Queen’s Speech

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, 38 Bills—surely this raises the question about whether legislation is being overused, a technocratic substitute for moral authority. I was struck by the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, when he wittily moved the Motion for the humble Address, quoting the then Lord Mancroft from 70 years ago:

“we have been … over-legislated … glutted, filled … and stifled with legislation.”—[Official Report, 4/11/1952; cols. 4-9.]

I have to say, I empathise. Is the only way for society to show disapproval to resort to banning or criminalising, or the only way to endorse certain behaviours or social norms to set them in legal stone, avoiding the harder job of winning hearts and minds? For example, I have always been a critic of the boycott and divestment movement. I think we should vigorously argue against academic arts organisations and councils boycotting specifically Israel, and I will point out how discriminatory and censorious such policies are. However, do we need a Bill to ban boycotts? It just seems such an illiberal way of confronting anti-Semitism in public bodies.

Similarly, as someone who for years has been raising the alarm about the increasing cancel culture on campuses, I have often faced gaslighting denials, even in the face of, for example, gender-critical academics being driven out of their jobs and increasing numbers of speakers at universities being no-platformed. Yet I still feel queasy about the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill; a law to ban campus censorship just sits uneasily and could easily be used to avoid tackling deeper cultural trends, such as the bullying of many students to conform to the orthodoxies of identity politics such as being told that they have to repeat the mandated mantras of language codes such as the use of pronouns, the eradication of the word “woman”, and so on.

In the context of this concern about overlegislation, the Brexit freedoms Bill is to be heartily welcomed: at last a chance to roll back unnecessary laws retained from the UK’s EU membership. However, an email I received yesterday from the European Movement alarmingly declared that this Bill epitomises “the calamity of Brexit” and strips back all our rights. Surely this confuses political rights with laws. I should like to see the spirit of the Brexit freedom Bill expanded: that we look at scrapping all those stifling laws that we do not need here at home, not only those drawn up in Brussels. That rights become a matter for civil society, not the law courts, would be my aim.

The legalistic mindset also seems to inform much of the response to the replacement of the Human Rights Act by an updated and slimmed down Bill of Rights, but I welcome the move, which recognises the dangers of a dependence on lawyers as the main guarantors of rights and welcome an antidote to judicial overreach. The incremental increase in litigiousness as a political tool can be and is used as a barrier to enacting decisions made democratically by the elected Government of the day, even when it is not a Government that the majority in this unelected House voted for or that the majority in the legal profession voted for.

I have heard this new Bill of Rights sneeringly dismissed as bowing to populism, as though being popular with the voting public should be a badge of shame, but there is something chilling about human rights lawyers suggesting that the only defence of rights is an Act that was brought in only in 1998 by Tony Blair. It is as though all those hard-won rights achieved by rank-and-file activists, trade unionists and all those who have fought for racial and sexual equality for decades before the HRA existed are irrelevant. These rights were not gifts handed down from on high and will not disappear without the HRA.

I urge that we burst the myth that we need to rely on the law to defend freedom, a point viscerally illustrated recently. Where was the HRA or its advocates when we saw the widespread suspension of all civil liberties during the lockdown period: people dragged before the law courts for social gatherings and inhumanely denied rights to visit loved ones locked away in care homes or dying in hospital? Indeed, under the HRA, we have seen increasing criminalisation of speech.

So I welcome Dominic Raab’s emphasis on using the Bill of Rights to guarantee free speech. How refreshing to hear a government Minister of any party prioritise codifying the importance of free speech in enhancing public debate. As a director of the Academy of Ideas, which organises such public debates, I say “Hear, hear.” But as we have already heard so well-articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, another piece of legislation might well cancel out any free-speech gains of the Bill of Rights.

The Online Safety Bill should really be renamed the online censorship Bill. The ministerial boast that the Bill will make the UK the safest country in the world online uses “safety” as it is used by safe space warriors at universities, as a synonym for censorship and silencing. Of course it is proportionate for the law to tackle protecting children from pornography, those vile suicide sites, online grooming and harassment, but the bulk of the Online Safety Bill targets adults’ freedom to say and read lawful but harmful speech, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar. Surely it is legislative overkill when the law is used to curtail lawful expression and a non-legal term such as “harmful” is expanded into the subjective category of psychological. To note, in today’s free-speech wars, that equals offensive speech some deem traumatic.

We are told the Bill will empower users, but instead it will empower—indeed, incite—big tech to remove what it decides is misinformation. But what is misinformation? The Wuhan lab leak? The biological fact of sex? Passages of the Bible? Who decides? The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is, we are told, designed to ensure that academic staff feel safe to question and test received wisdom and put forward controversial and unpopular opinions. Good, but is that open-ended approach to ideas allowed only for academics? Surely all citizens should be equally free to question received opinion and have access to controversial views, yet the Online Safety Bill will deny them that equal right under the law.

To conclude, the law cannot guarantee free speech or freedom, but it can be used to curb and criminalise these liberties. We in this House must be wary of this when scrutinising the contradictory legislative priorities contained in the Queen’s Speech.