Freedom of Speech

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. She and I met, somewhat implausibly, on the slopes of Mount Sinai some 30 years ago. She was then in a previous incarnation as an archaeologist. I like to think that we have been friends ever since. When I say friends, I do not mean that we are on nodding terms when we pass in the corridor; I mean that we are actual friends—we like each other. I do not think that I have ever felt the need to preface my remarks by saying, “Although we rarely agree” or “Although we have very different views”. It is odd that so many people feel the need to handle opponents with tongs in that way. It strikes me as both a belittling and a self-absorbed way of putting distance between people. Why on earth should we be expected to agree with our friends? Would it not have gone without saying for most of our recent history that you could have friends across the divide? No one would have thought it remarkable.

In 1644, John Milton wrote:

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”


I cite the blind sage for two reasons. First, there is a certain karma in quoting him here: John Milton was no fan of the House of Lords, and he was no fan of the episcopacy in particular. Indeed, the man that Dr Johnson referred to as an “acrimonious and surly republican” was so against all kinds of authority that his libertarian principles spilled over even into his magnum opus, Paradise Lost, in which it is notable that the Almighty Himself gets some rather bad lines. It is as though Milton’s dislike of prelates and princes spilled over into a certain disdain even towards his creator.

But I also cite him for another reason: to ask your Lordships to dwell on the extraordinary fact that those words could have been uttered in 1644. How radical, revolutionary and earth-changing they must have seemed. Up until then, every civilisation had assumed that there was a supreme truth and that it was interpreted by some aristocratic or sacerdotal class. The idea that you could reach the truth by experimentation—by argument, trial and testing ideas—was extraordinary, and it was largely developed in the language in which you are now listening to these words. The phrase “civil liberty” dates from 1644, and it was a long time before any other tongue came up with an equivalent. In English, the phrase “liberty of conscience” dates from 1580.

I want to dwell on just how extraordinary it is that we moved away from this tribal ethic that had defined our entire existence as a species until then—the fundamental ethic of “my tribe good, your tribe bad”—to this idea that you could have a constant test and would get to the truth through a cacophony of different ideas.

Milton would have shared the most reverend Primate’s definition of whether it is “fitting” as well as “frank”; he made a great deal of the distinction between liberty and licence. For him, licence was giving in to your animal appetites; liberty was a virtuous application of reason, a kind of informed consent. When you had read up about the subject, you could make a free choice in a more intelligent way. “Knowledge”, he once wrote, is but “opinion in good men”. In other words, what people begin by putting forward as a radical idea becomes the accepted consensus if it turns out to be true: the good ideas drive out the false, over time.

This may sound terribly basic when I say it now, but I do not think it is. We have lived through this little bubble in which we have taken those ideas for granted. A lot of societies never got there; we did not until fairly recently. I wonder whether we might come to look back on recent years, the last two or three centuries, as a brief interglacial with long stretches of cold before and in front, when people went with certainty and tribal identification, rather than with the idea of piloting or trialling ideas, or letting others argue against them.

The primary duty of inculcating this rather difficult idea, of teaching people this counterintuitive thought that someone you do not like might still have something to tell you, that you do not know everything, that we all start from ignorance and can constantly refine our understanding, fell mainly on our educators. We needed constantly to habituate people to this way of thinking.

The great philosopher Hannah Arendt, the chronicler of the Eichmann trial, once wrote:

“Every generation, western civilisation is invaded by barbarians—we call them ‘children’.”


By that, she meant that you and I came into the world with pretty much the same mental and operational apparatus that we would have done 5,000 years ago. The reason that we do not live in the way that our ancestors lived then is because we are able to build culture—civilisation—on accumulated knowledge. We are able to do that because we accept empiricism, reason, the scientific method and the ability to test ideas, refine and improve them over time. And what worries me is that we are ceasing to do that. Not only our universities but our secondary schools are reverting to a much older heuristic of holding up identity, accident of birth and physiognomy above reason.

Over the summer I participated in teaching in a school, appropriately called the John Locke Institute. Rather like what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham was describing in his home city, it tries to teach young people the idea of what the administrators of the course call “generous listening”. It is a lovely phrase. Generous listening means not waiting, patiently or impatiently, for the other person to stop speaking so that you can jump in. It means properly trying to engage with where they are coming from. If they use a loose word, do not pounce on it. Do not engage with their weakest argument; engage with their best argument.

The Oxford Union organised something they called “ideological Turing test debates”, where young people would be given a topical debate—should statues come down, should private schools be abolished—and you had to guess whether they really meant it. In other words, they had to master the other point of view well enough that they would have passed the Turing test and people would not have been able to tell whether they believed what they were saying. Is that not the sort of thing that all our schools and universities should be doing, in order to equip people to function in modern society? I fear that, when they do the opposite and say, “The most important thing about you is that you are female, white” or whatever it is, instead of teaching those countercyclical truths, they are teaching procyclical tribalism.

I close by citing—at some risk, in case she is watching —my elder daughter, of whom I am very proud. She is reading French and linguistics, and as a condition of being where she is at university, she was told that she needed to do an unconscious bias test. What does that have to do with French? Well, two hundred years ago, had she not been female and had been at the same university, as a condition of matriculation she would have been subject to the Test Act. She would have had to abjure the doctrine of transubstantiation: she would literally have had to swear an oath saying that she did not believe that the bread and wine in the Eucharist were the literal body and blood of our Lord. What has that got to do with French? As much or as little as the unconscious bias test—and if you cannot see that, you are in the matrix. In the 200 years between those two Test Acts flourished a free civilization. By heaven, we will miss it when it is gone.