Contemporary Cultural Boycotts

Lord Young of Acton Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for bringing forward this debate and to Freedom in the Arts for having produced this excellent and timely report. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union and will try and put a human face on what we are talking about. There are plenty of examples in The New Boycott Crisis. I thought I might give some examples from our own case files.

We have fought on behalf of 150 artists, writers and performers in the last six years of our existence, all of whom have been targeted for cancellation or, indeed, cancelled because they expressed views that other people disapprove of. Where possible, we have tried to help them. It is worth noting that more than one-third of the more than 150 people we have come to the aid of have been targeted for cancellation because they have expressed their gender-critical views. That is, I think, the coalface in the arts; it is what people find themselves cancelled or targeted for cancellation for more often than expressing any other point of view. Rosie Kay is a case in point, someone who I am proud to say the Free Speech Union was able to help when she was targeted for cancellation in 2021. It is fantastic to see her recover so magnificently.

I shall give the Committee some other examples. There was a case last year involving Martin Speake. He was referred to the Free Speech Union by Freedom in the Arts, with whom we have a close working relationship. Martin Speake was an internationally regarded saxophonist who was for more than two decades a jazz tutor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Greenwich. In February 2024, he replied to the conservatoire’s request for feedback on its diversity plan, and argued, I think reasonably, that Black musicians were not underrepresented in British jazz and that Black Lives Matter was a dangerous organisation. He quoted Martin Luther King that people, including musicians, should be judged on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. For this, students boycotted his classes, a petition was got up demanding his removal, the London Jazz Orchestra asked him to step down, his album was put on hold, and his UK concerts were cancelled. The stress eventually forced him to resign in November 2024 from a job he had held for two decades. Happily, the Free Speech Union was able to fund an employment tribunal claim for constructive dismissal, and Trinity Laban settled in February 2026 in a way that was very satisfactory.

Another example is Gillian Philip in 2020. She is a children’s novelist who was part of the team producing the best-selling Warrior Cats series under the pen name Erin Hunter. She was dropped by her fiction packager in 2020 after adding a message of support for JK Rowling to her Twitter profile. Not only did she lose her job, but she was unable to get another job as a writer and had to retrain as a heavy goods vehicle driver.

I could come up with more and more examples, but I will close with just one recent case to come in at the Free Speech Union involving an Irish playwright based in New York called Phelim McAleer. He tried to organise a staged reading of a play about the events of 7 October 2023 in southern Israel. He tried to organise this staged reading at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, which is subsidised by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. It is a verbatim play based on interviews with more than 100 survivors of the Hamas attack on 7 October. It had a six-week off-Broadway run and was acclaimed by the New York Post as spellbinding, but the Lyric could not find a single evening on which to stage a reading of this play, in spite of the fact that he was going to pay for it privately and even though the theatre had found numerous opportunities to platform Palestinian perspectives, including a poet who described Israel as a settler-colonialist project, a genocidal state and a pariah state. No one is suggesting that that Palestinian poet should have been no-platformed, but all voices in these debates should be heard, and the arts need to play a proper role in facilitating these discussions.