Freedom of Speech: Universities

Baroness Harman Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Fourth Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Freedom of Speech in Universities, HC 589.

It is a pleasure to speak in this Chamber with you in the Chair, Sir Henry. I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for giving us the opportunity to discuss the Joint Committee’s report; to the Minister for being here; to the members of the Committee, particularly those who are here; to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock), who represents the Scottish National party; and to the Labour Front Bencher, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden).

The inquiry started because the then Minister for higher education, the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), who is now a Transport Minister, made a number of comments about there being a problem with free speech in universities. Bearing in mind the importance of free speech to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and its importance in universities, we thought it right to look into the matter.

Let me remind Members that the Joint Committee is half Lords and half Commons. We are very fortunate because we have members not only from the main parties—the Conservatives and the Labour Opposition—but from the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, and we have Lord Trimble from Ireland, so we are a very broad-ranging and sage Joint Committee. It also includes a former Lord Chief Justice, in the shape of Lord Harry Woolf. We are all strongly committed to human rights and wanted to look at whether there was a problem with freedom of speech in universities—freedom of speech being one of the most basic human rights.

The right to free speech is of course a foundation for democracy. It is important in all settings, but especially in universities, where education and learning are advanced through dialogue and debate. It underpins academic freedom. Universities are places where ideas are developed. A diverse range of interesting and sometimes controversial topics should be debated.

Of course, that has always been the case. Back in the day, when I was at York University—that was not recently—we had heated debates and lots of protests. If ever someone from the South African apartheid regime came to the university, we were all out protesting and demonstrating. We demonstrated and protested against the Government in relation to their policy of internment in Northern Ireland. We protested for women’s rights. You name it; we were debating and protesting about it. That has always been the case, and it remains the case to this day, when additional issues are causing concern. Just as we protested about the National Front, so today’s students protest against the British National party. They have protests and controversial debates about Syria. We certainly never discussed trans rights when I was at university, but that is now the subject of heated debate at universities. The need to have controversial debates is not new, and free speech, particularly at universities, is very important indeed.

I think it is true to say that when the Joint Committee went into this inquiry, having heard the Minister say that there was a problem, we went in with open minds. We were not sure whether it was just a case of a flurry of stories from the Daily Mail saying, “All students have become snowflakes and are shutting down other students’ right to debate,” so we went in with an open mind. Indeed, I was quite sceptical about whether there really was a problem. But it is also true to say that at the end of all the evidence—we heard evidence from university administrators, student unions, student societies, particularly Jewish societies and Islamic societies, campaigners such as Peter Tatchell, trans rights protagonists and, indeed, Members of the House of Commons—we were all convinced that there was a problem and that the Minister was right to raise it. The question we considered was what was causing the problem and how it should be solved.

The Minister, when raising this matter, had said that the problem was students. However, we felt that the problem was not only students inhibiting one another’s time and opportunity to speak, but a number of other issues, such as the Prevent duty, the Charity Commission, university bureaucracy and the complexity of overlapping guidance. However, just as a starting point, we all ought to be clear that the phenomenon of people wearing masks and bursting into meetings, threatening and intimidating people and trying to stop them speaking, is not the right to protest; it is actually criminal activity.

None of us on the Joint Committee feels any sympathy at all with people who say that they are exercising their right to protest but come in with masks on and set off smoke bombs. We have an unequivocal view about that. For a start, we do not know whether those who have been doing that are actually students, because obviously they are masked. Sometimes, when their identity is disclosed, it turns out that they are not students. They should be charged for breach of the peace, threatening behaviour and any other criminal offence that suits the occasion, but certainly if they are students from the university and they are coming in with masks over their faces, they should be disciplined. That is not the right to protest; it is an inhibition on other people’s right to free speech.

It was a particular irony that, according to one newspaper report I saw, the masked protestors were coming in to protest that the university should be a safe space. Nothing is less safe than someone who is wearing a mask breaking into a meeting and threatening people, so we have no truck with that. However infrequently it happens, it absolutely must be stamped down on.

I will give hon. Members just a couple of examples. In March, the King’s College London libertarian society invited speakers in. The debate had been under way for about 30 minutes when a group of between 16 and 20 hooded and masked protesters stormed the front entrance of the Strand campus building, jumped over the security barriers, ignited smoke bombs and forced their way into the Safra lecture theatre. In the process, they knocked a security guard unconscious, and he was taken to hospital. A number of other staff and students were injured during the violent protest. Actually, we should not dignify that with the name “protest”. We are totally against it. We cannot have the disruption of meetings.

