Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Jess Phillips and Miriam Cates

Report stage
Monday 13th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates]

My right hon. Friend is right: this Bill is an important marker for universities, which will be forced to recognise that these are not specific isolated issues, but that there is a culture change that needs to be addressed across our whole country. We are also seeing it in other countries in the world, particularly America.

I support the amendments to remove the restriction on field of expertise, and I also support Government amendments 3, 4 and 6 to 10, which will ensure that higher education providers cannot require visiting speakers or hosting bodies to bear some or all of the costs of security. This will prevent no-platforming by the back door. As my right hon. Friend the Minister has already said, if universities have a physical safety and security issue on campus, they should urgently address the root of that.

On safety, amendment 18, in the name of the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western), would compel the Office for Students, when considering a free speech complaint, to be mindful of the right of students to feel safe on university campuses. I have no doubt that the amendment is well meant, and I listened carefully to his arguments, but I fear that it would further embed the culture and attitudes that have led to the chilling effect on free speech and that have made this Bill necessary.

In the amendment, as on campus, we see the conflation of physical safety with intellectual and emotional comfort. Students should of course be physically safe, and higher education institutions have a duty to follow health and safety law, like all other organisations, but I suspect that is not what the amendment is getting at. Universities should absolutely not be cultivating an atmosphere on campus where students believe they are or should be free from emotional and intellectual discomfort. Just as our bodies must go through training, challenge and discomfort to become physically fit, so our minds must experience challenge, discomfort and sometimes even offence to become stronger, more resilient and more wise.

In the recent book, “The Coddling of the American Mind”, the authors describe “anti-fragility”, the idea that young people’s brains must be exposed to challenges and stresses, or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs. Nowhere is it more important to understand the concept of anti-fragility than in our universities, where institutions are cultivating minds that will become the thought leaders of tomorrow. Since our universities act as an incubator for wider public culture, we will fail to uphold freedom of debate in this country if we fail to uphold it on campus.

Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. As a recent New York Times editorial put it:

“Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny.”

We saw the impact of that cancel culture in political and social debate during covid, where damaging, un-evidenced, ineffective and wasteful policies went unchallenged. If we value the kind of rigorous debate that upholds democracy and ensures the best policies are produced, we must not allow this concept creep of the term “safety” on campus.

Despite levelling up, Brexit and enormous economic challenges, this is possibly one of the most important Bills making its way through Parliament, because our ability to unite and level up in this country is threatened by the culture on campus. The starkest division in British society—not only in voting behaviour, but in social values—is between graduates and non-graduates. The trend towards a homogenous worldview in our higher education institutions is exacerbating this division. Instead, we need our universities to be places where it is the norm for competing ideas to co-exist and to be openly interrogated and challenged by evidence.

[Jess Phillips]

I want to challenge the idea that university students will all be walking like lemmings into the light unless we do something about it. At my university, the right hon. Jack Straw, who was then a Labour MP, was banned from the student union—I forget why. He was the only person it banned, and I walked through that door past the plaque banning him, and I am a Labour MP now. I think the students are probably going to cope with some of this.

[Miriam Cates]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. She gave a passionate speech, and I fully support the many things she is doing to uphold women’s rights, but this is needlessly being made a left/right issue. Many of the incidents we have talked about today are about those on the right being cancelled, but it is much wider than that.

[Jess Phillips]

I have been cancelled many times.

[Miriam Cates]

I am very sorry to hear it. The hon. Lady absolutely should not be. What I am trying to say is that this is a much wider issue than the particular incidents that have made the headlines, and some deeper culture changes need to take place. That will take time, and we need to do a lot in schools as well.

I very much support the Bill. Hopefully it can narrow the divide that we see in society. I very much support the Government amendments, which will do a lot to protect freedom of speech.