Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morgan (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a long and fascinating debate and, like other speakers, I pay tribute to the Minister for his rationality, willingness to conciliate and awareness of the seriousness of these issues. Like my noble friends who have spoken, I wish that we were able to go further and to have a government amendment which expressed terms such as “statutory duty” and “the role of university personnel” with much greater clarity. As on previous occasions, I wish our Front Bench had not been less than wholehearted on this matter and taken a view, which many of us knew nothing about, which apparently has guaranteed academic freedom—so that is all right then. It is not a satisfactory position.

I speak not as a party person but as someone who has spent his entire career in the university world. I was a university teacher—I am a university teacher now in my retirement in King’s College—and I was a vice-chancellor for seven years. Universities are a unique marketplace for ideas—that is their ultimate purpose. They may additionally assist with creating wealth and giving local employment but their main function is to be uninhibitedly and courageously involved in ideas, particularly language. If we are talking about terms such as “terrorism” or elements which are conducive or similar to terrorism, you need extreme clarity, including the capacity to debate these matters.

I was concerned when we had a helpful meeting the other day that the reasonableness of the Minister was not paralleled by his government colleague, who talked not about terrorism but about pathways to terrorism. It seems that if you produce a concept which is in the mind of terrorists you are automatically creating a pathway. However, pathways cover many things. They can emerge in an unexpected way and can lead nowhere or everywhere. My friend, the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, referred to the University of Wales, where he knows I had the pleasure of working with him, and how a pathway, when we were talking about the theme of nationalism, led to one or two misguided people blowing up buildings. That was not a necessary consequence of that debate. The effect of opening up the theme of what nationalism was—its different political and cultural expressions and so on—had a civilising effect and nationalism resulted not in bombs but in devolution being debated in this House and on the statute book. Pathway is a dangerous concept. Non-violent extremism has been dismissed as nonsensical by other noble Lords and I need not stress that again.

I wish to make two more points: this duty is unworkable and it is wrong. It is unworkable because I can say that as a vice-chancellor—perhaps other vice-chancellors will disagree—it would not have been possible to carry out this role, this statutory duty: we would be obliged by the nature of our professional role not to apply it. As I say, the purpose is for universities to be free to debate ideas. You would be forced to discuss with student societies who they were going to invite, whether alternative views would be presented and what the general tone would be. You would, in effect, be censoring or monitoring the interchange of ideas in a way which is not compatible with being the head of or a senior figure in a university.

The nature and the force of the statutory duty and the way in which it would be exercised are still not clear in the Bill. It appears to have satisfied our Front Bench but it has not satisfied me or people such as my noble friends who have first-hand experience of working in universities. So, first, it is completely unworkable. It would destroy the very essence of collegial collaboration within a university institution and the element of trust which is absolutely essential to the way in which a university operates.

Finally, this duty is wrong. It is trying to undermine precious, unique and special institutions in this country which are honoured all over the world. These institutions do different things: they are impressive for their intellectual standards, which are widely acknowledged and admired, and for their internationalism. The whole point of being in a university is that everyone is equal there; you do not identify or marginalise any particular minority groups. To even suggest that universities should do anything other than what they do and act as a kind of thought police is deeply damaging to something which has been a pride of the history of this country for many centuries.

I hope that the Minister, with the tolerance, rationality and courtesy that he has shown, will feel able to go further and pursue the path suggested by other noble Lords of removing universities from the Bill.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the former Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, in which role I received complaints from students from every university. So I have that experience in addition to having spent decades at Oxford.

I take the unusual position that whether or not these amendments are passed it will make absolutely no difference to the law. They are tautologous. They say that one has to have regard to freedom of speech within the law. However, if the Bill is passed, freedom of speech within the law will mean that the law in this Bill is incorporated, so it will not take you any further.

Sadly, over the past 30 years academic freedom, which is one thing, and freedom of speech in the universities, which is another, have been savaged. I wish I could share the rosy view of academic freedom put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Morgan and Lord Elystan-Morgan. Some noble Lords may recall that in 1988 all university statutes were arbitrarily removed and new ones imposed without consent which removed academic tenure. The House must know that the selection of students is controlled, one way and another, by the state to the nth degree, as is the direction of research. I do not have the time to go into it but academic freedom has been greatly undermined.

As to freedom of speech, again, sadly, there are umpteen laws that reduce it in the university. I do not have time to go into all of them but they include protection against harassment and racial and religious hatred. Can your Lordships imagine what would happen if someone turned up as a lecturer or as a visitor to say that one race was inferior to another? They would not get to the end of their lecture, I can assure you. There are some things that ought not to be said—and, indeed, are not said—but there is no absolute freedom of speech. The Equality Act 2010 put special duties on universities to promote racial harmony between different groups on campus and the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006 likewise curbed freedom of speech. I am sorry to shatter the illusion but it is not there any more, not as we would wish it to be. To say that in promoting the objects of this Act, as it will be, the universities will have to have regard to freedom of speech within the law simply means that they will have to have regard, whatever that means, to freedom of speech as already curtailed as I have described, plus as it will be curtailed, for good or ill, by this Act. So I do not mind whether or not the amendments are accepted because they do not mean much legally.

