Freedom of Speech: Universities

Thursday 17th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Sir Henry Bellingham in the Chair]

15:00

[Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Fourth Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech in Universities, HC 589.

It is a pleasure to speak in this Chamber with you in the Chair, Sir Henry. I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for giving us the opportunity to discuss the Joint Committee’s report; to the Minister for being here; to the members of the Committee, particularly those who are here; to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock), who represents the Scottish National party; and to the Labour Front Bencher, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden).

The inquiry started because the then Minister for higher education, the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), who is now a Transport Minister, made a number of comments about there being a problem with free speech in universities. Bearing in mind the importance of free speech to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and its importance in universities, we thought it right to look into the matter.

Let me remind Members that the Joint Committee is half Lords and half Commons. We are very fortunate because we have members not only from the main parties—the Conservatives and the Labour Opposition—but from the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, and we have Lord Trimble from Ireland, so we are a very broad-ranging and sage Joint Committee. It also includes a former Lord Chief Justice, in the shape of Lord Harry Woolf. We are all strongly committed to human rights and wanted to look at whether there was a problem with freedom of speech in universities—freedom of speech being one of the most basic human rights.

The right to free speech is of course a foundation for democracy. It is important in all settings, but especially in universities, where education and learning are advanced through dialogue and debate. It underpins academic freedom. Universities are places where ideas are developed. A diverse range of interesting and sometimes controversial topics should be debated.

Of course, that has always been the case. Back in the day, when I was at York University—that was not recently—we had heated debates and lots of protests. If ever someone from the South African apartheid regime came to the university, we were all out protesting and demonstrating. We demonstrated and protested against the Government in relation to their policy of internment in Northern Ireland. We protested for women’s rights. You name it; we were debating and protesting about it. That has always been the case, and it remains the case to this day, when additional issues are causing concern. Just as we protested about the National Front, so today’s students protest against the British National party. They have protests and controversial debates about Syria. We certainly never discussed trans rights when I was at university, but that is now the subject of heated debate at universities. The need to have controversial debates is not new, and free speech, particularly at universities, is very important indeed.

I think it is true to say that when the Joint Committee went into this inquiry, having heard the Minister say that there was a problem, we went in with open minds. We were not sure whether it was just a case of a flurry of stories from the Daily Mail saying, “All students have become snowflakes and are shutting down other students’ right to debate,” so we went in with an open mind. Indeed, I was quite sceptical about whether there really was a problem. But it is also true to say that at the end of all the evidence—we heard evidence from university administrators, student unions, student societies, particularly Jewish societies and Islamic societies, campaigners such as Peter Tatchell, trans rights protagonists and, indeed, Members of the House of Commons—we were all convinced that there was a problem and that the Minister was right to raise it. The question we considered was what was causing the problem and how it should be solved.

The Minister, when raising this matter, had said that the problem was students. However, we felt that the problem was not only students inhibiting one another’s time and opportunity to speak, but a number of other issues, such as the Prevent duty, the Charity Commission, university bureaucracy and the complexity of overlapping guidance. However, just as a starting point, we all ought to be clear that the phenomenon of people wearing masks and bursting into meetings, threatening and intimidating people and trying to stop them speaking, is not the right to protest; it is actually criminal activity.

None of us on the Joint Committee feels any sympathy at all with people who say that they are exercising their right to protest but come in with masks on and set off smoke bombs. We have an unequivocal view about that. For a start, we do not know whether those who have been doing that are actually students, because obviously they are masked. Sometimes, when their identity is disclosed, it turns out that they are not students. They should be charged for breach of the peace, threatening behaviour and any other criminal offence that suits the occasion, but certainly if they are students from the university and they are coming in with masks over their faces, they should be disciplined. That is not the right to protest; it is an inhibition on other people’s right to free speech.

It was a particular irony that, according to one newspaper report I saw, the masked protestors were coming in to protest that the university should be a safe space. Nothing is less safe than someone who is wearing a mask breaking into a meeting and threatening people, so we have no truck with that. However infrequently it happens, it absolutely must be stamped down on.

I will give hon. Members just a couple of examples. In March, the King’s College London libertarian society invited speakers in. The debate had been under way for about 30 minutes when a group of between 16 and 20 hooded and masked protesters stormed the front entrance of the Strand campus building, jumped over the security barriers, ignited smoke bombs and forced their way into the Safra lecture theatre. In the process, they knocked a security guard unconscious, and he was taken to hospital. A number of other staff and students were injured during the violent protest. Actually, we should not dignify that with the name “protest”. We are totally against it. We cannot have the disruption of meetings.

We also heard evidence from the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who in February had gone to speak at a meeting of the politics and international relations society of the University of the West of England in Bristol. Again, people with scarves over their faces and wearing dark glasses burst into the room. They were shouting that the hon. Gentleman was a bigot and various other insults and, as he made clear, it was evident that they just wanted to stop the event. There were 300 people there who wanted to engage in a serious discussion and four or five people who were determined to disrupt it. That is totally unacceptable, whether or not they are students.

Aside from the issue of people bursting into meetings, there are other inhibitions on free speech that we discovered through the evidence we took. We were concerned about the guidance issued by the Government in relation to the Prevent duty deterring some students, particularly Muslims, from inviting or questioning speakers they wanted to hear. The Joint Committee feels that the Government absolutely have an obligation to keep us safe and to keep the country free from terrorism, but the Prevent guidance is so widely drawn, particularly as it relates to universities, that undoubtedly some believe that they are in danger of breaching it and that they could be reported and get into trouble if they invite certain speakers. The Prevent duty states:

“When deciding whether or not to host a particular speaker,”—

university bodies, including student unions—

“should consider carefully whether the views being expressed, or likely to be expressed, constitute extremist views...or are shared by terrorist groups.”

It might be that I am a vegetarian and my views on vegetarianism are shared by a particular terrorist group, but does that put someone in breach of the Prevent duty? We felt that the duty is in a good cause, but it is widely drawn in such a way that it inhibits free speech. We therefore ask the Government to review the Prevent duty. It is about time it was reviewed generally, but perhaps they will do it with a view to looking at its impact on free speech.

