Contemporary Cultural Boycotts

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Fox of Buckley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Freedom in the Arts report The New Boycott Crisis, published in February 2026, and of the impact on artistic freedom of contemporary cultural boycotts.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to bring to the attention of the Government and the Committee the themes in this recent report, The New Boycott Crisis. If we value art as a crucial mirror on society, the corruption of art reflects social trends right back at us and we should look back closely, so I say many thanks go to those noble Lords who are doing that today.

The report was launched here in Westminster at the end of April, alongside the Art Beyond Boycott Toolkit. It was a packed room with lots of cross-party attendance. The authors are co-founders of Freedom in the Arts, Rosie Kay, an award-winning choreographer, and Denise Fahmy, a senior arts professional, who teamed up with Reading University’s Professor Jo Phoenix. All three have experienced the vicious consequence of cancel culture. They combine their personal insights with oodles of professional knowledge to provide a multilayered investigation into how boycotts operate against different art forms, looking not just at individual artists but at gatekeepers such as venues, agents, managers and producers.

Using survey data and qualitative interviews, the report shows how even the threat of cultural boycotts is leading to anticipatory cancellation, institutional anxiety, silent boycotts and self-censorship. The report is so on the money that it got extensive media coverage even in the same crowded week as the local elections. Significantly, it was picked up by specialist publications such as Arts Professional, Museums Journal, Chortle and Mixmag, no doubt because it cut through due to its insights into the genuinely heartbreaking stories of individual artists brought to financial and reputational personal ruin by boycotts—you cannot get more personal than being cancelled because of your identity. As the report documents, that is the fate of so many Jewish artists today.

Perhaps this is nothing new. As we head into August and Edinburgh Festival season, I recall years of participating in that wonderful, artistically rich atmosphere, when the Academy of Ideas put on arts debates and live reviewing at the Fringe and at the book and international festivals. It was a joy, but it started to turn sour when, 20 years ago, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign demanded boycotts of any art form involving Israelis. Whether it was an ugly disruption of a performance of the Jerusalem Quartet in 2008, with activists yelling, “Israeli-armed musicians”, or a decade later, getting an Israeli hip-hop opera evicted from its venue. These were shocking but marginal, isolated incidents. What is shocking today is that such occurrences are so regular they are barely noticed. The campaign against antisemitism notes:

“Discrimination against Jewish people has become normalised in the arts: it’s now simply part of doing business as a Jewish creative in modern Britain”.


The report notes something else that has changed. If boycotts were historically public, involving external bodies bullying arts organisations, today they have evolved into an internal, systemic dynamic within arts organisations. Sometimes, it is a leadership team more driven by ideological agendas than artistic excellence, but more often it is insidious, with weak management capitulating to staff complaints demanding that their well-being is protected from allegedly dangerous performers. Last year, comics Philip Simon’s show “Jew-O-Rama” and Rachel Creeger’s “Ultimate Jewish Mother” had their acts pulled at the last minute by a fringe venue. The reason? Staff at the venue complained of “feeling unsafe”. Apparently, a fictional comedic Jewish mother was a threat to employee safety.

The report is full of similar evidence of employees activating internal HR procedures to reframe political demands. There is an additional institutional vehicle used similarly, especially in publicly funded arts organisations, and that is values frameworks and equality, diversity and inclusion policies. I know that the Government can be a little defensive about the virtues of EDI, but I hope the Minister will examine the documentation of how EDI is being weaponised to demand the boycotting of certain artists. I note that in February, DCMS Minister Ian Murray MP, while stating the Government’s commitment to free speech, caveated it. He quoted the Secretary of State’s ambition not to stoke the culture wars, and stressed the need to protect people from hate speech. But does the Minister acknowledge that, in many institutions, the culture wars are stoked by EDI enthusiasts and that hate speech is often a euphemism for speech someone disagrees with? Arts organisations often state that their value statements are anti-hate to justify cancelling Zionist and gender-critical artists, for example.

In her moving and passionate speech at the report’s launch, acclaimed singer-songwriter Róisín Murphy, herself a victim of a high-profile vicious boycott after speaking her mind on puberty blockers, made an important, relevant point. She said:

“Public funding, meant to support excellence regardless of politics, has become an ideological points system …This isn’t patronage. It’s patronage with strings attached so tight they strangle the critical thinking it takes to invent anything”.


What can politicians and government do to help the arts escape this censorious stranglehold? While the Arts Council declined an invitation to attend the parliamentary launch of the report, it was notable that a couple of days later, after two Jewish men were murdered in Golders Green, the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, used the opportunity to put pressure on the Arts Council. He said:

“Where public funding is being used to promote or platform antisemitism, the Arts Council must act, using its powers to suspend, withdraw and claw back funding”.


That is a positive sentiment, but I worry about cancelling the cancellers as a tactic. It perhaps also misses more subtle, silent boycotts, rather than the overt anti-Jewish abuse. Also, it does not note that a wider range of artists with dissenting views are now targeted.

