Freedom of Speech

Lord Walney Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. I greatly anticipate the report that his committee is due to publish next week on the critically important area of regulation of the internet. It is of great interest, as he will understand, in relation to the report that I am writing for publication in the new year in my capacity as the Government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption, looking at the far right, the anti-democratic far left and single-issue groups, as well as the scale of the threat that they pose and measures leading into that. It is clear that freedom of speech and the ways in which the internet can be used or misused are of significant importance to that.

I was struck by the Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture given by Lord Sumption just last month, which examined at length the issue of freedom of speech. He made the point, which has also been eloquently expounded in many of the contributions today, about the importance of freedom of speech to the proper functioning of our liberal democracy. This is not simply freedom of speech as an abstract concept, but the need to enable, allow and tolerate a breadth of opinions within it, to ensure that our liberal democracy can remain resilient, so that we are not simply a country that has elections every few years but one that has the underpinning of understanding, tolerance and an ability to move that actually makes a country a democracy.

I feel a little self-conscious talking about a secular crisis of faith in front of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and probably the most revered Anglican audience that it is possible to have, but I hope that he and they will indulge me, because I feel that this is relevant. I spent most of my life as a progressive, new Labour youngster activist and then a Front-Bench Member of Parliament and am now here on the Cross Benches. In most of my time growing up, I thought that I had a sort of Enlightenment view on equalities, with the idea that there were progressive opinions that were good and conservative opinions that were bad and that there would be an onward march of progressive legislation and culture change that would lead to ever-increasing benefits to humankind. In that context, if anyone had engaged me and my fellow new Labour acolytes on the idea of freedom of speech, we would not have had a great deal of interest in it. In fact, we would have spent more time engaging in no-platforming demonstrations for reprehensible people who we thought should not be given a platform in particular places.

The clash of rights, if I can call it that—I realise that that in itself is a highly contested way of describing this—between people with different views on rights related to biological sex compared to gender has profoundly shaken my faith in this sense of an ever-expanding sense of right as opposed to a clear sense of wrong. I am pleased that my noble friend Lady Falkner mentioned the plight of Professor Kathleen Stock. I add that the way in which the author JK Rowling is being pursued, with attempts to silence her, should profoundly concern us. It plays directly into this idea that we need a breadth of opinion to be able to make changes and decide where we want to go as a society.

It is sometimes seen as heretical or an abusive thing to say if one points out that many of the campaigners who now wish to place the views expressed by the likes of Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling as outside acceptability held views of that same kind 10 or 20 years ago. That is not to say that they were wrong then and right now, or right then and wrong now, but that you need that breadth of opinion to be able to understand where we want to go. I feel that that is being profoundly questioned now by people who are doing so for the best of intentions but who may well do significant damage to our democracy in doing so.

Turning to the partly related issue of online safety, one of the reasons I am seeking guidance from the committee and others is the profound tension regarding who, if anyone, should regulate the debate. It is potentially as problematic for a Government to regulate what should be within those bounds as it is for a very narrow group of people within Facebook. If you reject both those things, you are still left with the problem of where the boundaries should be, what the level of regulation should be and how you go about reaching an understanding.

I was really pleased to hear the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, talk so compellingly about disinformation. I feel that too often, we put together hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. However, I hope that a greater focus from government and the state on who is perpetrating disinformation—which countries and organisations—could unite all of us in what is otherwise a profoundly contested debate over where the boundaries of freedom of speech ought to lie.