Universities in England and Wales have a duty to promote free speech. It is different in Scotland. We had the benefit of the Scottish National party’s hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), who helped us contrast the situation in Scotland with that in the rest of the UK. Under the Education Act 1986, universities in England and Wales have a duty to promote free speech, but the problem is that the way some of them go about it ironically ends up inhibiting free speech.

Hansard cannot show this, but hon. Members can see this organogram showing the process that students have to go through when applying for a meeting. There are application forms to fill in and time limits to comply with. Some universities require students not only to name the speaker in advance, but to give a biography of them and provide an advance copy of the speech they will make. That would not be possible with any of the speeches that I make in universities, because I prepare my speech on the train. The point is that it is inhibiting. It is all about risk aversion, what people cannot do and tying them up with bureaucracy.

Newcastle’s code of practice for freedom of speech for external speakers warns against people communicating in a way that might unreasonably offend others. That is not acceptable. We should have free speech, even if it is found to be offensive by some others. Southampton talks a lot about speakers holding controversial views. The whole point about a debate is that it is two different views and therefore people should not shy away from controversy. Some of the university procedures are controversy-averse, which we thought was in opposition to free speech.

Another organisation that is controversy-averse is the Charity Commission, which is having a chilling effect on free speech. Its guidance warns student unions that they could risk their charitable status if they have controversies that could risk their reputation as a charity. We think that the Charity Commission goes way beyond the law and is having a chilling effect on students’ free speech.

No speaker has the right to speak in a university, but students have a right to hear who they want to hear irrespective of whether others might find it offensive or insulting. There is a place for meetings of, say, people who have been victims of sexual assault or those of a particular religion, but we cannot have the whole campus being a safe space with the lowest common denominator.

There is an overlapping set of guidance from many institutions, including the Equality and Human Rights Commission, so the Joint Committee drew up our own guidance. The Committee is heaving with lawyers with good political judgment, and we have expert legal advice—when you have the Lord Chief Justice on your Committee, you get the law right. That is what we have done, so we have saved the Minister and his Department any effort. We have issued guidance on free speech for universities and students when organising events. It states, “You can say whatever you like, so long as it is not against the law, and this is what the law is.” One simple piece of guidance is what is needed, because guidance under the Prevent duty, from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, from the Charity Commission and from the union administrations is all too much. We know that students have other things to do in their lives—I will not name them, and I probably do not even know what they are now—so they have to get on with their lives and they cannot be bound up with bureaucracy.

I thank the Minister for the way he has responded. His predecessor spoke a lot about this subject, but I could not detect any action. This Minister is actually doing something and has brought people together, so I am confident that, with the good work under way on our Committee, with the shared commitment that we all have to freedom of speech, and with the Minister’s action, we can enable debate to flourish on university campuses, which is what we all want to see all across the country.

15:15

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

This inquiry is one of the most important that we have undertaken in my three years on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As we have heard, we received some very disturbing evidence. Free speech is indeed a foundation for democracy in society, and universities are places where many of tomorrow’s leaders learn how to explore ideas in a way that prepares them to engage in and influence wider society, so it is critical that free speech is secured in universities. A key part of all students’ education is the ability to engage in dialogue and contentious debate. Universities have a legal duty under the Education Act to secure freedom of speech within the law, both for students and for visiting speakers.

If we do not prepare students to engage in dialogue in an environment that promotes free speech, there is a serious danger that we will risk promoting extremism and factionalism within wider society. Only by understanding different views and beliefs and by, as one of our witnesses said, countering bad ideas with good ones, will we build community cohesion and break down prejudice and discrimination in wider society, which, at worst, as we know, can lead to violent disturbances within our local communities. That is something that none of us wants. Indeed, it is one of the purposes of the Prevent strategy. It is ironic that the strategy is in many ways defeating one of its key objectives in the way that it is applied at universities. I will come on to that in more detail shortly.

For the record, I will set the legal scene, which the Committee is now well versed in. Article 9 of the European convention on human rights states that,

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.”

Article 10 sets out the right to freedom of speech and a right to,

“hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority”,

and this

“can extend to the right to say things which may...disturb the listener”,

and which the listener might find offensive or even shocking. Free speech is not an absolute right. There are limitations on it to ensure that it is not exercised in a way that causes harm to others by, for example, inciting murder, violence or terrorism or stirring up racial hatred or hatred for other groups, or if it is defamatory or malicious or constitutes harassment. We found that within university settings the inhibitions and restrictions on free speech went much further than that. A number of factors were limiting free speech at universities. I will summarise them briefly, and go into detail about some of them.

As we have heard, there were incidents of unacceptable intimidatory behaviour by protesters intent on preventing free speech and debate. Unnecessary bureaucracy was imposed on those organising events. There was some confusion about what the Prevent duty entailed; for example, some students were frightened about the possibility of being reported for organising or attending events, and of being investigated, as a result, as potentially involved in extremism, which might draw people into terrorism. There was considerable confusion about that.

Other factors were regulatory complexity and confusion, confusion over the Charity Commission guidelines, and unduly complicated and cautious guidance from the Charity Commission itself about what student unions could or could not do in organising events and permitting speakers to attend. Safe space policies were often incorrectly used. Indeed, we did not find the concept of safe space policies helpful at all. It was applied too broadly and vaguely. We found that student unions were inconsistent in the way they applied the regulations on allowing them to hold events at the student union. The different types of group might include faith groups, groups with non-religious views, or groups with views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, right-wing or left-wing views, pro-life or anti-abortion views, and views on transgender issues or Islamophobia. There were many minority views and beliefs—a huge swathe. University authorities’ oversight of the issue, under the legal duty to secure free speech that I mentioned, was inadequate. Another matter of concern was the chilling effect—an undercurrent of restraint among students, both as to their speech as individuals and as to the large number of events either not held at all or inhibited, and of which there was no report, although students wanted them to be held.

