Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Dean Russell Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 12th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

I speak today from experience of working with universities and as an academic studying physics many years ago. What I found during that time was the importance of enabling diversity of thought, the ability to challenge ideas and the ability to propose new ideas, even though they go against the grain of what others may think.

Over 10 years ago, I worked on a project with a Russell Group university that would not allow its academics to blog because it was too scared that they might say the wrong thing. I successfully encouraged the university to set up a new website that included the big debate, which enabled academics to have a yes/no debate on the topic of the day and to provide different points of view. That is what academia and universities should be about: they should be about debating things to get to the truth.

As we have seen over the past year with covid, there have been disagreements about the science. We have seen disagreements about the ethics and morality of different issues that have impacted on us all, and we must make sure that we enable and continue that within our universities. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) mentioned earlier, the challenge is that we have to look at this issue through the lens of modern society. Ten years ago, blogs were a new thing; now, social media is everywhere, and what happens in one campus can go across the country and the world in a matter of minutes.

We see all the time the awful impact of what I call hate-mobbing—the idea that, all of a sudden on social media, one person is targeted for their point of view. In many cases, it might be because they have an absolutely abhorrent point of view and should not be voicing it in the way that they are doing, but the point is that we need to make sure that such views are debated and scrutinised. I worry that we are moving towards what I would call a swipe-left society, like with certain apps, whereby people keep swiping until they get to a point of view or debate with which they agree, and that is the only thing that they see. We must make sure that, in universities, we challenge each other and see the arguments of other points of view, to make sure that the debate is rounded and that, as I say, we get to the truth.

Andy Warhol famously said that, in the future, we would all have 15 minutes of fame, but increasingly I see that we are getting 15 minutes of shame, with people being attacked for their points of view. We have to make sure that we protect them on campus, because the academics and students of today will be in this House in 10 or 20 years’ time. They will be the leaders of our culture and society. They will be the people teaching our next generation. If they feel that they are being stifled in their view, and if they are scared of expressing a point of view that is different, we stifle them and society, and the seeds of doubt are planted now for generations to come.

There is another really important point here that we must take into account. We have talked about hate and hate-filled speech, and, of course, we do not want to give those platforms, but we also need to make sure that such views are scrutinised. The shadows are where hate festers. The awfulness of certain people’s point of view is not dismissed from their mind because they do not say it, they just hide it and get others to hide it with them, and then it becomes a movement or a moment. We must make sure that we shine a light on hate, that we shine a light on different points of view, because if we do so we can argue that, quite often, what is being said is absolutely foolish and nonsense. Anti-vaxxers are a good example of that. After a year of our inboxes being filled with, at times, utter nonsense and fearmongering, science and the success of our vaccine programme has proved that all wrong.

There is a famous phrase that I like, which is that a mind stretched by a new idea never returns to the same size. With the use of free speech, the truest form of free speech, in academia and universities, we stretch everybody’s minds and we challenge each other to have new beliefs and new perspectives. That is why I support this Bill today. We need to make sure that we protect freedom of speech on campuses more than anywhere because that is the one place where we should be challenging each other to find the truth and to be able to support that for our society and our nation to come.