For example, Scottish performance poet Jenny Lindsay, author of the aptly titled book Hounded, explains that after a tweet criticising a trans activist threatening violence against lesbians, she had seven months of private, quiet, bewildering cancellation, losing work without knowing why, unanswered emails, complaints to her publishers, messages saying we are frightened to book you. She notes, “It was clear people had got a memo: Jenny Lindsay’s a TERF”. But with no paper trails, no proof, just commissions swerved in case they cause grief, it can be especially isolating. The real loss is, “artwork that was never made and never seen”.

I therefore hope that the Minister will meet the authors of this report to discuss how the Government can help the sector adopt the report’s proposals to improve institutional capacity to resist this politicisation of programming and employment decisions that is discriminatory in terms of who gets to create, perform, exhibit and publish. Artistic judgments must be centre stage. Leadership from Ministers could include public support for boycotted artists, encouraging publicly funded arts organisations—indeed, the Arts Council—to adopt the Freedom in the Arts free speech charter.

To conclude, artistic creation needs freedom to challenge, explore, surprise and push boundaries. Otherwise, art created and programmed will be risk-averse, narrower, safer, samey, carefully calculated and curated not to offend. What a dreary tragedy. To quote Róisín Murphy again:

“Without that freedom, we don’t get better art, we simply put artists into a chokehold and suffocate the life out of our culture”.


The arts must breathe freely again. How can the Minister help them breathe freely again?.

Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is right to raise the important issue of threats to democratic institutions. He has asked us to consider disinformation, foreign interference and levels of distrust in politics. Disinformation as a weapon used by hostile states is a serious threat that needs to be tackled vigorously. However, we must be honest and admit that, sometimes, blaming foreign interference can itself be a form of disinformation. Everything from 17.4 million people voting to leave the EU 10 years ago—happy Brexit week, by the way—to the proposition that Covid originated in a Wuhan lab were falsely blamed on Russian bots. We should interrogate whether an overzealous focus on foreign interference and disinformation and misinformation is being too easily weaponised by hostile forces closer to home: domestic politicians.

This bad habit has partly contributed to a collapse of trust, based on hypocrisy. One of the final legacy policies bequeathed by Keir Starmer as Prime Minister has been the proposal that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, has just mentioned, forcing major platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to algorithmically boost content from “trusted” public service broadcasters, especially the BBC. The stated reason is fighting disinformation. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, pointed out, how grotesque is that, when public trust in the state broadcaster has taken a battering lately due to documented scandals of fabrication? Where were the BBC fact-checkers when the BBC spliced together two separate parts of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear that he told his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight while cutting the part where he told them to protest peacefully? Rather than a mistake in editing, that appears to have been produced to create a false impression.

What is more, the BBC’s own internal memo prompted by the scandal admitted egregious distortion of coverage of the war in Gaza, such as uncritical airtime regularly given to Hamas propaganda and personnel on BBC Arabic. It also acknowledged a unit of activist reporters distorting coverage of the gender/sex debate to fit a pro-trans ideology agenda. You cannot get a more obvious example of disinformation than BBC journalists stating as fact that trans women are women, in defiance of biology, truth and now the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, while illiberal regulations are justified as necessary to protect the public from being manipulated by disinformation, lots of solutions involve official manipulation—but for the greater good, so that is okay. That takes an insidious form of nudge units or Orwellian narrative control techniques. The recent revelations about the role of the Research, Information and Communications Unit based in the Home Office is a chilling case in point. Examples include advice to the police on how to present a wide range of protesters as unsympathetic thugs or helping to shape statements from victims’ families to keep the lid on any public rage, however deserved, over horrendous crimes.

What about narrative control NGOs, which receive millions of pounds in public support to influence public opinion through the media? One example is the recent revelation that a racial injustice influencer—whatever that means—was employed to write pro-migration storylines for EastEnders. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy stressed that TV is a cornerstone of democracy and, as such, a key tool in “supporting social cohesion”. Well, that is one way to describe the embedding of partisan political viewpoints in broadcasting cultural artefacts; another might be propaganda.

Despite such examples, when politicians discuss disinformation their target is rarely such dodgy interventions or state misdemeanours and untruths. Instead, the debate often takes the form of self-righteous campaigns against foreign actors manipulating the easily duped masses. As a consequence, it seems that there is no problem that allegedly threatens the democratic institutions that cannot be solved by controlling what ordinary people can see and read, or by limiting the information that the public have access to, often deploying tactics which betray civil liberties and democratic norms, such as censorship or surveillance.

This seems as though it is driven by the management of voters’ increasing refusal to unquestioningly accept PR about policies as though it is truth. Popular scepticism about, for example, the hidden economic costs of net-zero targets or fury at years of deception by the state about the statistics on mass migration are met with incredulity. Warwick University’s professor of philosophy, Quassim Cassam, has written insightfully on this issue, locating the start of this trend back to 2016, as has already been mentioned. The establishment’s shock and surprise at the election results that year led to a despairing question: why and how on earth did millions vote for Brexit or for Trump? Rather than digging deeper, the standard liberal answer, Professor Cassam argues, was that those voters voted the wrong way because they were either irrational or victims of misinformation. He argues that this conclusion by elites

“allows them to explain supposedly ‘deviant’ conduct in a way that doesn’t require them to interrogate their own assumptions”,

while promoting

“the idea that their own political views are not just true, but self-evidently true, so that only some kind of cognitive failure can explain someone else’s failure to share them”.

