Labour has just betrayed a generation of young people
Less than a week before the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 was to come into force – over a year since it was given royal assent in May last year after passing through two houses of parliament – the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced her “decision to stop further commencement … in order to consider options, including its repeal”.
I had to read her statement several times to believe it, thinking at first it might be an anti-Labour “deep fake” designed to imply that the new government is callously indifferent not just to free speech, but the democratic process itself.
When the Act passed last year, ultimately with cross-party support, I let out a loud sigh of relief rather than a cheer. It had taken months of exhausting arguments, hours of speeches, and the watering down of amendments just to modestly enhance the academic freedom duty on universities. This would allow a complaints scheme for students, staff and visiting speakers, who could seek compensation if they suffered a breach of a university’s obligations, and allowed fines or sanctions for higher education providers and student unions if they transgressed.
Despite all of this hard work, Phillipson has with undue haste speedily threatened to cancel a law itself designed to counter cancel culture. She didn’t even bother telling parliament face-to-face from the dispatch box, which would have at least allowed some push-back or heckles of “shame”, instead preferring that favoured messaging device of pen-pushers – a written communique from on high, on the eve of parliamentary summer recess.
Like all good bureaucrats, Phillipson has exploited a loophole: the Act was democratically passed, but commencement – usually a technicality – was cynically manipulated in an act of bad-faith betrayal.
I had originally been surprised at how much visceral opposition there was to a liberalising law from the usually achingly liberal “great and the good” in the Lords. That was until I realised that so many of them were vice chancellors, college heads or university trustees. It seems that the vested interests, lobbying behind the scenes, have now prevailed having initially lost the debate in the chambers of democracy.
Phillipson justifies her decision by stating that she is “aware of concerns that the Act would be burdensome on providers and the OfS”. For a certain class of higher education senior managers and arms-length regulators, free speech is indeed “burdensome”. Labour clearly don’t want to disturb the status quo with piffling matters like students fearing the utterance of dissenting opinions in class, the process of having talks disrupted or cancelled, or gender-critical academics like Professors Jo Phoenix or Kathleen Stock being bullied off campus by a minority of activists – all while university management look the other way or collude with such disgusting harassment.
Labour might try and claim to be on the side of the workers, but you cannot work in higher education without the defence of academic freedom to protect pluralistic intellectual life. The government has cited concerned UCU and NUS bureaucrats, but that just demonstrates the vast chasm between the Cabinet and ordinary students and lecturers. Anyone on the ground in the real world can grasp that these ideologically captured unions have been more likely to have been culprits in silencing debate than engaged in the defence of their members in recent years.
Even more disingenuously, a government source told the BBC that the legislation would have allowed Holocaust deniers on campus and was an “anti-Semite charter”. What a nerve. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism has indeed disgracefully been rife on campus since October 7. But this is usually under the guise of the decolonising and critical race theory rubrics that college principals have endorsed and encouraged.
The best antidote to such anti-Jewish bigotry and historic illiteracy is more debate, with uncensored open discussion and lecturers encouraging students to read widely and think freely, allowing them to understand that geopolitics is complex and nuanced. Instead, the government has opted to continue confining young minds to a diet of closed, simplistic, one-dimensional worldviews, with dissent demonised or silenced.
In an interview on Monday, Bridget Phillipson declared “the culture wars on university campuses end here”. Now on Friday, she has declared war on the culture of free speech on campus. Let me assure her, as a parliamentarian and the Director of the Academy of Ideas, surrender is not on the cards. The fight-back starts here.