Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th June 2022 Commons Chamber

The hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) has said that we should not “pick fights with students”. If we have to pick a fight with the tyrants among students, then so be it; there are people among student bodies who do not believe in freedom in the way that most people in this Chamber do, who want to see that freedom restricted and inhibited. I am worried that the hon. Lady has described an emphasis on free speech as a distraction. How can the advocacy of freedom, how can the pursuit of open debate ever be a distraction? The Government will not be distracted, and neither will Conservative Members in our campaign to ensure that, in the words of Disraeli and Cardinal Newman, universities remain places of “light, liberty and learning”.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I rise to speak to new clause 1, which stands in my name and in the names of my colleagues, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) and my right hon. Friends the Members for Harlow (Robert Halfon) and for Ashford (Damian Green). I thank Professor John Heathershaw and his colleagues at the University of Exeter for their input.

This Bill is a very serious one, and the issue I raise of transparency in our universities is a very serious one. It has been much publicised of late in the newspapers in relation to some very distinguished and famous universities that have been alluded to already in this House, and rightly so. It is often misunderstood or underappreciated in the higher education sector how important the issue of undue influence and non-transparency is to the reputation of that sector, which is one of the crown jewels of our country both economically and culturally.

Universities exercise a wider influence not only over the young people whom they educate, but more widely in our public life, yet no standard approach has existed to date for handling foreign donations. No single standard has been created to allow donations to be made transparent, to be made public and to be properly tracked, and, therefore, for students and other donors and the public at large to understand whether there are pressures of a financial nature, and if so what pressures there may be, on the institutions with which they may have to deal.

Instead of this panoply of different approaches and different thresholds, and this lack of transparency and culture of non-disclosure, it is important that the Bill addresses those matters and brings some order to the situation. That is what my new clause and the other new clauses, which I am delighted to see have been tabled in a similar spirit, are designed to address. In my case, the measure is aimed not at any specific country or individuals, but generally so that there should be a wide understanding of the lack of transparency and a wider solution to it. I take my hat off, metaphorically, to the Minister, her Secretary of State and her officials, because the Government have substantially accepted my new clause, and indeed—dare I say?—arguably even improved it in relation, for example, to politically exposed persons. I thank her and other Ministers for the very constructive attitude that she and they have taken in relation to this important issue.

I will make a couple of small points in passing because this is still a live matter and officials will wish to think about the implementing regulations. The first is about the enlarged role for the Office for Students and the need for it to be given a role that it can dispatch rapidly and effectively as well as impartially. More widely, I note the essential importance of the higher education sector and of our universities being zealous in themselves, as institutions, in preserving freedom of speech and the culture of a deeper freedom of speech that, as so many Members have said, they have sought to defend in their treatment of students and colleagues. That remains vital.

I am delighted to support the Government amendment and withdraw my new clause 1 as a result.

[Alicia Kearns]

I rise to speak to new clause 3, but I wish first to welcome the significant work done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), which has had an implication for that which I sought to achieve, and to touch briefly on new clause 19, tabled by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), with which I have enormous sympathy. When you are an alumnus of a university, you have a great ability, you would hope, to influence it, so I place on record that if Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge is using NDAs, it can expect this not to be the last it will hear of it. I will work with the hon. Lady to call it out if it is doing it, but I am sure that there is absolutely no way that the place that gave me an incredible three years would be doing that.

New clause 3 was tabled to solve a series of problems that we face in our education system. We exist in a state of hybrid warfare where we do not necessarily know that we are at war. Indeed, more often than not our enemies do not tell us that we are at war—the most effective manner to attack us. In this war they use every possible lever of influence to attack us. It is naive, sadly, but our universities are failing to accept that they are being weaponised and used against us in a state of hybrid warfare. The Chinese Communist party is at war with us, because between now and 2050 it expects there to be a war between two world orders—theirs and ours, ours being the one that believes in the rule of democracy and standing up for freedom of speech, which this Bill so focuses on. We might not realise that we are at war, but we are, and for decades now we have failed to recognise that. It is not enough to say, “Bad Chinese Communist party—stop doing what you are doing in trying to achieve your goals and the continuance of your power.” We have to take the fight to it in terms of standing up for what we believe in, standing up for our world order, and, most importantly, building resilience within our system.

That is what my new clause focuses on doing—tackling the unintentional ignorance, or potentially wilful deceit, of those who do not recognise the seriousness with which our education system is under attack. Everyone plays a role in protecting freedom of speech. That is why I am so grateful to the very many colleagues who over the past few days have spoken in support of the new clause and given support on the issue across the House. I also thank the Department for Education, and particularly the Minister, who has been in constant dialogue with me and has adopted the ambitions of the new clause completely. I know that in coming months we will work together to make sure that we build the resilience that is needed in the education system.

My new clause particularly seeks to focus on Confucius institutes, which play an enormous role in the teaching of Mandarin and all that comes with learning that language—cultural understanding, historical understanding, debates about the present day, and debates about the entire concept of the country and how it feels, breathes, lives and sees itself. We have 30 Confucius institutes in this country. Nowhere else in the world has anywhere near 30. One might ask why Scotland has the highest number of Confucius institutes in the entire world. There is a reason why the Chinese Communist party has chosen to infiltrate Scottish education and to try to force its own narrative within those areas. More concerningly, almost all UK Government spending on Mandarin language teaching in schools, which is £27 million from 2015 to 2024, goes through Confucius institutes.

Our students and our kids—our under-18s—are being taught Mandarin by Confucius institutes, which are an arm of the Chinese state. Confucius institutes are supervised by the Chinese Communist party through the Ministry of Education. They are not allowed to hire teachers unless they have been vetted by the Chinese Communist party. I have recently discovered that Edinburgh University’s Confucius institute has representatives of the Chinese Government’s embassy on its board. This is absolutely outright political intervention. Teachers are not allowed to cover issues such as Taiwan or Tibet, which are apparently sensitive. This is deeply concerning. Lancaster University and Edge Hill University rely on CIs to provide teaching for undergraduates. We cannot allow a hostile power to capture our education provision. That is why we need transparency.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire because his new clause has allowed us to bring in the requirement to report when universities take in foreign funding. These safeguards bring us into line with the US, Germany and the Netherlands, all of which discourage their universities from using Confucius institutes or introduce mandatory financial disclosures, because British students deserve a choice. They should not be forced to learn a language through the prism and narrative of a genocidal regime. That is all we are trying to do. We are not anti-China; we are trying to create resilience within our system. I am pleased that the Government are taking action and that under their amendments universities and student unions will be required to register funding arrangements. The Office for Students will have the power to force universities to provide alternative Mandarin education or to terminate Confucius institutes’ contracts.