King’s Speech

Lord Lebedev Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lebedev (CB)]

I thank all noble Lords for their kind words. First, I would like to say that it is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to mark the three exceptional maiden speeches. Congratulations and welcome.

My great-grandfather Mikhail was a deputy in Stalin’s war Cabinet—not a role that naturally encourages a man to speak his mind freely. In fact, my family say that he never felt able to speak openly about anything out of fear—the downright terror that afflicted the country where I was born of being punished for saying the wrong thing. That is why this country’s great tradition of free speech has long aroused such admiration in my heart and around the world.

Ten years ago, I told the Leveson inquiry that a free and independent media was essential for Britain today. It has been alarming since then to see the erosion of free speech that is taking place here. It has been appalling to see an author as distinguished as JK Rowling forbidden from speaking at great universities, supposedly bastions of intellectual liberty, because she espouses views about gender that are probably the views of the quiet majority and have been held for centuries. It was shocking that Coutts Bank decided that Nigel Farage was no longer suitable to be a customer, not because he was insolvent but simply because it did not like his views on Brexit.

I am aware that these examples may tempt your Lordships to conclude that I am some kind of reactionary—or even a conservative. So let me say, in the spirit of Voltaire, that I equally support the right of Jeremy Corbyn to his views on Hamas. I may find those views repellent, but I will defend his right to hold them; it is not just the left that is guilty of cancel culture. I will even defend the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who was abruptly sacked from his party for his views on Covid vaccinations.

I am concerned that some of the provisions in the online harms Bill could give further legal basis for a process of censorship and self-censorship that is already under way. When you muzzle, cancel and sack people merely because they champion their honestly held opinions, you are playing with fire. By allowing people to be censored right, left and centre, we are making a huge mistake. By suppressing free speech, we are not contradicting the nutters and conspiracists; we are giving credence and foundation to their otherwise bonkers assertions. Worst of all, we are allowing the most deadly enemies of freedom to claim an equivalence between cancel culture in Britain and the suppression of free speech around the world.

There are too many countries where you can be jailed for your views, where journalists are shot—including, sadly, Russia. I have read industrial quantities of falsehoods about myself in the last two years, but at least I live in a country where journalists do not fear for their lives. Those authoritarian regimes are growing in number. We must not give them the propaganda win of pointing at us and saying, “What about you?”—believe me, that is what they are saying.

Why the hell is the BBC trying to bowdlerise “Fawlty Towers”, one of its finest creations? Why can we not mention the war? Why are they trying to sandpaper Roald Dahl? Why can we not say “fat”? Have attitudes really changed so fast? Around the world, people are noticing what is happening and saying, “Look at Britain, the home of western liberal values. Look at what happens, in Britain today, if you say or think something about human biology that used to be pure common sense”.

Our positions on gender are so booby-trapped with dynamite and so easy to parody that they are harming the cause of gay rights around the world. We are giving our enemies precisely the stick that they need to beat us with. They are not laughing with us any more; they are laughing at us. It is worse than that, because freedom is indispensable to our national creativity. The freedom to be comically outrageous contributed to the national sense of fun. That spiritual and intellectual exuberance, that amazing artistic, cultural, literary, scientific and journalistic energy, has drawn people of talent from around the world to make this a great home of innovation and ideas precisely because they know that they will be able to live their life as they choose and speak as they find. We would be insane to throw away these freedoms.