Such top-down condescension and complacency have led, disastrously, to politicians smearing reasonable popular scepticism about official truths. Over recent years, everything from concerns about two-tier policing, farmers’ fury at inheritance tax hikes and public outrage at the horrors of the rape grooming gangs, through to local opposition to low-traffic neighbourhoods or ULEZ-style anti-car measures, or protests at asylum hotels and much more have been mischaracterised in this House and the other place as having been incited by far-right misinformation or populism—terrible—whipped up by the goateed bogeymen of tech bros, especially Elon Musk. This approach not only avoids the real reason for declining trust but exacerbates it further.

Online Communication Offence Arrests

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this short but crucial debate on free speech. Usually, when I talk about the concerns that my organisation, the Academy of Ideas, has about the erosion of free speech as a key factor in the public’s distrust of state institutions and fury at feeling that their views are not just ignored but silenced, or when others, such as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, talk about the work of the Free Speech Union, we get a groan in the House. “There they go again” they say, “scaremongering”, “hyperbolic”, and all the rest of it, so it is great that the issue is being taken seriously today. When, as in May, the Economist headlines with “Europe’s free speech problem” and identifies the UK as one of the most censorious countries, we should all be worried, and I hope that the Government are.

The figures for arrests tell their own story. As we have already heard, there are 12,000 arrests a year, a 58% increase since 2019. I note that the Library briefing for this debate stresses that convictions and sentencing for relevant offences are decreasing dramatically and tells us not to worry, but I find that even more worrying, because it suggests that arrest is being used promiscuously to set an example, a warning to others that if they post or say the wrong thing, the police will turn up at their door, enforcers of conformism and suppressers of dissent, regardless of the law.

The journalist Fraser Myers recently asked:

“So what are we allowed to say in Britain that won’t get us arrested?”


Something certainly seems to have gone awry in the police and criminal justice system. Every force in the country has a team of officers sifting through people’s posts, trying to determine whether they cross some undefined line. The Economist, discussing this special zealotry, concludes:

“It is much easier to catch Instagram posters then thieves; the evidence is only a mouse-click away.”


Does the Minister worry that the police indeed seem to have become distracted?

Some of the detail in recent high-profile cases suggest skewed priorities. The noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, has already referred to the Times Radio producer Maxie Allen and his partner, who were arrested for the crime of posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group, but the detail that I noticed was that Mr Allen’s partner asked the police officer for an example of malicious communication. The detective stared blankly and then had to google the crime.

There is the case of the Met Police intelligence unit, which usually deals with terrorism and extremism, sending Kent Police to investigate tweets from Julian Foulkes, a former police officer, about the rise of antisemitism since the 7 October pogrom. The body-cam footage from that raid showed a police officer rifling through Mr Foulkes’s book collection and expressing alarm at some of the “very Brexity” things on his shelf. Does the Minister, like me, wince when he hears that and wonder whether the police have become politicised in their actions and what they are up to? I am worried that the police will lose credibility over this.

On Saturday 29 June, 20 year-old Montgomery Toms, known as Monty, was arrested while standing alone quietly at the side of the London Pride march. His crime was wearing a handmade cardboard sandwich board showing a “trans flag = mental illness” message. Monty left the scene when approached by two officers but, two streets away, he was surrounded by 11 officers, handcuffed, held in solitary confinement for nine hours at Charing Cross police station and, while not charged with a crime, placed on pre-charge bail conditions. Such ludicrous overreach led Douglas Murray to write in the Spectator that if Monty had wanted to avoid being arrested, he should have worn a pro-jihad sign; or, even better, have indulged in a bout of phone thefts, and then he would not have seen a police officer for miles.

I do not want to just blame the police here: they take their direction from the top. The message is clear: speech crimes are on a par with or even more dangerous then real crimes. The UK Government’s public information campaign in relation to the riots was menacing. “Think before you post”, was their meme. The public fury about the excessive 31-month sentence for Lucy Connolly’s offensive Facebook message about setting fire to hotels was partly because Philip Prescott, an actual rioter who physically attacked a mosque, was sentenced to only 28 months. No wonder the police see online communication as on a par with violent actions.

Finally on the data, we need to note that communications offences are not the only gauge of attacks on free speech. Criminal lawyer Luke Gittos warns us that public order legislation, especially stirring up hatred, as we have heard, is being defined too broadly and making people feel too

“scared to speak out about important topics in case they face criminal prosecution”.

Mr Gittos recently successfully defended an ex-Royal Marine, Jamie Michael, charged with that offence simply for posting a video of himself ranting about illegal migration. He was held for 17 days, but acquitted in 17 minutes by a jury, and Mr Gittos reminds us that the jury system often acts at a curb on the worst excesses of the state. Now even that is under attack. Can the Minister assure us that it will be protected?