We also heard evidence from the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who in February had gone to speak at a meeting of the politics and international relations society of the University of the West of England in Bristol. Again, people with scarves over their faces and wearing dark glasses burst into the room. They were shouting that the hon. Gentleman was a bigot and various other insults and, as he made clear, it was evident that they just wanted to stop the event. There were 300 people there who wanted to engage in a serious discussion and four or five people who were determined to disrupt it. That is totally unacceptable, whether or not they are students.

Aside from the issue of people bursting into meetings, there are other inhibitions on free speech that we discovered through the evidence we took. We were concerned about the guidance issued by the Government in relation to the Prevent duty deterring some students, particularly Muslims, from inviting or questioning speakers they wanted to hear. The Joint Committee feels that the Government absolutely have an obligation to keep us safe and to keep the country free from terrorism, but the Prevent guidance is so widely drawn, particularly as it relates to universities, that undoubtedly some believe that they are in danger of breaching it and that they could be reported and get into trouble if they invite certain speakers. The Prevent duty states:

“When deciding whether or not to host a particular speaker,”—

university bodies, including student unions—

“should consider carefully whether the views being expressed, or likely to be expressed, constitute extremist views...or are shared by terrorist groups.”

It might be that I am a vegetarian and my views on vegetarianism are shared by a particular terrorist group, but does that put someone in breach of the Prevent duty? We felt that the duty is in a good cause, but it is widely drawn in such a way that it inhibits free speech. We therefore ask the Government to review the Prevent duty. It is about time it was reviewed generally, but perhaps they will do it with a view to looking at its impact on free speech.

Universities in England and Wales have a duty to promote free speech. It is different in Scotland. We had the benefit of the Scottish National party’s hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), who helped us contrast the situation in Scotland with that in the rest of the UK. Under the Education Act 1986, universities in England and Wales have a duty to promote free speech, but the problem is that the way some of them go about it ironically ends up inhibiting free speech.

Hansard cannot show this, but hon. Members can see this organogram showing the process that students have to go through when applying for a meeting. There are application forms to fill in and time limits to comply with. Some universities require students not only to name the speaker in advance, but to give a biography of them and provide an advance copy of the speech they will make. That would not be possible with any of the speeches that I make in universities, because I prepare my speech on the train. The point is that it is inhibiting. It is all about risk aversion, what people cannot do and tying them up with bureaucracy.

Newcastle’s code of practice for freedom of speech for external speakers warns against people communicating in a way that might unreasonably offend others. That is not acceptable. We should have free speech, even if it is found to be offensive by some others. Southampton talks a lot about speakers holding controversial views. The whole point about a debate is that it is two different views and therefore people should not shy away from controversy. Some of the university procedures are controversy-averse, which we thought was in opposition to free speech.

Another organisation that is controversy-averse is the Charity Commission, which is having a chilling effect on free speech. Its guidance warns student unions that they could risk their charitable status if they have controversies that could risk their reputation as a charity. We think that the Charity Commission goes way beyond the law and is having a chilling effect on students’ free speech.

No speaker has the right to speak in a university, but students have a right to hear who they want to hear irrespective of whether others might find it offensive or insulting. There is a place for meetings of, say, people who have been victims of sexual assault or those of a particular religion, but we cannot have the whole campus being a safe space with the lowest common denominator.

There is an overlapping set of guidance from many institutions, including the Equality and Human Rights Commission, so the Joint Committee drew up our own guidance. The Committee is heaving with lawyers with good political judgment, and we have expert legal advice—when you have the Lord Chief Justice on your Committee, you get the law right. That is what we have done, so we have saved the Minister and his Department any effort. We have issued guidance on free speech for universities and students when organising events. It states, “You can say whatever you like, so long as it is not against the law, and this is what the law is.” One simple piece of guidance is what is needed, because guidance under the Prevent duty, from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, from the Charity Commission and from the union administrations is all too much. We know that students have other things to do in their lives—I will not name them, and I probably do not even know what they are now—so they have to get on with their lives and they cannot be bound up with bureaucracy.

I thank the Minister for the way he has responded. His predecessor spoke a lot about this subject, but I could not detect any action. This Minister is actually doing something and has brought people together, so I am confident that, with the good work under way on our Committee, with the shared commitment that we all have to freedom of speech, and with the Minister’s action, we can enable debate to flourish on university campuses, which is what we all want to see all across the country.