Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 12th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

The Bill is a damaging non-solution to a non-existent problem that only exists in the minds of this reactionary Government and their outriders. Trade unions, led by the University and College Union, rightly argue that there is no evidence to support the notion of a free speech crisis on campus by what the Government deem to be intolerant or even oversensitive students and staff. A 2019 Policy Exchange report, which claimed to find evidence of a free speech campus crisis and which was cited repeatedly in the Government’s own White Paper, which informs much of the Bill, has since been discredited. For instance, one of the report’s main examples of no-platforming at Cardiff University did not happen at all—the event went ahead as planned.

Democratically elected student unions who represent their student bodies much like trade unions in the workplace have long adhered to a no-platform policy formed in response to the fascist groups who sought to exploit and subvert democratic platforms to promote hate, racism, fascism and holocaust denial. The Government do not understand that if someone is allowed free rein to espouse racist, hateful or discriminatory views without challenge, it can directly contribute to a culture where people of my class, my race and my gender no longer feel safe. Yet no-platforming is an incredibly rare outcome: of the 62,000 requests by students for external speaker events at English universities in 2017-18, only 53—less than 0.1%—were rejected by a student union or university. Despite that, the Government have created a self-serving narrative of an imagined free-speech crisis to force through this authoritarian legislation.

The Bill fails to secure for staff the ability to speak out against their employers and will empower the Office for Students, with appointments by the Government, to interfere politically in university and academic life, thus seriously imperilling academic freedom and democratic norms. It also narrows the legal definition of academic freedom in a way that is almost unprecedented in British law. Unlike rules on judicial review, there will be no standing requirement, so any person, business or campaign can sue universities. The threat to freedom of speech and academic liberties therefore comes not from the imagined free-speech crisis but from the Government and their hugely disproportionate legislation.

As the University and College Union rightly highlights, the much graver threats to academic freedom take the form of casualised employment, sustained attacks on the arts and humanities, insecurity of research funding, the Prevent programme, Government interference with the academic research agenda—especially on decolonisation —and targeted redundancies. More than two thirds of researchers and almost half of teaching-only staff in the higher education sector are on fixed-term contracts. Widespread insecure employment strips academics of the ability to speak and research freely and curtails chances for career development. Indeed, the proposed compulsory redundancies across England’s universities including at Leicester, Liverpool, Aston and Chester, are alarming. In Leicester and across the UK, university management must listen to the workers’ demands and withdraw compulsory redundancies. The Government must end the marketisation of higher education, which restricts academic freedoms, and instead encourage universities to work constructively with trade union representatives to protect higher education livelihoods.

Many aspects of higher education need urgent redress. For too long, universities have been treated as private businesses and left at the mercy of market forces while top salaries have soared and students have paid more for less. Tuition fees have trebled and maintenance grants have been scrapped, leaving the poorest graduates with an average debt of £57,000. Education must be a universal right, not a costly privilege. The Government must properly fund our universities, scrap tuition fees and cancel student debt. Instead, they are pushing through this legislation that solves none of the real issues facing the higher education sector and will instead compound the problems that they claim they wish to solve. They must end their divisive culture wars, stop stoking the fires of hate, abandon the power grab over the higher education sector, commit to properly supporting the freedom, wellbeing and funding of all staff and students and scrap altogether this free hate speech Bill.