Ministerial Code: Policy Announcements

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I find the outrage from Opposition Members to be in the category of faux outrage. As I said earlier, the Speaker’s comments were heard by Ministers across the Government, and Treasury Ministers have been hardly out of the other place this week, with Statements and Question Time. I cannot see how anybody could assert that all the decisions in the Budget—which makes difficult choices to fix the foundations of the economy and public services in this country—were trailed in advance.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this is not about party politics or outrage; no one is playing politics here. This is about the rules and a set of conventions that are democratic in nature. It is not fair to dismiss concerns about manipulation. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke—and, goodness knows, he and I agree on nothing—raises perfectly valid arguments. Can the Minister listen seriously to the concerns? It is true that I did not know in advance everything that was going to be Budget—in some ways it was a lot worse for ordinary working people than I anticipated—but I did know far too much. The attempts at manipulation break the rules. If the public break the rules on anything, they get a lecture from this Government, so maybe the Government should listen in this instance.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I do not recognise the scenario that the noble Baroness presents. As the Minister for the Cabinet Office said yesterday, we take this extremely seriously. We are going to shortly produce a new Ministerial Code and we will be increasing the transparency of a whole load of measures as a result. It is clear that we are not going to agree on this point across your Lordships’ House. We have heard the Speaker’s comments and they apply to Ministers in this House as well.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 20th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I have problems with all the amendments in this group. Amendment 1 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, would elevate “political or moral disapproval” to be the sole or main factor, and the noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, wants to introduce the concept of materiality into influence. Both these would just create huge loopholes, which would allow public bodies to conceal their boycott activities within other factors. Clever lawyers would find ways of writing papers which support decision-making in, say, local authorities or other bodies affected by the Bill, by reference to a whole load of other factors, to support the claim that they were not “materially” influenced by their disapproval of a foreign state, or that it was not the sole or main factor. I genuinely have a problem with the watering-down implied by Amendments 1 and 2.

I listened very carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, said about his amendments. I understand that he is trying to find a way through by removing the reference to “political or moral disapproval”, but I am not convinced that his amendments work either. In particular, I am not sure what the restriction to “that territory” in his Amendment 4 will do. Let us suppose that the territorial consideration is Ukraine, because it has to relate to a particular foreign territory by virtue of subsection (3). Does that mean that the decision-maker must have no regard to what is happening in Ukraine itself? It seems to me that “that territory” can be related only to the territorial consideration referenced in subsection (2). In that case, it would be Ukraine. If, say, Russia is the foreign state you have a problem with, it seems that you can take account of its activities only in Ukraine. You could not take account of activities that were not in Ukraine—for example, attacks from other places, such as the Black Sea, or whether it takes children from Ukraine back to Russia. If you thought that Russia was the territory—still restricting it to one territory—you have the problem the other way around; you could take activities only in Russia, but not in Ukraine, which is the fundamental problem. That creates an interpretive problem.

While these distinctions might not matter if we are talking about Russia and Ukraine, if you try and then relate it to a council or other public body trying to boycott Israel, and relate that to the complexities of the different parts of the territory around the State of Israel, you may end up finding some odd conclusions on how the reformulation might work in practice. I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, is a very clever lawyer and I am not, and I may well have completely misunderstood how his amendment is intended to work.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, because this is the first group, I again state that I think that a lot of these amendments are trying to establish what is intended by the Bill, in a probing way. In that sense, they are very helpful for clarification on the language used. It was clear from Second Reading that most of the people who have since tabled these amendments and are speaking now are not in any way defending BDS; it was clear to me anyway. These boycott schemes are censorious and illiberal, and very often, as was stated at the time, the seeding ground for anti-Semitism in public life. In that sense, I oppose them; I am just not clear how the Bill will actually tackle them.

As we speak, just to use an example, the Rio Cinema in London has just cancelled its Eurovision party on the basis that it will not hold it while Israel still has somebody in the Eurovision Song Contest. I do not know whether this is self-declared BDS; it is a charity, and I am not quite sure how the Bill would apply. The point I kept trying to make at Second Reading was that, so often, I feel that the Bill will miss where a lot of the anti-Semitic censorship is occurring, around the periphery, rather than just in terms of divestment and investment, and so on.

I say that because those of us who are interested in tackling those issues need to have as much free speech as possible. I particularly support Amendment 6 from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire—although both his amendments are interesting—which makes the point about

“any person seeking to persuade the decision-maker”.

That is what politics is, is it not? Trying to persuade a decision-maker—lobbying and trying to have an influence on politics—is surely the job we are all in, even if we disapprove of, in this instance, what someone is trying to persuade about. I just get anxious about this being in a Bill; it sets a dangerous precedent.

Points have been made well by other noble Lords about the use of the language of political and moral disapproval; I want there to be far more political and moral disapproval in politics today than there is. It is an entirely good thing to make that clear. I wish there was a bit more “political and moral disapproval” leadership in general, even though many of us arguing that would disagree over what it should be. That is fair, but it is far better than a kind of technocratic approach. Also, if we are to win the hearts and minds of many of the young people who go along with BDS campaigns, we will have to show our political and moral disapproval, and win them over and seek to persuade them. Noble Lords get the point, but it is not clear how the language in the section to which these amendments refer will help us to tackle the problem that the Bill seeks to address.