Members of the Committee are not aware of one reason why I was concerned to hold the inquiry, which is a personal experience I had at one university. I shall try, in giving examples, not to name the particular university, as I think that might be unhelpful. I had been asked to speak about work I had done in Parliament —so, ironically, it was all in Hansard—on sex discrimination in relation to abortion. I was speaking in a room slightly smaller than this Chamber. The back wall was entirely glass windows and on the other side of it was a large courtyard or quad. To my right was one pop-up banner describing the organisation that had invited me to speak—the university Life organisation, on which two small feet were depicted. After I began to speak about what I had done in Parliament, which is on the public record, a university official in uniform came into the room and said, “Your event is causing offence.” There was a startled silence in the room, particularly from me. The official said, “It is causing offence to the students who are sitting in the bar on the other side of the quad.” They could not possibly have heard a word I was saying. It could only have been the sight of the banner. I was certainly saying nothing unlawful at all. We came to a compromise in the end. The official suggested that if we drew the giant curtains across the back of the room, so that the students in the bar could not see what was going on, we could carry on with the event and I could finish my speech. I know that that is not the only time when there has been an endeavour to put restrictions on parliamentarians at universities.

I was concerned about the issue and pleased about the inquiry, because I think the chilling effect and unreported inhibition of speech is far wider than we recognise. Often the chilling effect inhibits students with minority views, and that emboldens students who want to silence or censor views they consider wrong or offensive. I was more convinced about the resultant chilling effect by evidence from Professor Adam Tickell, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex. He said he had been unaware of the scale of the problem:

“It was only in preparation for this session that I became aware of the cases”.

Those cases included students being interviewed by Prevent officers, students subsequently telling the student union president that they were afraid to speak their minds, and Muslim students saying they were afraid to go to their campus prayer room. That is evidence from one of our witnesses that there is more to the issue than the public have been aware of for some time.

I join the Committee Chairman, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), in thanking the Minister for the interest he has taken in the issue. He told the Committee that just as important as the evidence of restrictions is

“what is hard to measure: the large number of events that do not happen at all, either because organisers are worried about obstruction or because the overzealous enforcement of rules makes them seem more trouble than they are worth.”

He added that,

“some of this is quite difficult to gather evidence for.”

I thank the Universities Minister for the lead that he is giving, and for the fact that he told the Committee that he would hold a

“summit to thrash out not only where the responsibilities lie but to make sure that they do not cut across each other and in so doing achieve the opposite of what all these guidelines are meant to achieve, which is to promote free speech.”

I should be interested if the Minister would today update the House on what he is doing to take forward what he said, and how he expects to tackle the issue in the coming months. It has become clear to me as we have examined the issue that it will not be resolved purely by the publication of our report, however important the Committee may think it. We have highlighted an issue that will take considerable tackling by a number of organisations and bodies.

I want to talk in a little more detail about the Charity Commission.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful case, and I am most grateful to the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the Chair of the Committee, for the way she led the inquiry.

Does my hon. Friend agree that perhaps universities and, indeed, student unions could take a more proactive role and encourage debate, rather than waiting for debates to come up, and seeing whether they are lawful and whether they should go ahead? They could perhaps take a more overt stance. The range of issues debated in universities is often pretty narrow. I look at the range of debate here and the global concerns about the problems of youth unemployment or, for example, the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the last 10 to 20 years, where 6 million people have been killed or died as a result of civil unrest and other disturbances. I rarely see debates in universities on these incredibly important matters. They tend to be confined, albeit on important issues, to a fairly narrow range.

[Fiona Bruce]

The hon. Gentleman makes a pertinent point, as always. I will refer back to it in a moment in relation to the Charity Commission’s guidelines. The actual wording of clause 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 imposes an obligation on university governing bodies to take

“such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured”

on both university and students union premises. I have written underneath, “proactive”. This is a proactive clause. It requires them to take steps to secure free speech, so I entirely agree. It does not help, for example, when, as charities, students unions have been told that they can devote resources to or campaign only on issues that further their charitable purposes. The Charity Commission has interpreted this—I think, and our Committee agrees —in a far too narrow way. The Charity Commission guidance for students unions indicated that it would consider it acceptable for charitable students unions to comment on

“street lighting near the campus”

because the issue affects students as students, and therefore fulfils their charitable purposes. The Charity Commission would consider it unacceptable for students unions to comment publicly on issues that do not directly affect the welfare of students as students, such as,

“the treatment of political prisoners in a foreign country.”

That is the Charity Commission’s own example, illustrating the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford.

The Minister told our Committee that the Charity Commission guidance should

“go further and facilitate the promotion of free speech. It should be giving students’ unions the permission to host debates about controversial issues and expose students to a wide range of viewpoints. That should be the core purpose.”

That is quite right. It is not just preferable that free speech is promoted and protected in universities. It should be a prerequisite for any university that is going to achieve its educational purposes. I am pleased that the Charity Commission has acknowledged as much this week and has announced in response to our report that it will create new guidance in this area. Helen Stephenson, chief executive of the Charity Commission said yesterday:

“charitable students’ unions, universities and other higher education providers can challenge traditional boundaries, encourage the free exchange of views and host speakers with a range of opinions, including those who might be controversial or divide opinion.

These activities are entirely in line with their aims to promote education.”

That is a pleasing response to our report.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I believe this year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. He was born in Trier in Germany. He was effectively expelled from Germany because he was the editor of a newspaper that exercised the right of free speech. For those students perhaps slightly to the left of some of us here today, I point to the example of Karl Marx, who was the victim of university or town authorities in Trier, because he wanted to exercise free speech. From whatever political point we look at it, free speech is absolutely vital to secure the rights of individual citizens, as he was trying to do in that case.

[Fiona Bruce]

That is an excellent example. I hope it will also encourage students to the right of Karl Marx, because I have spoken to a number of students who have recently said, “I wouldn’t admit to being a conservative on campus.”

