A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate, particularly given its focus on the next generation and looking to the future. I welcome much of the discussion so far on skills and education, particularly given how important it is for my part of the world and for the region of the east midlands. However, as so much has already been said about skills, I will focus my remarks on another key element of our future success, which is broader than just the acquisition of skills, knowledge or education, and extends into our confidence, both individually and collectively, to use those abilities.

When I talk about confidence, I mean the ability for us as a mature democracy, facing huge opportunities but also some challenge in coming decades, to identify, debate and determine our response to what without doubt will be massive change in the decades ahead. Bluntly, it is about our ability to have difficult conversations, the confidence to create space for robust debates about who we are as a country, where we want to go and who we want to be, and the willingness to engage in debate on—and subject our preconceived notions to—rigour, scrutiny and critique. That is why I particularly welcome the Government’s commitment in the Queen’s Speech to guaranteeing freedom of speech on campuses, not just from the perspective of fixing a growing issue in some parts of academia, but for making a clear statement about how this timeless notion should continue to be upheld across wider civic society as a whole.

That a Bill guaranteeing freedom of speech appears necessary should give us all pause in a free, enlightened and curious society. How has an element of higher education managed to get itself into a place where it argues precisely against notions it is supposed to uphold? Given that it seems to have slowly done exactly that in recent decades, it appears necessary to legislate. I say that as a Conservative who does not want to legislate against things unless it is absolutely necessary, yet one of the reasons I am a Conservative is because I seek to deal with the world as it is, not as I wish it would be. Whether I like it or not, it appears that some time-honoured enlightenment notions of rationality and free speech are being questioned. If that is the case, it appears that the Government will have to be clear and make an unambiguous statement that freedom of speech is a value that is non-negotiable and that, if it cannot be guaranteed by manners, tradition and convention, it will need to be guaranteed in law.

I remain astounded by the extraordinary—and extraordinarily deficient—vapid intellectual architecture that has grown within our universities in recent decades. I saw it starting off 20 years ago with the no platforming debates when I was at university myself; now it is a general lack of intellectual curiosity or an othering of inconvenient viewpoints, which results in the loss of swaths of perfectly reasonable debate, while rendering it almost impossible to draw conclusions across anything. It is the product of an obsession with a postmodern relativism that has created a toxic quagmire of up-ended logic and muddled thinking, where no one really knows what can acceptably be said, who can acceptably speak or what level of debate and discussion can actually be had.

The frames of the very concept of debate have been loosened to such an extent, through the fashions of Foucault, Derrida or their fellow travellers, that objectivity and rationality are discarded by some as if they were some kind of out-of-fashion, transient plaything. What follows is the dystopian reality that there is no real ability to draw any form of conclusion at all—“I have my truth, you have yours, this Bench has its own.” The whole discussion is narrowed and then disparaged to the extent that up becomes down and feelings become king. My, what has it come to when a law—a law!—is now required, not to set reasonable boundaries on freedom of speech, but to ensure that people can go to the extent of using those reasonable boundaries?

People have the right to be heard. Viewpoints have the right to be challenged. Comfort must, by necessity, be discomforted. Our world demands pluralism of thought, deed and action as the price of progress and improvement. I welcome the Government’s intent in this area.