It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) on securing the debate and thank everyone who has contributed to it.
Like the Joint Committee, I approached this issue with a fairly open mind. That said, I have a bent, so far as free speech is concerned. As president of the debating society at university, I was totally happy to countenance inviting a senior member of the British National party to come and speak, even though I found, and still find, his views abhorrent, because I felt that the only way to deal with them was to challenge him. I invited Tariq Aziz, who was then the Iraqi Foreign Minister, but he was no-platformed by the Home Office at the time, so my members had to make do with Mark Owen from Take That instead.
I came to this with an open mind, but I clearly started from a position that free speech should be encouraged. We live in an open society and open debate is particularly important. If our democracy is to flourish, someone having views that are offensive to someone else is not sufficient reason to prevent them expressing those views—but expressing them does not mean that they should go unchallenged. Rather than trying to stop that person expressing such views, what we want is open debate.
I also approached the debate very conscious that, today, a word or a couple of words in a sentence that someone utters can completely characterise and define their position. It is easy, as universities go through these issues, to get to a point where they might think that someone is an unacceptable speaker because of how
their views have been represented. They react to how the views have been presented, rather than listening to the argument. For all those reasons, it is important to be cautious in how we approach the issue.
When I appeared before the Joint Committee, four or five weeks into this job, I carefully calibrated how I expressed my position: I not only expressed concern about a creeping culture of censorship, but suggested that measuring whether we have free speech on campus by events that happen is not in itself sufficient. We do not know about the events that do not happen or, more importantly, about the events that happen but in a different way from how they would have happened had they been able to go ahead freely.
As Universities Minister, I have been going around universities speaking directly to students. I found it slightly amusing that, before I spoke at one university—the Universities Minister doing a Q&A with students—they had to read out the safe space policy. I just had to smile. I visited another university to discuss a number of issues, including free speech, and it was suggested to my team that, if we really wanted negative headlines, we should go ahead. I said, “Why don’t you invite lots of students from other universities nearby? You have the Universities Minister, and it would be good for them to be involved.” They said that they couldn’t invite them because they thought they would cause trouble. They were going to manage the invitation list. A video had to be played at the start of the event. As I spoke to my team about it, I ended up asking myself whether it was really worth doing the event at all. That is how censorship happens. I could see that I was second-guessing myself and what I was going to say. I am the Universities Minister. I hope that I might have some controversial views, but hopefully none that are sufficient for me to be turned away from speaking at any of our universities.
It is based on that experience, and the number of letters that I now receive from students across the country, that I have come to the view that the Committee is actually on to something here, in two important respects. The first is the bureaucracy and rules around free speech, whether from equalities law, the Charity Commission, which regulates student unions, or a university’s own policies, or a particular student union’s own policies. At best, it is so confusing that a well-intentioned person could somehow end up seeing censorship as the way to promote free speech, which is a contradiction in terms. At worst, it is very easy for wreckers to use that bureaucracy to frustrate views that they do not agree with and do not think belong on campus.
The Committee is not only on to something really significant here, but its work, which is even-handed and level-headed in its approach, provides a very good basis on which to proceed. It is a cross-party Committee and it has members from both Houses; it is not the Government party trying to use free speech as a wedge—that is the last thing I want to do. Free speech on campus should not be seen as a proxy for some of the wider culture wars in our society. If anything, it should be about helping universities with what they are best placed to do: fostering open debate and the free exchange of ideas. There are often clashes, but those clashes should be seen as positive, rather than something we want to rail against or stop.
I very much welcome the Committee’s report and its recommendations. I have been a Minister for a number of years now. When Ministers receive Select Committee
reports, we often spend our time scratching our heads and thinking how to respond by doing the least we can and then moving on. However, this report provides a very strong basis for the Government to do what we can to promote free speech. That is why I held a summit, attended by the National Union of Students, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Office for Students and the Charity Commission, so that we could all work together to resolve this issue in a way that works for all our universities.
The Committee has thankfully come up with not only a set of recommendations, but its own guidance. We are looking to produce uniform and simplified guidance, and the Committee’s work means that we can proceed in haste to produce that for the start of the next academic year.