Our Committee concluded that the concept of safe spaces, having been extended to entire university campuses, is unhelpful. It is not only unhelpful. If minority views are supressed across the whole campus, but they are not views that are promoting terrorism or inciting the kind of activity I referred to earlier, the concept is actually against the law, impinging on the right to free speech under article 10 of the European convention on human rights. A number of students unions tried to argue in evidence to us that it was necessary to limit speakers who cause harm through speech—harm caused because people might find speech disturbing or upsetting. As our report says, however, this is counter or detrimental to free speech. Regarding safe spaces, we say:

“Whilst there must be opportunities for genuinely sensitive and confidential discussions in university settings, and whilst the original intention behind safe space policies may have been to ensure that minority or vulnerable groups can feel secure, in practice the concept of safe spaces has proved problematic, often marginalising the views of minority groups. They need to co-exist with and respect free speech. They cannot cover the whole of the university or university life without impinging on rights to free speech…When that happens, people are moving from the need to have a “safe space” to seeking to prevent the free speech of those whose views they disagree with. Minority groups or individuals holding unpopular opinions which are within the law should not be shut down nor be subject to undue additional scrutiny by students’ unions or universities.”

I hope that university authorities will take careful note of that.

On the Prevent strategy, we had quite some evidence. I want to reiterate what the guidance says. As our report states, under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the guidance states that higher education bodies,

“when deciding whether or not to host a particular speaker…should consider carefully whether the views being expressed…constitute extremist views that risk drawing people into terrorism or are shared by terrorist groups.”

Those are important words—“risk drawing people into terrorism or are shared by terrorist groups”—if a little wide, but the issue of terrorism is critical. The guidance goes on:

“In these circumstances the event should not be allowed to proceed except where”

the educational bodies

“are entirely convinced that such risk can be fully mitigated”.

That is the legal position, but I will also cite some of the evidence we received about that and about hate speech.

An organisation called CARE, Christian Action Research and Education, stated:

“One common occurrence is that certain speakers who are perceived as ‘extremist’ are being denied the chance to speak at universities, to discuss their ideas, and have their ideas challenged by others in an open debate. First, this drives any such ideas underground. Second, the definition of extremism, as identified in the Counter Extremism Strategy…is very broad, incorporates non-violent as well as violent forms of extremism, and does not necessarily relate back to the concept of terrorism. In his recent judgment in the case of Mr Salman Butt, Ouseley J confirmed that the Prevent duty is a duty to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and does not refer to all forms of extremism…Nonetheless, no steps have been taken by the Government to confirm the correct interpretation and scope of the definition of what constitutes ‘extremism’ and its impact on the Prevent duty.”

Some student groups, for example, have been prevented from holding events because the Church from which the speaker comes is considered fundamentalist or, in other words, extreme. Such an individual has not the slightest intention of drawing people into terrorism. I ask the Minister and his colleagues to look again at the counter-extremism strategy to ensure that its broad definition of extremism, which has been used by some universities, is not used to prevent free speech at universities.

Hate speech results from the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words, or the displaying of written material that is threatening, abusive or insulting and therefore intended to cause the person harassment, alarm or distress, or to stir up racial hatred. Although that is the definition of hate speech, and, as we were told in evidence,

“it is meant to be used narrowly in relation to any speech that fulfils the particulars under the Public Order Act 1986…over time, the phrase has become embedded into everyday language to describe any statement that some may find ‘offensive’.”

At universities, there is an increasing tendency to conflate offensive speech with hate speech, which

“has resulted in a far greater willingness to countenance censorship.”

Several pieces of evidence to our inquiry showed that that was the case. As a result of those common misunderstandings, freedom of speech at universities has suffered. I would be grateful if the Minister looked at CARE’s evidence to the inquiry in particular, so that an appropriate application can be made in universities.

I will give a few examples of the kinds of issues that were mentioned to us in evidence. We were told of a university that introduced “emotional risk assessments” in December 2016 that were used in an “invasive and heavy-handed way”. They have resulted in the students’ association telling student groups

“what they can and can’t do and say”.

In some cases, all of a student group’s activities, including weekly meetings, events and emails, that were to be sent to outside students or speakers had to be approved in advance by the students association. That meant that one or two people in the students’association office could basically make the operations of that student group impossible. For example, they rejected events because they were “too provocative” and they would not allow discussions that made specific reference to the Manchester terrorist attack or Hurricane Gregory, in case those specific incidents of suffering caused upset.

Another group was not allowed to have a stand at a freshers’ fair unless it was unmanned. A group at another university was told that it had to provide the name of any invited speaker, the topic and an outline of their talk 21 days in advance of the event.

We were told that at other universities there was a culture not only of safe spaces and hurtful speech but of trigger warnings:

“Students are encouraged to catastrophise when they hear something controversial or challenging rather than to engage with new ideas robustly.”

That is hardly a preparation for the world of work.

An ethics society was told that it could not hold an event because it would be asking for volunteers during it, and that contravened university policy guidelines. On further inspection, it was found that no such guidelines existed within the union or the university. Another group was told that it would be refused affiliation with the students union on the grounds that it was

“violating union policies regarding discrimination and equal opportunity”,

but on reading the union policy, no such violation was found. Several groups, particularly pro-life groups, were prevented from holding events or exhibiting material at freshers’ fairs that, on further investigation, was found to be used in primary schools and in further education material.

There are real problems for many groups in arranging external speakers and organising events. The Alliance of Pro-Life Students said that,

“pro-life societies are often given undue burden to host events”

and are

“subject to mediations to which other societies are not”.

Humanist groups said that student unions and universities,

“repeatedly shut down expressive conduct deemed by them to be wrong, offensive, or harmful, particularly with regards to criticism of religious beliefs”.

Such groups told us that,

“student unions were making arbitrary decisions about the views to which students should be exposed.”

They say that “many student unions” do not have clear or coherent democratic policies in place, which means that voting in a certain way, or no-platforming, or getting

“safe space policies into official union policy is surprisingly easy. If unions had better guidelines for democratic policies, and their union officials faced actual sanctions for disregarding freedom of speech, the union, and therefore the university environments, would become both more democratic and more open to diverse viewpoints.”