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I also wish to speak in support of Amendments 1 and 6 in the name of my noble friend Lord Wallace. As a former councillor, I can imagine that former colleagues will be absolutely horrified at the scope of the Bill. We are talking about how moral and political disapproval cannot be used as the basis of a decision. Many councillors get into politics because they have moral and political views—they want to change the world and do something about things in their own area. I would welcome clarity, as others have asked for, on how it is to be established whether a decision-maker has been

“influenced by political or moral disapproval of foreign state conduct”.

What means might be used to actually determine this, in the event of needing to enforce action against it?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to return, very briefly, to something the noble Lord, Lord Mann, raised earlier. I can understand in the broader sense why universities have been included, because very often it has been universities that have been at the cutting edge of popularising boycotts. They have taken a wide range of forms—and not just in terms of what is sold or invested in. As the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, pointed out, it could be denying people research, not letting Israeli academics come over to speak or whatever. There are all sorts of ways that this happens. So, I understand why the university sector is in scope. My problem is that it is not clear to me how a Bill like this can do anything other than attack academic freedom, which I am interested in defending. I think we have to deal with what is happening on university campuses in a different way.

Regardless of that, the reason it is frustrating—and why I am referring to what the noble Lord, Lord Mann, said—is that, if you have a conversation with anyone outside this Chamber, if they are like me, they are worried about BDS and anti-Semitic campaigns against Israeli academics. Something has just happened at King’s College London in fact, where an event has been called off, and there is a University of Leeds chaplain in hiding —all these things are going on. Ironically, if anything, this Bill is too narrow to deal with what is really happening. The point that the noble Lord, Lord Mann, made was that the way wording happens, there are ways around it that this Bill will not deal with. He and I might differ about how we would deal with that—I think we probably would. None the less, given what a public authority is, it is understandable why universities are in here—but, as people have said, which bit of the university?

For the Minister to say “Oh, no, it wouldn’t count, student unions”, would be utterly ludicrous. From the Government’s point of view, even if I go with you, why would it not be student unions? That would be mad. They are part of what the public authority of the university is about, along with research councils and everyone else. I am not trying to encourage the Government to wipe up every part of a university to bring them in scope, but to keep saying that they are not in scope makes no sense from the point of view of the public justification for this Bill by Michael Gove when he has argued for it, and anyone else who supports it. So we do need some clarity here.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, this debate has referred consistently to universities, but I do not want the point to get lost that there is an equivalent problem with local government pension schemes, where a succession of bodies take part in the decisions that are reached. Every fund has advisers, in particular advisers on ESG. The trustees are responsible for the decision, but they are under a legal obligation to give due regard to their advisers’ views. Now, because of the encouragement by the Government, the individual funds are not actually investing the money; the money is passed on to a pooled fund that equally has its advisers and its decision-makers. Somewhere in that thread of control, someone is a decision-maker, but I defy the Minister to tell us precisely, in the terms of this Bill, who it is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

The thing is, though, as we are teasing out, is it not right that the Bill would not stop Warwick University student union from passing a motion in that regard? It would stop the university from acting on it, but no university has ever acted on these things. That is why we are all scratching our heads a little about what we are going to get from the Bill. It was a manifesto commitment—we understand that—but it is not our fault if the Government cannot turn their manifesto commitment into a usable piece of legislation.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

On the Warwick University point, for clarification, the other important thing that happened there was that Warwick University academics refused to sit on a panel discussing the issue of Israel, and so on. That was led by academics. It would not be affected by the Bill. The Minister can say, “Oh, that’s okay, it won’t be affected by this Bill” but that has had a much more damaging impact on the debate around Israel in Warwick University than anything that a few people at the student union did and that the university authorities did not act upon. What the university did not do was support those Jewish students and the organisation that organised that debate, and it let the academics carry on. The question of what the Bill will and will not do, and who will be held responsible, is what we are trying to clarify in this Committee.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I did not come prepared with examples about universities—my memory is not that good. However, there have been very many occasions where violence used by anti-Israel students has forced the university to cancel speakers or to charge Israeli and Jewish societies for their own security when an Israeli or a pro-Israeli speaker comes. There are manifold examples of this, and I have dealt with it over the years. If noble Lords do not know about this, they really should.

The comments that have been made by the noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Wallace, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, take us to the heart of the Bill and why the drafting is so difficult. What the Bill really means to do is clamp down on anti-Semitism in local authorities and universities, but it cannot say so in direct terms; therefore, it goes much more broadly than it needs to, because it is academically dancing around the subject. If I could rip it up and start again, I would have a couple of clauses saying that anti-Israel activity—anti-Zionist activity, if you want to call it that, or anti-Semitic activity—is prohibited in universities and public authorities, because there are no examples of universities and public authorities acting against Australia, to give a fanciful example. Is anyone banning Australian wine because of what happened to the Aborigines? Is anyone banning New Zealand lamb because of the way the Māoris were treated? Is anyone, anywhere, ceasing to use Chinese products? I need hardly go on.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as others have explained so well, this Bill presents a dilemma. I have long argued that the BDS campaign has seeded a culture of normalising anti-Semitism. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, and I will have to disagree on what that definition might be; however, one of the points about democracy that I agree with him on is that we need that kind of debate. The problem I have is that BDS is an entirely illiberal and censorious boycott campaign; but, on the other hand, this legislation, which aims to ban such boycotts, is also illiberal and censorious. So, what to do?

