Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Debate between Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Mann

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I come to this from an entirely different perspective from that of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, sharing literally no arguments with him. Therefore, I shall refrain from taking up any time to offer any critique of his pro-university analysis.

I should reference my interest in the register: I am an unpaid, independent government advisor on anti-Semitism. I speak very independently. I suspect that I have been to more universities than any other Member of your Lordships’ House or any member of the Government or any Member of the House of Commons in the last two years. I have spoken with more university vice-chancellors on anti-Semitism than anybody else. I have spoken to virtually all of them over the last three years—some multiple times. I have been in and I have solved specific problems with them, and I think they have been reasonably pleased to have had my assistance in solving them. That is what they have told me. So I know what is going on. I meet with the Union of Jewish Students regularly, as I do with Universities UK. It is fair to say, in the five years that I have been carrying out this role, that I have spent more time on the university sector than on any other single issue.

My approach has been lauded in the Jewish community, and I think it is successful. My—if you like—philosophical, but also strategic and even tactical, approach has been to say to the universities that, in dealing with anti-Semitism—anti-Jewish racism—the critical thing they have to do is listen on a regular basis to their Jewish students, who are organised through Jewish societies. There are about 80 of them across the country. I speak regularly, and have recently done so, to large numbers of students at Jewish societies in universities, and I spend a lot of time listening to them on their perspectives, their fears, their ambitions and how they see themselves as being Jewish both in the country, in the city or town or sometimes rurality that they are based in, and in their university. I feed that back, for better or for worse.

My strategy is, therefore, that when I speak to university vice-chancellors, for example, I tell them that what they have to do is to get their head round what anti-Semitism is, and how Jewish students and staff should have equality of status and what that means, and what the obstacles to that have been and are. The organising strategy is very simple: they should go and speak regularly to their Jewish students because they are organised. If there is a coherent system of organising Jewish staff members—not just academics because there are as many, certainly in some of the bigger cities, non-academic Jewish staff as there are academic staff—and an effective forum for Jewish staff, and there are some, then by all means speak to them as well. But there is no system for that, so that is not a system solution; that is something that should be done, something that is encouraged and something that more could be done to develop.

If the university leadership speaks to the Jewish student leadership, they will have a perspective on what is going on. If they do it every year, there will be a turnover of Jewish student leaders—that is inevitable in a student environment—and they will have a bit of a time series of what the issues are and how well they are doing in dealing with them.

What has been remarkable since 7 October is not how much anti-Semitism there has been in our universities but how little there has been compared with what has gone on in the United States, for example, or in Canada or Australia, as relevant comparable countries. That is because the universities are listening and talking to their Jewish students and responding, initiating and thinking through. Having a working definition of anti-Semitism as a benchmark has been invaluable in doing that and in understanding the issues. That is working.

However, there are problems; I deal with them. The biggest problem—I repeat what I said at Second Reading—is the ostracisation; the isolation when your so-called friends do not speak to you and the micro- aggressions that go with that. That is the worst problem that Jewish students face, and it has dramatically increased. Students are uncomfortable where they live because their flatmates are not including them in things any more because they are “Zionist” or “pro-Israel”, whatever that means—it can mean many different things.

That is the big problem, so I am looking at the Bill and asking: what does it do, if it applies to universities, to assist those students and staff? The answer is: it does nothing—zero, zilch. I do not mean a little bit; I mean nothing. It does nothing about the academic boycotts, which is a problem. It does nothing about the isolation if, for example, someone wants to work with, say, an Israeli university but is blocked by the rest of the department from doing so. If someone wants to research in a particular way, on a thesis or in a postgraduate setting, they are discouraged from doing so. These are the real problems that come to me. It is insidious and dangerous racism.

I come back to the question, because in making law we have to look at it: what does the Bill do about that in the context of universities? The answer is nothing; there have been no successful BDS campaigns in our universities—none. I have been around long enough to have seen and experienced the origins of the campaign, not just in the last three or five years in my current role, or the 20 years I have been around Parliament, but the 40 years in which I have been in some kind of public life. For all those 40 years, there have been zero successful BDS campaigns and therefore it is not a big problem. They are unsuccessful campaigns.

I fully understand. I know the people who organise them and I know how they do so. I am on the receiving end of the abuse. I have had people jailed for targeting me and my family. I could take noble Lords back to when I was stopped from speaking in universities because I dared to visit Israel in 1984. When I was in the West Bank, I met a man called Sinwar—noble Lords may have heard of him. He was the student leader at Birzeit University at the time. It is probably a good job I was not photographed with him. But after I went on that visit to Israel, I was banned from speaking in universities.

I have been through all that, and I am telling noble Lords that there is nothing in this Bill that assists Jewish students. Frankly, it does not matter whether you listen to me, because if you go back to the principle that universities should listen to Jewish students, the Jewish students say that they do not want the Bill to cover universities. What are we doing if we allow that to happen? Jewish students are clear; they do not want it. It does not help them. Is it some kind of political game—I am not sure who it is aimed at—to put it in? There is no case in tackling anti-Semitism for universities to be included in this Bill. By definition, when the Union of Jewish Students says: “No, thank you”, they are the arbiters, the front line—the people impacted and affected. It does nothing on academic staff and academic boycotts.

Before I am, no doubt, sacked by government—as I am not paid, that is kind of an arbitrary thing— I intend to offer to every single political party, for we do not know who will be in power afterwards, a proper set of proposals on the changes that are needed to improve what is going on for students with anti-Semitism. This Bill is not it. This amendment is right and appropriate; it would be outrageous, when the Union of Jewish Students says: “No, thank you”, for us to ignore it. I recommend the amendment to the Committee.

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow such a powerful speech from the noble Lord, Lord Mann, and that from my noble friend Lord Willetts just now. I should declare an interest; I am on the council of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, and I am a visiting professor at King’s College London. I want to be sure that is on the record.

I also want to be clear at the outset that I appreciate the good intentions of the drafters of this Bill. Of course, as it is a manifesto commitment, when it comes to later stages, I will certainly support it; I hope my noble friend Lord Leigh will take note of that. However, I think there are real problems with it, which have been brilliantly clarified by the two excellent speeches that preceded mine. I will be brief, because they have made many of the points that I wanted to make and much better than I will be able to. I will ask the Minister just to clarify a couple of things on which I need some reassurance.

The first relates to the points that my noble friend Lord Willetts made about the ONS’s review of the status of universities, and the likelihood that this measure will inadvertently tip them towards being reclassified as part of the public sector. It would be good to understand what assessment the Government have made of that likelihood and of the impact it would have on universities’ ability to borrow and make investment decisions of their own without the kind of Treasury oversight they would have if they were drawn further into the public sector.

Secondly, like my noble friend Lord Willetts, I would like a better understanding of how the provisions in this Bill can be squared with all the provisions that were enacted in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act that we passed just last year. The Office for Students is meant to stand for the widest possible definition of freedom of speech; anything within the law should be permissible on our campuses. The Bill will considerably narrow what is lawful speech. My concern is that that is a very heavy-handed approach, and one that does not sit easily with the Government’s intentions in passing the freedom of speech Act last year.