As I have said before, the issue will not be resolved overnight. I am encouraged that the Minister is determined to address it. It is clear that since our report more instances have come to light. For example, a colleague on the Committee received an email from UK Lawyers for Israel this week that expressed a number of concerns about specific policies on university campuses, including ticketing requirements and restrictions on advertising. It says that, although our report mentions that some pro-Israel events were disrupted, that happens on many occasions. The impact of such disruptions can be not only burdensome regulations and requirements for future events; the cost, time and administrative burden, and the need to protect people from hostile protests leaves students who run such societies exhausted and put off from hosting events. In an echo of another of our comments, UK Lawyers for Israel said that universities must impose penalties on students who incite, encourage or participate in the disruption of meetings.

It is a very full report; there is much more to it. I thank the Minister for his interest and look forward to his response and future action.

[Sir Henry Bellingham (in the Chair)]

Hon. Members may be interested to know that I plan to start the wind-ups at 4 pm.

15:48

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. I rise to speak as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and it is a pleasure to do so. I have greatly enjoyed my brief time on the Committee, and I thank and congratulate our Chair, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), on her leadership and on bringing together an important and timely report.

The Committee has recently been debating the extent to which everyone in the country feels that they can identify with the language and existence of rights. Even for those who do not immediately speak the language of rights or who do not think within a legal framework of rights, the right to freedom of speech immediately resonates. Our right to stand up and say what we like within the law and in the way we choose is entirely central to how we live our personal and political lives. To feel that that right may be being inhibited in universities is particularly worrying. I say that as someone who taught for a number of years at King’s College London and also taught at the University of Leicester; I did both very happily. I never came across anything of the like that we have discussed in this report, but those were simpler times.

The truth is that, as the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham laid out so clearly, we have a problem in some of our universities in the way in which students’ right to free speech is being inhibited. There are three basic methods by which it is being inhibited, which have been discussed by my colleagues, and of course they are: protest, shutting freedom of speech down; political attitudes of no-platforming that prevent people from being heard; and an unhelpful risk-averse bureaucracy, which is jamming up the process of holding events altogether.

It is particularly pertinent in the framework of university life that these problems are occurring, because “university” —the word itself—is intended to encompass everything, and to be open and broad, bringing in a range of views and people, in order to extend the learning and experience of those who come through it. Yet in too many cases we see the signs of a changing attitude that is preventing that from being the case.

It is obviously the case that protest itself is a form of freedom of speech, right up to the point where it inhibits somebody else’s right to express themselves. Cases were brought to our Committee’s attention. In particular, in what is now a reasonably famous case from, I regret to say, King’s College London—a university where I taught—masked protesters broke into a peaceful debate and set off smoke alarms, so that the building had to be evacuated, which completely shut down the discussion that was going on. That is absolutely unacceptable in the moment, but it has even greater ramifications because, of course, once a student event has been disrupted, at cost to the student body and to the university, those carrying out a risk assessment of such events in the future will take a much harder line. That means that every protest of that kind endangers the freedom of speech at future events.

Much the same is true with no-platforming. We were told that there were actually very few registered cases of individuals being no-platformed. However, once a policy of no-platforming on a particular issue is established, it means that there will not even be a discussion as to whether people should discuss that issue, because if they do not conform to the strictures laid down by the university or the student body they will not even have a chance to be no-platformed, because they will not even be considered as potential speakers.

We must encourage students and those working in universities to remember that if someone stands on a platform and breaks the law by giving a speech, it is the speaker themselves who is culpable; it is not automatically the student body or the university that must carry the can. Of course, if a speaker has previously broken the law and it is possible that they might use their platform to do the same thing again, that puts the university or student body in a slightly different area. However, ultimate responsibility must lie with the people who express such views, not with their audience or the organisers of the event. It is that which we need to be mindful of.

I completely concur with the statement by the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham that we cannot expect speakers to have to submit their speeches in advance if they have never done anything wrong before. There is the example of the journalist Peter Hitchens being asked to submit his speech before he spoke to a student body as a prerequisite to his being able to stand on a platform. That can only be a veiled form of censorship.

Lastly, I turn to the bureaucratic process itself. I am a Conservative and so people would not expect me to stand up and extoll the virtues of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a little bit like jam; a little bit of is very good and very effective, but three pints of it is too much. So we find with the examples that we have seen from a number of universities where there is an excess of risk aversion.

What really happens through such byzantine processes is an attempt to prevent anything vaguely risky from happening, and in my experience that is not the purpose of university life. Indeed, university life is a time to take risks, experience new things and hear new thoughts. I say to the people who find themselves in this situation and pondering these issues in universities that there is absolutely no contradiction between adhering strictly to one’s own world-view and having an open mind. Unfortunately, awareness of that fact has been lost.

I commend to the Minister the recommendations that our Committee made. I am very pleased to hear that he held a summit—I think it was on 3 May—that brought together the National Union of Students, the Charity Commission and a number of other relevant bodies, at which this bureaucratic issue was discussed. I hope that our Committee’s report was part of the discussions then, and that those present were able to consider the principles that we have pulled together as a very simple legal and—I believe—effective way of ascertaining whether an event is acceptable.

The first point we make is that everyone has the right to freedom of speech within the law; the second is that universities should seek to expose their members and students to the widest possible range of views, while ensuring that they act within the law; the third is that if a speaker breaks the law, it is the speaker themselves who is culpable; and the fourth is that protest itself is a legitimate expression of freedom of speech.

With all that in mind, and as long as there is a clear and clean system of redress for those who feel that any of those principles are being inhibited, we will have a much better framework to ensure that students do not find themselves having to worry about the events they attend or the events they are holding, or having to worry about being unable to stand up for what they believe in.

I second the remarks made by my hon. Friends the Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) that there is a danger—albeit a danger that I do not believe is currently very present in many of our universities—that we encourage a sort of intellectual monoculture in certain places, which would be the physical equivalent of the echo chamber that we hear about among groups on Twitter, whereby people only listen to their own views and only get feedback from people who are in broadly the same position as themselves, and whereby it might be considered acceptable to invite only four or five speakers from the same political party during the course of a year. I do not believe that that is in the spirit of a university education.

