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Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said: “If any members of staff at Edinburgh have been involved in this incident, the University needs to take urgent action.”
Ewan Somerville, The Telegraph, 16th December 2022.
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Toby Young, of the Free Speech Union, said it had taken up hundreds of cases where a student or academic was placed under investigation for saying something ‘offensive’.
He stressed: “If this guidance means universities take those vexatious complaints less seriously, it will be hugely beneficial.”
Connor Stringer, Daily Mail, 15th December 2022.
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However, thanks to a campaign by the journalist Toby Young and his Free Speech Union (FSU), ministers have backed down over the clause.
David Maddox, Express, 14th December 2022.
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In a liberal democracy like Britain, where all are supposed to be equal before the law, the police are expected to be politically impartial. Yet, time and again, the police show themselves to be taking sides in the culture war.
Carrie Clark, Spiked, 12th December 2022.
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Dr Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel at the Free Speech Union, told The Telegraph: “This paper ought to come with a prominent disclaimer, ideally along the lines of ‘Ignore this paper – it’s largely wrong’. It focuses on harassment but refuses to engage with the relevant statutory test – when is it reasonable in an academic context to perceive conduct as harassment? ‘Very rarely’ is the likely answer. It is comically ungenerous in its depiction of gender-critical beliefs.”
Ewan Somerville, The Telegraph, 10th December 2022.
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Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, said: “The Government amended the Bill to defang the statutory tort in the hope of winning round its critics in the Lords. Plainly, that hasn’t worked, so I very much hope the Government will restore the statutory tort in its original form when the Bill returns to the Commons.
“One thing is clear from today’s defeat: universities really don’t want students and academics to be able to sue universities if their speech rights are violated. Why? Because it would force them to put their house in order. To my mind, that’s the best argument for restoring the tort.”
Louisa Clarence-Smith, The Telegraph, 7th December 2022.
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But Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel at the Free Speech Union, described the amendment as “disappointing”.
“The purpose of the tort is not to make university disputes costlier and nastier, but to prevent disputes arising in the first place by creating an adequate risk factor that deters heavy-handedness. That risk factor will be significantly decreased if universities will have multiple opportunities to run down the clock,” he said.
Tom Williams, Times Higher Education, 2nd December 2022.
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Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, said: “If the Government amends the Bill so students and academics are only able to take their universities to the county court for breaching their free speech duties after exhausting every other avenue, it will neuter it.”
Louisa Clarence-Smith, The Telegraph, 1st December 2022.
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The Free Speech Union has been lobbying the government about the impacts of the bill on freedom of expression.
FSU founder Toby Young wrote in The Spectator that the new version of “the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous one” but that “the devil will be in the detail.”
“Another objection to the previous version is that, according to its provisions, the list of legal content that was harmful to adults was going to be included in a statutory instrument and not in the bill itself,” a Free Speech Union spokesman told The Epoch Times by email. “One concern free speech groups had is that after this list had been drawn up it could easily be added to by another statutory instrument, whether by this government or the next, creating an anti-free speech ratchet effect,” he said. “That would have been a hostage to fortune,” he added.
Owen Evans, The Epoch Times, 30th November 2022.
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The new version of the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous one. We’ll know more when it’s published – all we have to go on for now is a DCMS press release and some amendments moved by Michelle Donelan, the Digital Secretary and architect of the new Bill. The devil will be in the detail.
Let’s start with something that hasn’t got much coverage today, but which I think is important. Plans to introduce a new harmful communications offence in England and Wales, making it a crime punishable by up to two years in jail to send or post a message with the intention of causing ‘psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress’, have been scrapped.
Toby Young, The Spectator, 29th November 2022.
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