I thought my right hon. Friend was going to challenge my literary knowledge, but let us move to the amendments.
The Government have moved a considerable way since we debated the matter in Committee, and I congratulate and thank my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities for her earlier words and especially for what she has done. She listened carefully in Committee. Often, when Ministers in Committee say, “I’ll take that away and think about it.”, we know they are going through the motions, but not this Minister, any more than I did when I was a Minister.
I think it is important that Bills metamorphosise through scrutiny and that Governments listen to argument—including arguments from those on the Opposition Benches, by the way. When I was a Minister, I would often go back to my civil servants and say, “Well, what the shadow Minister said seemed to make a lot of sense to me. Why aren’t we doing that?”. That is a very effective way for Ministers to challenge their own officials when they hear cogent and sensible arguments put from all parts of the House. That is precisely what this Minister did, and the Government amendments, on which I will not comment in any detail, reflect her consideration of the strong arguments that we used to strengthen this Bill, which she has now done in a number of respects.
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Having said that, I want the Minister to go further. She will have seen the new clauses and the amendment in my name, and I will deal with them very briefly. The first deals with the matter of staff beyond those who are full-time employees of the university. That point was made by hon. Members across the House, because the character of employment at universities has changed. Very often, universities now employ temporary staff, visiting staff and so on, and it is important that everyone associated with the university is protected by the provisions of this legislation. The purpose of new clause 6 is to include,
“any academic staff (however engaged or employed), honorary, visiting and emeritus academic members”,
and providers of academic expertise.
New clause 7 and amendment 21 deal with exactly the point that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle raised: the relationship between this legislation and the Equality Act. We received assurances from the Minister about that in Committee, and I have made further representations to her since then. Of course, I have no doubt that the upper House, the other place, will return to those matters, but the hon. Lady is right that it is important from a legislative perspective that the Bill works with other statute and that its provisions are not successfully challenged by recourse to other laws. I hope the Minister might say a word or two more about that in respect of the new clause and amendment in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt).
In summary, I believe this Bill is an appropriate, apposite and sensible response to growing concerns in universities about free speech being inhibited. I am disappointed with the Opposition—I say that with some distress—that they voted against Second Reading. I thought they would not as I thought they would try to improve and amend it. They were caught on the horns of a dilemma, because in Committee they did just that, and again today I see amendments, some of which I have some sympathy with, in the name of the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington and others. Their amendments are designed to improve the Bill, yet simultaneously they deny that there is a problem.
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”.