I end with one perhaps slightly over-dramatic quotation, which was written on the donors’ board in the old library at my university. I will spare everyone the Latin, but it is a quotation from the Book of Daniel:

“Many shall pass by and knowledge will be multiplied.”

We cannot hope for knowledge to be multiplied unless a plurality and a multitude of views are expressed and heard within our universities.

15:59

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. It is also a pleasure to speak to this report. I commend the Committee for it. It is a very interesting read, and I am pleased to hear that the Minister and the Charity Commission in England will pay some attention to its recommendations. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s speech later.

I was pleased to hear from all the members of the Committee who have spoken so far that they, too, agree that universities should be places of debate and discussion, disagreement and dispute. It is only by disputing the status quo that knowledge moves on, that the sum total of human knowledge is expanded, and that we learn more. Academic freedom, university autonomy and the right of scholars to think and do and say as they will are essential elements of universities. They are indispensable if we want to see universities be universities, and if we want the benefits to society that come from having universities.

The right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) reminded us of how heated debate has always been part of university life. It certainly figured in my time as a student. Representing Edinburgh North and Leith, I must mention the role that academic freedom and freedom of speech played in the Enlightenment. Those freedoms were so important in incubating the freedom of thought and the rebellion against orthodoxy that underpinned the expansive thoughts of Enlightenment figures. Without those freedoms, we would not have had that Enlightenment, and we would not have the world as we know it today. Free speech has created our world and continues to create it anew.

In that context, I am pleased that universities in Scotland seem to be maintaining those freedoms rather well, and that the Scottish approach to regulation appears to be more effective than the rather heavily laden approach being taken in England. I was certainly pleased to hear from the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) that England’s Charity Commission is now agreeing to reissue guidance. That was certainly something that figured heavily in the report. It is clear that students and university bodies are finding things confusing, to say the least.

Freedom of speech is not an indivisible right. It does not sit alone and gleaming like some immutable, omnipotent deity. It does not exist outside of human interaction or outside of society. There is no free speech without stout defence of it and without rational and reasonable care taken of the privilege. There is no free speech where we allow hate speech. Those repressed by the violence of hatred are not free to speak. Those cowed by hate speech aimed at others are not free to speak. Those practising hate speech are not speaking; they are shouting so loudly that they are excluding other voices. Hate speech is the enemy of free speech, and we should not allow it. That does not mean, however—many Members have made this point—that we should ban speakers we do not like or intimidate their supporters. The example given by the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham was upsetting. It is depressing to think that people think they can force their opinions on others in that way or intimidate them in that way. Masked protesters are no better. Intimidation does not defeat hatred; it inflames it.

Our defence of free speech, and of the privilege of discussing possibly awkward topics, has to be stronger and more open. The report goes a long way towards making that possible, in a way. Our defence against hatred has to be rooted in a society that will not accept it, and in a broadside of opinion that says that tolerance and patience are virtues that we value, and that stand above personal advantage or tribal instincts.

I certainly had great sympathy with what the right hon. and learned Lady said on safe spaces and on free speech in universities. Safe spaces exclude people as much as, if not more than, they protect people. Closing down debate by protest, exclusion or intimidation is censorship by the mob and cannot, in any mind, be the way in which we would want universities to function. Is it really the message that we want the students of today to learn? Do we want to say that the safest way of dealing with ideas that we find distasteful, opinions we dislike and people whose views we find abhorrent is to ignore them, shut them out and think that they will have no further effect on us? That surely would not be a sensible thing for them to think, and I think that there are significant parallels to be drawn with the Prevent legislation since it, too, appears to suggest that bad things will go away if we do not look at them.

It cannot only be me—it clearly is not—who looks at the effects of the Prevent legislation on our universities and questions how effective it is. As outlined in the report, having universities and student unions jumping through hoops to satisfy regulators about events on their premises is hardly likely to be the greatest blow any terrorist group has ever faced. It is only 20 years since the Good Friday agreement was made. That ended the troubles by rational means, and I cannot believe we have forgotten that it was not achieved by closing down debate in universities. In fact, some people might remember that a previous Government sought to deny “the oxygen of publicity”. That was a farcical policy, which did nothing to address the underlying issues.

Vetting the thousands and thousands of speakers who present in universities every year is not a solution, or even a partial one. Cairncross, Blunt, Maclean, Burgess and Philby did not need a “Moscow is swell” event at Cambridge to persuade them. The time and effort spent by universities and student unions on monitoring and adjudicating on events seems to me to be wasted. In my view, positive relationships between communities and public organisations are the key to preventing recruitment and radicalisation. That takes time and effort; it takes years and years of building trust, and it is far too easily destroyed by careless comments and attitudes.

I recommend Scotland’s approach on this to England’s regulators and policy makers. Do it in a spirit of seeking mutual benefit, and that is what you will move towards. To the students, let us say, “Do as you will. Attend meetings or don’t, listen to speakers or don’t, but engage in the debates; think for yourselves. This is a time of your life that, as we all know, passes all too quickly. Suck it in, soak it up, make it count and enjoy it. And in the meantime, tell Government to back off—they always need to be told.”

15:59

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry, and it is a great privilege and honour to follow the introduction of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who so eloquently presented the conclusions of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I also pay tribute to the Committee members present—the hon. Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), who spoke so thoughtfully.

I am here because I am the Opposition spokesperson and therefore have to respond to the debate, but I hope that I also bring other things to it. Having long been a member of Select Committees in the past—particularly education Committees—I appreciate the importance of the evidence-driven process, rather than obiter dicta being floated out sometimes, to be massaged and expanded by the mainstream media. All politicians want to get our message across, and some of us succumb rather too rapidly to that temptation.

I also come to the debate bearing many of the tenets that I was taught, including the process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Historians are told to look at those things, but students of many other humanities disciplines depend on them, too. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) for reminding us of the importance of the Enlightenment; the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, played a part in that process. The classic statement of Enlightenment libertarianism—I will not quote it completely accurately—was by Voltaire and went something like, “I might hugely disagree with your opinions, but I will defend to the death your right to express them.”

