Contemporary Cultural Boycotts

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for introducing this important debate. Freedom of expression has always been the lifeblood of great art. Art flourishes through freedom, not conformity. History reminds us what happens when freedom is lost.

In the Soviet Union, writers and artists who challenged the official ideology were censored, blacklisted, imprisoned or sent to the Gulag. My own family experienced that world. My aunt was a dissident writer and a close friend of both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anna Akhmatova. She chose satire as her way to defy the regime, rather than open political confrontation. Even so, she spent days under interrogation in the Lubyanka. She watched friends and fellow writers disappear into the Gulag, including her friend Solzhenitsyn. Like Akhmatova, she knew that in such a climate silence could become a means of survival.

Britain is not the Soviet Union, and I am not suggesting otherwise, but history teaches us that freedom is rarely lost overnight. It is eroded gradually as people begin to censor themselves, because they fear the consequences of speaking openly. The New Boycott Crisis suggests that this climate of fear is now affecting our cultural sector. As James Marriott wrote in the Times, something has gone badly wrong. A world once built on talent, merit and creative risk has, he argues, been replaced by a culture of fear, informal sanctions and institutional cowardice.

The report identifies two groups as particularly affected: Jewish artists and those with gender-critical beliefs. Since 7 October, some Jewish artists, as we have heard, have found themselves judged not by the quality of their work but by their identity. Likewise, gender-critical artists, such as Rosie Kay and Róisín Murphy, have described the professional backlash they faced for expressing lawful views. The problem arises when cultural institutions become so fearful of organised campaigns that they no longer defend artistic freedom. Instead, they quietly exclude those views considered controversial, not because they are unlawful but because they are not fashionable. The greatest casualty is self-censorship. We never see the play that was never written, the exhibition that was never staged or the young artist who decided it was simply safer to remain silent.

Does the Minister accept that artistic freedom includes the right to hold lawful gender-critical beliefs, even when those beliefs are not popular and considered controversial today? If public bodies are under a statutory duty to uphold freedom of speech, how will the Government ensure that this duty is honoured in practice rather than being quietly abandoned in the face of organised campaigns?