failure of left-leaning politicians and media, who are reluctant to discuss thorny issues because of fear of causing offence. “The only papers that will report this sort of thing are the Telegraph and the Mail,” Skidelsky said. “Of course, they do play it up for their own purposes. But there is a real problem there. One shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it just because you think you might give comfort to the wrong side.”
“Publishing and the arts are traditionally the vanguard of challenging ideas, but they are increasingly reluctant to give a platform to voices deemed controversial. The historian Nigel Biggar has claimed Bloomsbury cancelled his book on colonialism and paid out the contract after being told by a senior staff member that, “We consider that public feeling on the subject does not currently support the publication of the book and will reassess that next year.” Kate Clanchy and the publisher Picador “parted company” after a row in which her Orwell Prize-winning book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me was accused of containing racial tropes. And Penguin faced criticism after releasing more “palatable” versions of classics by Roald Dahl in 2023, removing words such as “fat”, “mad” and “ugly”, and adding in gender-neutral terms.”
After surveying the state of the arts, Barnes argues that: “Censorship has also made its way into disciplines most associated with the pursuit of objective truth: science and medicine. “When ideological concerns leach into medicine, it can have a negative impact on patient care and distort the evidence base for that care,” Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, told me. “The medical landscape has been transformed by the inclusion of ‘experts by experience’ [individuals who have a certain medical condition or who hold a particular identity] in the past ten years.” Some of these changes were necessary, she acknowledged: “Doctors who don’t listen to their patients are bad doctors.” But while patients “are undoubtedly the experts when it comes to how their condition impacts them and what it’s like to live with it, they may not be the expert when it comes to knowing the best way to treat it”.
“This conflict has played out in several hotly disputed areas of healthcare. The Spectrum 10K research study, led by Simon Baron-Cohen, which aimed to “better understand autistic people’s mental and physical health” was paused because of concerns raised by the autistic community. Last month, Louis Appleby, the UK’s leading expert on suicide prevention, revealed that a research paper written by the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health, of which he is the director, had been rejected by a leading academic journal on the grounds that its focus – homicide and mental illness – was “not a suitable subject for academic study”. It was, apparently, “too stigmatising”. “Well meant, I accept,” Appleby posted on social media, “But which is worse for stigma? Denial or data?”
“And in 2021 NICE guidelines on how best to help people with ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, were changed, removing the recommendations that those with the condition should try to increase their levels of exercise, or undertake cognitive behavioural therapy. Those with ME argued that the measures had not accepted that theirs was a physical illness. But a number of doctors claimed “that patients may be denied helpful treatments and therefore risk persistent ill health and disability” as a result of the change. Baxendale said a “combination of experts by experience and a consumer model of healthcare can create a dangerous dynamic where people demand treatments from their doctors as a right, regardless of the evidence base for it”.
“Having studied the brain for 30 years, Baxendale was surprised by claims that the effects of drugs used to block puberty in adolescents experiencing gender-related distress were reversible. She found almost no evidence behind them. So she wrote a paper on the dearth of research into these drugs’ impact on cognitive development. Several medical journals rejected it. “One person was upset and said, ‘We can’t say this because it’s going to stigmatise an already stigmatised group.’ They… didn’t like the conclusion.” If we are to help those most vulnerable and protect others, the starting point must be accurate data. “Refusing to publish conclusions that don’t fit a particular narrative is a really effective way of controlling information, which is the opposite of what science should be,” Baxendale said.
“Explaining why this shift towards intolerance and excess safety has occurred is complex – but the burgeoning equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) industry has played a crucial role.
“HR departments have become all-powerful, and the number and scope of roles connected with diversity and inclusion have grown rapidly. According to data published by LinkedIn, the UK employs almost twice as many diversity and inclusion employees (per 10,000 workers) as any other country. Between 2015 and 2020, globally the number of people with a “head of diversity” title more than doubled. But, as an independent government report on inclusion at work concluded in March 2024, “In recent years some well-meant practice has been shown to be counterproductive and, in some cases, unlawful.”
“For me, one of the big things that changed publishing culture was the introduction of diversity and inclusion training,” Diana Broccardo of Swift Press said. “You instantly get people afraid to talk. Once you get down a road where everyone’s thinking the same, it’s quite difficult… to think any different.” She recalled sitting in a diversity and inclusion training session in which the trainer had assumed that because the majority of the management team were white, they therefore all had similar backgrounds and ideas. “This was simply wrong,” Broccardo said. “We had very different backgrounds, socio-economic statuses and outlooks. In my experience, the training encouraged people to be wary of differences rather than celebrating diversity.”
“Bosses often feel powerless to push back against an EDI agenda. “They’re very nervous because they feel that they don’t understand the topics,” Sarah Rutherford, a researcher and consultant on organisational culture and gender, told me. “And because it has been framed in terms of rights, who wants to be opposed to that? No one.” Younger generations, Rutherford argued, are more aware of identity politics than those above them, and more “fragile” about it. Older generations “feel nervous and want to attract the talent, and therefore they’ve given in an awful lot more than they would have done”. Senior leaders “really don’t understand this stuff. But they don’t want to be seen to be dinosaurs.”
Barnes concludes that: “In the pursuit of offence-less discourse, we are enabling a creeping censorship that will deny the next generation of academics, politicians, scientists, artists – citizens – the power of free thinking. We do young people, our future leaders, a disservice by infantilising them, by believing they need protecting from difficult ideas and truths. Do we want Britain to be led by those who cannot think openly and critically, who cannot tolerate different views, and who wish to shut down, or even punish, those who disagree with them?”
Worth reading in full.