In the broadest terms, the Bill’s premise could sanction a dangerous trend of government determining in law which political campaigns are legitimate and which are not. I found the Minister’s emphasis on public authorities all speaking with one voice on foreign policy more scary than reassuring. Perhaps she might consider just the smidgen of a possibility that one day, the Government are in opposition and are involved with public bodies that disagree with official foreign policy. It is hard to know whether the Bill would catch them then.

However, if the aim is to rein in public institutions from dabbling in contentious moral decisions beyond the scope of their core responsibilities, which Michael Gove certainly seemed to imply, then we should recognise that, ironically, one reason why investment and procurement strategies have been politicised in recent years is government-backed, top-down directives. Just look at the way that pursuing ESG targets and adopting divisive EDI diversity criteria have distorted investment and procurement decisions, and not all for the good. By and large, therefore, the Government should stop interfering in what is and is not invested in by autonomous public bodies.

Beyond a concern about the threat to the autonomy of, for example, universities, councils and arts organisations, which was well explained by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and many others, I just cannot see how the Bill can avoid stifling democratic debate. We have heard powerful speeches, especially those critiquing Clause 4 as a gagging clause. However, the provision that prohibits vice-chancellors, chief execs of arts organisations and council leaders from saying that they would support the boycott if it were lawful is in fact Orwellian—and that is not overusing the word. Is it not dangerous to discourage leaders of public bodies from explaining their decision-making processes? Surely it is in the public interest that we know the pros and cons of financial investments, or why they might want to boycott, and so on.

Unlike some, therefore, I am not somebody who goes along with a rather unpleasant cynicism about the Government’s motives. I am happy to accept that the Bill is being put forward in good faith and that it is an attempt to tackle one of the sources of anti-Jewish hatred—BDS-style boycotts. However, despite the intention, clamping down on open discussion, which so much of the Bill does, will make it more difficult to tackle anti-Semitic racism in the public sphere.

Those of us who oppose BDS should hold firm that it is we—or it should be—who are on the side of democratic free speech. In contrast, BDS is a boycott campaign whose very essence is to use regressive censorship tactics to isolate Israel economically and culturally. However, note that this is not about shaming Israel or embarrassing it into taking a different policy decision. We have heard a lot in today’s debate about the past boycott of South Africa—maybe it is an age thing—but that was aimed at ridding South Africa of apartheid, not of ridding the world of South Africa. The BDS movement, however, aims to rid the world of a Zionist state: that is, to eradicate Israel. As people have called for evidence, that is what its founders and much of its literature say.

I think I get why the Government might focus on trying to find a way of curtailing BDS. Today’s boycott culture is pretty grim. I recently encountered those abusive, rather vicious protests outside Zara and McDonald’s, which I was told not to enter and buy a burger from, as it would mean that I was endorsing genocide. It is scary that so many of those young protesters have no qualms about mirroring the 1930s Nazi tactic of blocking Jewish services and businesses with their “Don’t buy from the Jews” slogans. BDS campaigns have certainly created a boycott culture, with anyone associated with Israel being treated in a cavalier, cruel and prejudicial way. There was the terrible incident the other day, when the young Israeli swimming champion was booed and jeered; and Gary Lineker, a leading BBC pundit, casually went along with the BDS demand to kick the Israel football team out of FIFA.

I am all for a robust response to this ugly mood, but this proposed legislation follows a worrying trend: creating criminalising laws as a substitute for political courage in taking on contemporary challenges. I therefore ask the Minister: is the problem the Government seek to tackle a plethora of university senates using BDS schemes to avoid investing in Israel? Hardly. However, there is the huge problem of a spike in anti-Semitic abuse targeting Jewish students—as described so vividly by the noble Lord, Lord Mann—and, by the way, of leaders of those public institutions often looking away. Consider the shameful case of a Birmingham University Jewish chaplain being driven off campus and into hiding after returning from military service fighting Hamas. Beyond these visceral attacks, let us not forget that too many in academia have cultivated the intellectual justification for anti-Jewish attitudes among the young by propagating decolonisation ideology and critical race theory—branding Jews as the embodiment of white privilege and Israel as the epitome of a colonial settler state, and therefore fair game for righteous hatred.

How will the Bill’s restrictions deal with that or help arts organisations tackle pernicious cultural boycotts such as the cancelling of Israeli artists, be it the London theatre that pulled the plug on the Jewish Film Festival, the cancellation of the Israeli hip-hop opera at the Edinburgh Fringe, or the bullying of high-profile artists who have the temerity to announce that they will gig in Tel Aviv? The Bill will not make an iota of difference.

I finish with the story of the Jewish nightclub owner who closed down his nightclub last week, having received a package addressed “Zionist child killer” that contained children’s clothes drenched in fake blood. However, the final straw was the threat to boycott the club. The Bill will make no difference.

By the way, I am delighted to have found so many free speech allies in this House; suddenly, everybody is on the side of free speech. I have not experienced that in the years that I have been here—only in defending BDS. None the less, I do not want to betray that free speech by agreeing with the Government that we should clamp down on it just because I want to fight anti-Semitism.

Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green. It is so refreshing to have a bit of straight talking and honesty, and an important reminder of the political context for the Bill being put forward—and, in fact, for Bills suddenly jumping up all over the place. There is a political argument going on, and we were reminded of it.

I remind noble Lords that most of us in this House are in the job of conversion, not just the Lords spiritual. If you are in a political party, you want to convert as many citizens as you can to vote for you. As campaigners, we use persuasion to effect change and to win hearts and minds. Despite the qualms of anti-nanny staters such as me, changing behaviour is all the rage in policy circles, not least among the Liberal Democrats. Legislators use sticks and stones and the nudge unit to make us smoke and drink less and walk and cycle more. I note this because we are keen on imposing preferences of how we live on a wide range of issues. I give that as a reminder, as it has been asserted on several occasions: “Who would ever dare impose a way of living on someone? They should live as they want.” If only.

You might say that such conversions are legitimate because they are harmless, but the Bill’s broad drafting does not even attempt to require that any harm is intended or caused. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, reassures us that good faith, harmless advice and so on are not in target. I am grateful for that, but she also says that it is all about motivation. How will the police and prosecutors assess this motivation? They would have to read minds. More likely, they would read social media, or even public speeches such as these made here today, scouring through everything for evidence of motivation. In that way, the Bill will be used to police views and does threaten free speech across a range of social settings.

I will start with church. I am a secularist, an ardent supporter of lesbian and gay rights, and no fan whatever of religious sexual ethics. The noble Baroness and I agree on religious freedom as a democratic virtue, and I argue that the Bill threatens it. All the world’s great religions are based on predetermined truth claims to which their followers must adhere. Preferences of behaviour and belief are baked in, and, yes, they are often judgmental and require some restraint on personal preferences. Christian teaching on the sacrament of marriage requires suppression of acting on sexual desire before marriage. However loving the church might be to any individual who is gay, the practice of homosexuality is deemed sinful, and therefore anyone who is gay is asked to practice celibacy if they want to be part of the church. You and I might think that such ideas are prosperous, but then the option is to leave the church or the religion, rather than inviting the law in to try to shape religious doctrine.

Every day, in this Chamber, noble Lords recite the Lord’s prayer:

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”


With this in mind, take the scenario of a young Christian who wants to be delivered from evil and to follow the Church’s teaching, and so asks the vicar to pray to help him avoid sexual temptation. Surely the Bill will turn that priest into a criminal, or could do; after all, the Bill makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual behaviour. What is at stake here should concern atheists, agnostics and everyone, because the Bill jeopardises fundamental principles of secular democracy.

To move on, while it is clear what the Bill means by sexual orientation, how would the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, define gender identity, before she tries to embed it in UK law for the first time? It is, at best, a contested concept. I appreciate that a precise, fixed definition might be tricky, when this particular identity can cover over 100 to 300 genders—transgender, gender-fluid, genderqueer, gender-variant, genderless and non-binary. The noble Lord, Lord Young, is not the only person who gets confused. Are all those to be covered by Clause 1?

As has been explained so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, we now have evidence that sexual orientation is being sidelined in the medical and cultural enthusiasm to affirm and champion gender identity. Definitions are also muddled by the forced marriage of “LGB” with “TQI”. There is no connection between being same-sex attracted and a desire to change gender. In fact, many lesbians and gay men feel that homophobic pressure is being exerted on them to drop their exclusive—and, yes, predetermined—sexual preference for the bodies of those born to the same sex.

Can we at least recognise that this is a very complicated and very contentious issue? A Bill such as this does nobody any favours. I ask every political party to keep well away from this. It will poison even more the well of free speech, intergenerational relations and our relations with each other on a topic that is toxic enough.

Elgin Marbles

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, and especially the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, I would like to welcome this excellent short debate on the Elgin marbles. I want to stand back from the specifics of the “to loan or not to loan” argument, and avoid the tit-for-tat row over ownership, because I fear that this technical approach can distract us from why these sculptures really matter. We should not lose sight of the marbles’ value as sublime works of art, the quality of their artistry and what Virginia Woolf described as their “immense and enduring beauty” after millennia. I urge that we refocus the public discussion to the sculptures’ significance in the history of the accomplishments of western civilisation.

I was reminded of this when rereading Tiffany Jenkins’s excellent Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums … and Why They Should Stay There. I recommend that DMCS Ministers treat themselves to the book for Christmas. In it, Dr Jenkins details how the 1816 House of Commons Select Committee that investigated Lord Elgin’s proposed sale of the marbles to the nation not only found that he had acquired them legally, but broadened its deliberations to weigh up the sculptures’ aesthetic and cultural merits. It concluded that the marbles’ artistic magnificence was such that their presence in Britain had the potential to spark an artistic renaissance. The context for this appreciation, fuelled by Enlightenment values, was the 19th-century interest in ancient Greece and especially the inspiring classical model of Athenian democracy, which chimed with the democratic spirit of mass society emerging in Britain at the time.

