Freedom of Speech: Universities

Debate between Fiona Bruce and Gordon Marsden

Thursday 17th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry, and it is a great privilege and honour to follow the introduction of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who so eloquently presented the conclusions of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I also pay tribute to the Committee members present—the hon. Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), who spoke so thoughtfully.

I am here because I am the Opposition spokesperson and therefore have to respond to the debate, but I hope that I also bring other things to it. Having long been a member of Select Committees in the past—particularly education Committees—I appreciate the importance of the evidence-driven process, rather than obiter dicta being floated out sometimes, to be massaged and expanded by the mainstream media. All politicians want to get our message across, and some of us succumb rather too rapidly to that temptation.

I also come to the debate bearing many of the tenets that I was taught, including the process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Historians are told to look at those things, but students of many other humanities disciplines depend on them, too. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) for reminding us of the importance of the Enlightenment; the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, played a part in that process. The classic statement of Enlightenment libertarianism—I will not quote it completely accurately—was by Voltaire and went something like, “I might hugely disagree with your opinions, but I will defend to the death your right to express them.”

Those are important principles. It is very good that the Joint Committee’s report, although it did not give us a great historical exegesis, went right back to some of those first principles and, importantly, to the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, which forms a useful context for its proposals.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham was absolutely right, and not in any way immodest, to say that the members of her Committee have a hugely broad area of experience. Inevitably, not all Select Committees can have that. From that point of view, it is incumbent on us all, whether in government or in opposition, to carefully examine what has been said. For my part, I think the members of the Committee have delivered an admirable synthesis, in fairly crisp and straightforward terms. With all those lawyers, it would have been very easy to get bogged down in lots of legal terms. The test is whether someone outside the legal world could pick up that document and find it useful, helpful and understandable. I think they could.

My right hon. and learned Friend talked about context. Context is important. We are all tempted, from time to time, to go off into flights of philosophical fancy and great principles, but we need to come back to context from time to time. She drew briefly on her time at university. I was at university slightly later than she was. I was at Oxford, which is always a little behind everybody else on some of its revolutionary activities. In fact, when I arrived in 1973, I found that we were in the process of occupying university buildings to get a student union—something that had been discussed and argued about some five years earlier in other universities—but I will let that pass.

Context is important. This year, we mark the 50th anniversary of two sets of activities—one involving students, the other involving free speech—that importantly changed our world. One of them, of course, was the wide-scale student protests in the 1960s. Baroness Bakewell, a Member of the upper House, only the other week presented a marvellous programme on television about the context of the French évènements in that respect, and how they changed French society. In that same year, 1968, Enoch Powell gave his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. Both those events still have resonance for us today when discussing what the bounds to student protests and to free speech should be. Those are important layers of context.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham was absolutely right to say that context changes the things that students, or the general public, want to talk about. Without disrespect to the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who is no longer in his place, I am suspicious of the idea that we can tell universities, “You should be talking about this, that and the other.” Students will talk about what students want to talk about. There may be more bread and butter discussed today at some points than there would have been when my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham and I were at university, but the crucial thing is that there should be spaces in which a broad number have that ability to talk. I am suspicious of the idea that we—particularly those of us who are perhaps rather more removed from their student days than others—should pontificate about what student unions should do, or choose to do. I think that way sometimes madness lies.

The report rightly talked about the potential dead hand of bureaucracy and inhibition. Sometimes, with the best will in the world, institutions and stakeholders get excited by the project and go ahead to develop things that sound thoughtful, but end up in an horrendous organigram, such as the one that my right hon. and learned Friend showed us. None of us is immune from that, but we need from time to time to cut away at it and, indeed, to make fun of it. When we were talking about bureaucracy I was reminded, as an historian, of the famous phrase in Philip II’s empire, “If death came from Madrid, I would be immortal.” That sense of bureaucracies or powers bringing those things to themselves and thinking that they have all the answers can produce that sort of position. It is reasonably clear where the boundary lies of breaching the right to free speech, and the example that my right hon. and learned Friend gave in that respect is a very important one.

I will touch briefly on the comments by the hon. Members for Congleton and for Brentwood and Ongar. The hon. Member for Congleton laid out well some of the ridiculousness of the hokey cokey of regulations. The particular account she gave of the curtains reminded me of the famous phrase in “Measure for Measure”,

“man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority”.

It happened to be a man in that case, and presumably it was on the occasion that the hon. Lady mentioned. Sometimes people get off on that sort of thing. While I welcome the Charity Commission’s response to the report, I do not think it is immune to that either. The examples that the hon. Lady gave reminded me—to take a medieval parallel—of scholastics trying to decide how many angels could dance on a pin.

The hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar talked about rights and about the law. I am sympathetic to that, but we must all remember that the law itself is not an immutable concept. The laws, from time to time, disadvantage citizens in our society and need to be challenged. Some 50 years ago, gay people in this country were mildly celebrating the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Principles are not always the same. If we look up at the screen today, what is being debated in the other Chamber? Homophobia, transphobia and biphobia. We might have different views on the importance of those relevant to other things, but context changes things.

It is important that we have those things in mind. We have heard today that there is not a pervasive problem of freedom of speech at our universities, and that some of the press accounts of widespread suppression of free speech have been out of kilter with reality. The Committee members did not find the wholesale censorship of debate that media coverage had suggested. That is not to say that the report does not draw attention to a number of important factors limiting free speech, and there is inevitably real confusion about how regulations apply to student unions. That is why it was important that the Committee undertook its student union survey, which showed that 25 out of 33 student union officers said that restriction of free speech was not a problem at their university.

[Fiona Bruce]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Gordon Marsden]

I will not, I am afraid. I have little enough time to speak, so I will continue.

The chief executive of Universities UK recently said:

“Tens of thousands of speaking events are put on every year across the country, the majority pass without incident.”

It was a little curious that the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), repeatedly expressed concerns about some of the impacts of student-led activities, such as no-platforming and safe spaces, in—in my view—a slightly lurid fashion. There is a clear line between frank speech and what whips up and can specifically promote hate, or be abusive. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham touched on that.

It is also important that we consider the role of Government and other organisations in this process. The National Union of Students has a no-platform policy for a handful of racist, anti-Semitic and extremist organisations, some of which the Government themselves have banned. Is the Minister opposed to that policy? How clear does he need to be about which of those groups he wants to see on campus?

Earlier this month, as we have heard, the Minister set out some proposals and thoughts. I think he felt a little constrained about what he could say because of the views of his predecessor. Bringing together that group, as he did, is potentially a productive mechanism. Can he spell out some of the conclusions of the summit and, as importantly, who is to be held accountable for taking them forward? The Government must not try to micromanage free speech on our university campuses; some of the problems raised by this report need addressing, but they will not necessarily be addressed by micromanagement from Government.

Finally, I come to the implications. Academics of both right and left persuasions have always and often been arresting and controversial figures, so it is important that the broader questions about academic autonomy and freedom are recognised by the Government. Throughout the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, the Opposition were clear that the new Office for Students should not be a micromanagement process for this. In terms of this activity, what does the Minister believe his responsibilities are, as opposed to those of the Office for Students, in terms of drawing up guidelines? If they are too widely drawn, they will produce some of the problems we have heard about today.

This is an excellent report, and I commend it. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham talked about the fact that the Committee had saved the Government a lot of time; I would also say money and possibly civil service time. Although I know very well that civil servants are loth to take anything simply as is, I suggest that the report could be a very important blueprint for solving some of the inevitable tensions and dilemmas in this area.