Those are important principles. It is very good that the Joint Committee’s report, although it did not give us a great historical exegesis, went right back to some of those first principles and, importantly, to the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, which forms a useful context for its proposals.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham was absolutely right, and not in any way immodest, to say that the members of her Committee have a hugely broad area of experience. Inevitably, not all Select Committees can have that. From that point of view, it is incumbent on us all, whether in government or in opposition, to carefully examine what has been said. For my part, I think the members of the Committee have delivered an admirable synthesis, in fairly crisp and straightforward terms. With all those lawyers, it would have been very easy to get bogged down in lots of legal terms. The test is whether someone outside the legal world could pick up that document and find it useful, helpful and understandable. I think they could.

My right hon. and learned Friend talked about context. Context is important. We are all tempted, from time to time, to go off into flights of philosophical fancy and great principles, but we need to come back to context from time to time. She drew briefly on her time at university. I was at university slightly later than she was. I was at Oxford, which is always a little behind everybody else on some of its revolutionary activities. In fact, when I arrived in 1973, I found that we were in the process of occupying university buildings to get a student union—something that had been discussed and argued about some five years earlier in other universities—but I will let that pass.

Context is important. This year, we mark the 50th anniversary of two sets of activities—one involving students, the other involving free speech—that importantly changed our world. One of them, of course, was the wide-scale student protests in the 1960s. Baroness Bakewell, a Member of the upper House, only the other week presented a marvellous programme on television about the context of the French évènements in that respect, and how they changed French society. In that same year, 1968, Enoch Powell gave his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. Both those events still have resonance for us today when discussing what the bounds to student protests and to free speech should be. Those are important layers of context.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham was absolutely right to say that context changes the things that students, or the general public, want to talk about. Without disrespect to the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who is no longer in his place, I am suspicious of the idea that we can tell universities, “You should be talking about this, that and the other.” Students will talk about what students want to talk about. There may be more bread and butter discussed today at some points than there would have been when my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham and I were at university, but the crucial thing is that there should be spaces in which a broad number have that ability to talk. I am suspicious of the idea that we—particularly those of us who are perhaps rather more removed from their student days than others—should pontificate about what student unions should do, or choose to do. I think that way sometimes madness lies.

The report rightly talked about the potential dead hand of bureaucracy and inhibition. Sometimes, with the best will in the world, institutions and stakeholders get excited by the project and go ahead to develop things that sound thoughtful, but end up in an horrendous organigram, such as the one that my right hon. and learned Friend showed us. None of us is immune from that, but we need from time to time to cut away at it and, indeed, to make fun of it. When we were talking about bureaucracy I was reminded, as an historian, of the famous phrase in Philip II’s empire, “If death came from Madrid, I would be immortal.” That sense of bureaucracies or powers bringing those things to themselves and thinking that they have all the answers can produce that sort of position. It is reasonably clear where the boundary lies of breaching the right to free speech, and the example that my right hon. and learned Friend gave in that respect is a very important one.

I will touch briefly on the comments by the hon. Members for Congleton and for Brentwood and Ongar. The hon. Member for Congleton laid out well some of the ridiculousness of the hokey cokey of regulations. The particular account she gave of the curtains reminded me of the famous phrase in “Measure for Measure”,

“man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority”.

It happened to be a man in that case, and presumably it was on the occasion that the hon. Lady mentioned. Sometimes people get off on that sort of thing. While I welcome the Charity Commission’s response to the report, I do not think it is immune to that either. The examples that the hon. Lady gave reminded me—to take a medieval parallel—of scholastics trying to decide how many angels could dance on a pin.

The hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar talked about rights and about the law. I am sympathetic to that, but we must all remember that the law itself is not an immutable concept. The laws, from time to time, disadvantage citizens in our society and need to be challenged. Some 50 years ago, gay people in this country were mildly celebrating the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Principles are not always the same. If we look up at the screen today, what is being debated in the other Chamber? Homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. We might have different views on the importance of those relevant to other things, but context changes things.

It is important that we have those things in mind. We have heard today that there is not a pervasive problem of freedom of speech at our universities, and that some of the press accounts of widespread suppression of free speech have been out of kilter with reality. The Committee members did not find the wholesale censorship of debate that media coverage had suggested. That is not to say that the report does not draw attention to a number of important factors limiting free speech, and there is inevitably real confusion about how regulations apply to student unions. That is why it was important that the Committee undertook its student union survey, which showed that 25 out of 33 student union officers said that restriction of free speech was not a problem at their university.

[Fiona Bruce]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Gordon Marsden]

I will not, I am afraid. I have little enough time to speak, so I will continue.

The chief executive of Universities UK recently said:

“Tens of thousands of speaking events are put on every year across the country, the majority pass without incident.”

It was a little curious that the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), repeatedly expressed concerns about some of the impacts of student-led activities, such as no-platforming and safe spaces, in—in my view—a slightly lurid fashion. There is a clear line between frank speech and what whips up and can specifically promote hate, or be abusive. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham touched on that.

It is also important that we consider the role of Government and other organisations in this process. The National Union of Students has a no-platform policy for a handful of racist, anti-Semitic and extremist organisations, some of which the Government themselves have banned. Is the Minister opposed to that policy? How clear does he need to be about which of those groups he wants to see on campus?

Earlier this month, as we have heard, the Minister set out some proposals and thoughts. I think he felt a little constrained about what he could say because of the views of his predecessor. Bringing together that group, as he did, is potentially a productive mechanism. Can he spell out some of the conclusions of the summit and, as importantly, who is to be held accountable for taking them forward? The Government must not try to micromanage free speech on our university campuses; some of the problems raised by this report need addressing, but they will not necessarily be addressed by micromanagement from Government.

Finally, I come to the implications. Academics of both right and left persuasions have always and often been arresting and controversial figures, so it is important that the broader questions about academic autonomy and freedom are recognised by the Government. Throughout the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, the Opposition were clear that the new Office for Students should not be a micromanagement process for this. In terms of this activity, what does the Minister believe his responsibilities are, as opposed to those of the Office for Students, in terms of drawing up guidelines? If they are too widely drawn, they will produce some of the problems we have heard about today.