What a contrast with 2023—anti-democratic trends are on the rise, and rather than publicly promoting these artefacts as inspiring embodiments of the world’s first democracy, policy retreats into uninspiring pedestrian legalese. Additionally, it has become fashionable not to celebrate but to demonise western civilisation. The Enlightenment and 19th-century cultural figures are routinely impugned as representing white supremacy, racist privilege, and so on.

Unsurprisingly, the dispute about the marbles has been dragged into the sordid anti-western discourse, and we are told that the return of the sculptures would be a positive act of decolonisation. But like so much of today’s philistine, politicised use of the past to score contemporary identitarian points, it bears little relation to historic facts. The notion that the return of the marbles would be reparation for what was stolen by British colonialists 200 years ago is misleading. When Lord Elgin acquired the marbles, Greece was under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire, not the British Empire. Indeed, the Ottomans were happy to sell them; they were indifferent to 19th-century Hellenism or democratic virtues of ancient Athens or anywhere else, and the Acropolis served as a garrison at the time.

Despite such inconvenient facts, there is growing pressure on all museums to repatriate their artefacts in general. Worse, too many who work in the sector behave as though their institutions are little more than repositories of ill-gotten gains of a shameful, colonial, slave-owning past. We should instead demand that they act as public servants, trusted by democratic society to curate the world’s treasures as guardians of historic scholarship and artistic appreciation.

In this context, it is crucial that the Government urge the British Museum not to fudge the issue in the name of political expediency or diplomatic niceties. I worry that talk of loans seems to do just that. Can the Minister promise to unapologetically defend housing Elgin’s precious marbles within London’s encyclopaedic collections, as an aid to a universal understanding of human culture?

Minister for Equalities

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I think that is a very important intervention and the noble Baroness can see from the House’s response that people agree with it. I have my first meeting with Nadhim Zahawi next week and I will put that on the agenda.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, there is nervousness about using the word “woman”. Last night at the PinkNews Awards, Keir Starmer declared that he would make it a crime to misgender. That means people might use the word “woman”, but nobody will define what a woman is. Maybe that nervousness is because people are frightened of misgendering and getting dragged into the gender wars. Can the Minister assure us that “equalities” means that biological women will not have their rights sidelined by an equalities agenda based on gender identity?

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Why has he dropped “Women” then?

Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Gohir, and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. One thing that is growing is the strong women brigade in here.

I welcome one aspect of this debate. I want to move away from the focus on the redistribution of a shrinking national cake. The answer is to bake a bigger cake. I am glad that so many noble Lords now profess that they are pro-growth because, until recently, those of us who were arguing for economic development faced lectures that growth was unsustainable, irresponsible, damaging for the environment, a recipe for greedy consumerism and so on.

My problem is that the measures announced in the growth plan are flimsy and insubstantial. The problems we face—here I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham—were foreseeable, but they were denied by all sides politically. Those problems are far greater than the Government or the Opposition seem to acknowledge, even now. If only they could be fixed through the prism of cutting or increasing tax.

I have no doubt that the mini-Budget was a trigger for the present crisis, but we need to be honest that it is not the cause of Britain’s woes. Our stagnated, unproductive economy has deep roots of many years’ standing. For more than a decade, central banks have turned to easy monetary policies and vast amounts of quantitative easing both to keep interest rates near zero and to prop up and sustain a zombie economy. This was not called out by politicians. It could not have gone on indefinitely.

Closing down the UK economy for two years during lockdown, which received all-party support, and now the war in Ukraine have brought the UK economy’s underlying fragilities to the fore. However, the idea that tax cuts are an easy answer is pitifully inadequate—let alone those who blame Brexit; that is just pathetic.

Without things being produced, no wealth is created to generate incomes, profits and tax revenues to pay for public spending, so production is the key. But is the idea of the tax cuts that businesspeople, corporates and wealthy capitalists will spend their untaxed windfalls productively? Why would we think that? Since the 1980s, business has not been short of funds to invest but it has not been entrepreneurial and it has not invested in innovation, better technologies or the skills revolution. Instead, corporate culture itself has become risk-averse, playing it safe and playing with financial engineering.

A furious public are not just in terror about the short-term—their bills and mortgages—but dismayed at the lack of meat on the bone of the plans. Take the energy policy—the energy that we will need to fuel growth. There is no point in the Government loudly shouting, “Let’s frack”, and then whispering, “With local consent”, and continually reaffirming their net-zero targets. Green growth in reality means unreliable energy and eco-austerity. Let us get on with nuclear power. Let us get on with building those houses. At the moment, it is all soundbites. Never mind subsidising old industries, where is the concrete plan to invest in new sectors, with new jobs and new energy solutions? Where is the spirit of risk, courage and experimentation? We must create a new industrial revolution. That is the long-term plan that we need but it is sorely lacking, and the public need to hear more of it.

The public are not fools. They instinctively know that there is no pain-free route out of this. We need some frank talking, and a collective approach to solving the problems, beyond party politics. A huge transformation is needed in the economy, and everybody must be involved in shaping it. The words “Growth, growth, growth” are not enough. A lot more must be done. We must be humble and recognise that we have to take a lead on this but that we need the British public onside to make it happen.