Anti-Semitism: University Campus Incidents

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but I make it clear that I speak in a personal capacity.

I and the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, set up something called the Coexistence Trust some dozen years ago to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment at universities, and I deeply regret that the curse of this is still ongoing. However, I am afraid that I do not support the call for an IHRA definition: it is extremely poorly worded and probably unactionable in law. The noble Lord, Lord Pickles, has just said that it is not meant to be legally enforceable. It directly conflicts with the duty on universities to protect free speech. But there is a further danger in this: when universities adopt this definition, the pressure on them increases also to adopt the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia’s extremely badly worded definition of Islamophobia. The end route, if we go down this road, is that there is no space left where students may learn to disagree with each other respectfully, something that I am sure no noble Lord would want.