This is an excellent report, and I commend it. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham talked about the fact that the Committee had saved the Government a lot of time; I would also say money and possibly civil service time. Although I know very well that civil servants are loth to take anything simply as is, I suggest that the report could be a very important blueprint for solving some of the inevitable tensions and dilemmas in this area.

16:30

[The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) on securing the debate and thank everyone who has contributed to it.

Like the Joint Committee, I approached this issue with a fairly open mind. That said, I have a bent, so far as free speech is concerned. As president of the debating society at university, I was totally happy to countenance inviting a senior member of the British National party to come and speak, even though I found, and still find, his views abhorrent, because I felt that the only way to deal with them was to challenge him. I invited Tariq Aziz, who was then the Iraqi Foreign Minister, but he was no-platformed by the Home Office at the time, so my members had to make do with Mark Owen from Take That instead.

I came to this with an open mind, but I clearly started from a position that free speech should be encouraged. We live in an open society and open debate is particularly important. If our democracy is to flourish, someone having views that are offensive to someone else is not sufficient reason to prevent them expressing those views—but expressing them does not mean that they should go unchallenged. Rather than trying to stop that person expressing such views, what we want is open debate.

I also approached the debate very conscious that, today, a word or a couple of words in a sentence that someone utters can completely characterise and define their position. It is easy, as universities go through these issues, to get to a point where they might think that someone is an unacceptable speaker because of how their views have been represented. They react to how the views have been presented, rather than listening to the argument. For all those reasons, it is important to be cautious in how we approach the issue.

When I appeared before the Joint Committee, four or five weeks into this job, I carefully calibrated how I expressed my position: I not only expressed concern about a creeping culture of censorship, but suggested that measuring whether we have free speech on campus by events that happen is not in itself sufficient. We do not know about the events that do not happen or, more importantly, about the events that happen but in a different way from how they would have happened had they been able to go ahead freely.

As Universities Minister, I have been going around universities speaking directly to students. I found it slightly amusing that, before I spoke at one university—the Universities Minister doing a Q&A with students—they had to read out the safe space policy. I just had to smile. I visited another university to discuss a number of issues, including free speech, and it was suggested to my team that, if we really wanted negative headlines, we should go ahead. I said, “Why don’t you invite lots of students from other universities nearby? You have the Universities Minister, and it would be good for them to be involved.” They said that they couldn’t invite them because they thought they would cause trouble. They were going to manage the invitation list. A video had to be played at the start of the event. As I spoke to my team about it, I ended up asking myself whether it was really worth doing the event at all. That is how censorship happens. I could see that I was second-guessing myself and what I was going to say. I am the Universities Minister. I hope that I might have some controversial views, but hopefully none that are sufficient for me to be turned away from speaking at any of our universities.

It is based on that experience, and the number of letters that I now receive from students across the country, that I have come to the view that the Committee is actually on to something here, in two important respects. The first is the bureaucracy and rules around free speech, whether from equalities law, the Charity Commission, which regulates student unions, or a university’s own policies, or a particular student union’s own policies. At best, it is so confusing that a well-intentioned person could somehow end up seeing censorship as the way to promote free speech, which is a contradiction in terms. At worst, it is very easy for wreckers to use that bureaucracy to frustrate views that they do not agree with and do not think belong on campus.

The Committee is not only on to something really significant here, but its work, which is even-handed and level-headed in its approach, provides a very good basis on which to proceed. It is a cross-party Committee and it has members from both Houses; it is not the Government party trying to use free speech as a wedge—that is the last thing I want to do. Free speech on campus should not be seen as a proxy for some of the wider culture wars in our society. If anything, it should be about helping universities with what they are best placed to do: fostering open debate and the free exchange of ideas. There are often clashes, but those clashes should be seen as positive, rather than something we want to rail against or stop.

I very much welcome the Committee’s report and its recommendations. I have been a Minister for a number of years now. When Ministers receive Select Committee reports, we often spend our time scratching our heads and thinking how to respond by doing the least we can and then moving on. However, this report provides a very strong basis for the Government to do what we can to promote free speech. That is why I held a summit, attended by the National Union of Students, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Office for Students and the Charity Commission, so that we could all work together to resolve this issue in a way that works for all our universities.

The Committee has thankfully come up with not only a set of recommendations, but its own guidance. We are looking to produce uniform and simplified guidance, and the Committee’s work means that we can proceed in haste to produce that for the start of the next academic year.

[Gordon Marsden]

I apologise for interrupting the Minister while he is in full flow. On the summit, which was advertised and which we are told went well, it would be helpful to both Members and the Joint Committee if he could provide a synopsis of what was actually agreed and who was tasked with doing some of those things.

[Mr Gyimah]

Absolutely. I will write to the Committee and I am willing to share that correspondence with the hon. Gentleman. It will include how the Government plan to proceed with the recommendations and the outcome of the summit. The Equality and Human Rights Commission holds the pen on the new guidance and regulations, so it will drive it, rather than Ministers or officials in Whitehall.

The Committee is on to something in highlighting overlapping and confusing regulations that frustrate, rather than promote, free speech. It mentioned the role of the Office for Students. Because the debate is almost out of time, I will set that out clearly in my follow-up correspondence.

I will mention something that I do not think the Committee touched on: the issue of culture. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) touched on the risk of a political monoculture developing on our campuses, so that, by default, certain ideas are seen as unacceptable. If free speech is to work, the same standards should be applied to all ideas, rather than believing that certain ideas should not be held because they are unpopular or unfashionable. Nigel Farage should be as welcome on campus as Jon Lansman, for example.

I also think that protest has a place. We want active debate, but we also want active and peaceful protest. However, protest becomes unacceptable when it is a deliberate attempt to prevent an event from taking place because the protestors disagree with the ideas that will be aired there. This is very difficult to solve, and it is one area that the Committee did not look at, but we really need to tackle it in order to ensure that our universities truly are bastions of free speech.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Fourth Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech in Universities, HC 589.

16:30

Sitting adjourned.