I remind the House that it is not in the academic arena where the trouble, if any, arises; it is with the visiting speakers and the societies. Under the Education Act 1986 universities already have onerous duties in regard to risk assessment, stopping speeches if necessary and checking on visiting speakers. They have codes of practice on this which, I have to say, are very often ignored. There is nothing new about this. They chafe, but it has been the law for 20 or 30 years that there have to be checks on visiting speakers.

However, this has not stopped some speakers from being howled down. Again, I have not the time to give examples, but I can assure noble Lords that visiting ambassadors sometimes get howled down; that other speakers get hassled and jostled; that there are meetings where cries go up of “Kill the Jews” and that sort of thing, when the Middle East is debated. It is not a happy situation. I wish it were better, but it is not. Basically, I am saying that this will not make much difference. We should also recall that some 30% of those convicted of offence—

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. Will she accept that this Bill does make a difference, even with these provisions in it? Universities will now be under a legal obligation to follow directions imposed by the Government, which goes beyond the legislation to which she has already referred.

[Baroness Deech]

It is the amendments which I do not think will make any difference. Whether the noble Lord’s dire predictions will be the case remains to be seen but I am very worried about the situation that already exists with interference. I have a list—again I will not trouble your Lordships with it. There are lists of convicted terrorists who sadly went through our universities—the underpants bomber on the plane, the man who drove his car into Glasgow airport, and so on. I only wish it were as some noble Lords remember in their youth, but it is not. Because of the umpteen laws that we already have about circumscribing freedom of speech, whether or not we pass these amendments will not, in my view, make any difference, sadly.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, we ought to realise that we are talking not just about the problems of terrorism but about something which has been much wider than that. I am very concerned about the situation in which we now find ourselves.

It is 55 years since my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke and I debated with Sir Oswald Mosley in front of 2,000 students at Cambridge University. There were many who wanted him banned, but we said that if there was to be a new generation of students who understood the threat of fascism, they had to hear the arguments and we had to respond to them. We had the response because the Jewish Society went to huge trouble to give us all the evidence from Sir Oswald Mosley’s activities before the war. Noble Lords may remember that that would have been a time when we were a generation who knew nothing of this, but I venture to say that a whole group of people went away from university knowing how to argue the case and understanding what this very emollient, brilliant speaker was really like. It was from that moment that I became an even more enthusiastic supporter of the concept of the freedom of speech as a mechanism against extremism.

I want to say to my noble friend that we are at this moment in a very dangerous position. A close friend of mine, an Anglican priest—a man whom I would vouch for in any circumstances—has just been sacked as the episcopal chaplain to Yale because he dared to write a letter in response to others in the New York Times. It was a very moderate and reasonable letter in which he talked about the activities in Gaza of Prime Minister Netanyahu. No one in this House would have thought that an unsuitable letter to write, but he was sacked.

In the past few years, there have been many occasions in universities when people who hold unpopular views have been unplatformed in one way or another—for example, people who want to argue the case against abortion. I think that is an argument that it is proper to have on whatever side you stand. However, there are universities where it is almost impossible to have that debate.

One of the problems that we are faced with is that my noble friend has a real difficulty. We have a terrorist threat which is greater than we have had certainly in our lifetimes. It is a threat which is particularly difficult because it is associated not only in the popular mind but, because of certain facts, with a section of the community. Therefore, those of us who seek racial integration have to be extremely careful in the way in which we handle this threat, but we also have to recognise that it is a threat. It is not acceptable just to say, “Well, you know, we will just have to put up with it”. That is not where we are today.

I understand my noble friend’s problem, but I remind him that down the ages the threat of terrorism has been used to restrict the freedoms which the terrorists wish to remove. That is the fundamental problem. I worry immediately when we ask universities to inform upon and to investigate, and to assess what is a proper debate and what is not a proper debate, because I happen to believe that there are no improper debates in universities. There are improper actions as a result of debates; there are improper actions during debates; but to put a case and to argue the case is an essential part of university education.

I thank my noble friend for his amendment. If he had not tabled this amendment, I think I would have found myself very hard put to support any of this part of the Bill. However, I hope that he will have listened carefully to what others have said. I do not want universities to be able to use this as an excuse for interfering not only in these subjects but in others. That is my worry. It is not the worry as put forward in the excellent speech of the introducer of the lead amendment. My worry is that, by analogy, people will say, “Just as we have to think about terrorism in this way, so we have to think about this or that unpopular view”, whether it is an issue of left or right, an issue of morality or an issue of politics. I hope that my noble friend will give me an assurance that, if he feels that he cannot say that his amendment covers that, he will go away and think again to ensure that the narrowness which he hoped to apply to this matter is sufficiently safeguarded. I do not want to have a world in which today’s version of those students cannot have that debate with today’s Sir Oswald Mosley—with today’s fascists, communists, or extremists of any kind. If that were true, we would have sold out on a central British value.