I rise to speak in favour of the Government’s motion to disagree with Lords amendment 10. As has been mentioned by other hon. Members, this Bill has been introduced because freedom of speech and academic freedoms are under threat in our universities. That has been well evidenced during the passage of the Bill and, as has already been mentioned, a recent report shows that 35% of British academics surveyed self-censor, and Office for Students data shows that 193 speaker requests or events at English universities were rejected in 2021, compared with just 53 in 2018. And of course there have been numerous high-profile cases of cancellation, including those of Helen Joyce, of the Israeli ambassador and of my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) when he was Education Secretary. This Bill is clearly very much needed.
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The Bill will protect academic freedoms and encourage freedom of speech on campus in a number of ways, but its cornerstone—its cutting edge—is clause 4, the clause that the other place attempted to remove and that the Government are rightly insisting on reinserting. Clause 4 has a simple purpose. It will allow students or academics who have had their free speech rights infringed to sue the university or students union that has targeted them. In other words, it will allow academics to seek rapid redress in a financially affordable way. Without this clause, the free speech protections in the Bill could be enforced only by an independent regulator, which would likely result in dispute resolutions taking months, or by bringing a judicial review against the university in question, which is prohibitively expensive for almost all students and academics.
In effect, clause 4 provides an instant feedback mechanism that will dissuade universities from acting to restrict freedom of speech in the first place. Without the tort, students would have to resort to judicial review, with costs in excess of £100,000, to secure their rights, and if that were the case, it would be sensible to assume that universities would be far less likely to uphold their freedoms in the first place, especially if they were coming under considerable internal pressure. The tort is therefore essential to protect academic freedoms, and I thank the Minister wholeheartedly for taking the time to listen to academics and free speech campaigners and for standing firm on this despite their lordships’ best efforts to move her. The tort, and its guarantee of the effectiveness of the Bill, are essential not just for academics but for the whole of society.
It has been observed that culture is upstream of politics, and I think it is clear that academia is upstream of culture. All the significant ideas in recent history that have influenced our culture, and subsequently our politics, have been birthed or nurtured on campus, from Darwinism
in Victorian times to feminism, climate science, important economic theories and the rethinking of our colonial past. All were once niche academic ideas, but they are now mainstream in our wider culture. Given the influence and therefore the power that academic thought has over society, it is crucial that ideas are tested thoroughly in the academic sphere through argument, through consideration of competing evidence and through academic scrutiny before they become accepted mainstream opinion. Without this scrutiny, erroneous ideas have the potential to lead the whole of society away from the truth. Where controversial or radical ideas might once have been thoroughly tested in this way in our universities, there is little evidence that this is currently the case.
This is having alarming consequences. For example, let us consider radical gender ideology, which claims that everybody has an innate sense of their own gender identity, distinct from biological sex, that only an individual can determine. It asserts that a man who says he is a woman is indeed a woman. This ideology, birthed on campus, has taken over our culture and some of our institutions and has resulted in children being sterilised, women’s rights being eroded and male rapists being placed in women’s prisons. In Spain this week, the ruling coalition will pass a Bill that will allow sex reassignment surgery—the cutting off of healthy body parts—for children as young as 12.
If radical gender theory had been properly challenged in universities, we would not have ended up in this sorry place, because while gender identity is a perfectly legitimate thought experiment for academics, had there been free speech on campus, it would have been weighed and measured and found wanting. We know from the example of Professor Kathleen Stock, a left-wing academic, how impossible is has been for academics to critique this theory, because their jobs and even their physical safety have been threatened. Thankfully, grassroots women’s organisations, desperate parents and some journalists and politicians are now shining a light on this lack of scrutiny, but the consequence of the lack of academic freedom has been serious harm to women and children.
Of course, radical gender ideology is not the only destructive and unevidenced critical theory that should have been challenged on campus. Critical race theory, sex positivity, the decolonisation of the curriculum and the idea that speech is violence all fail to stand up to proper intellectual or scientific scrutiny, yet they have become the prevailing opinion of many in our institutions.
We must return to ideas and policies based on evidence and reality, which means protecting free speech and academic freedom in our universities so that ideas can be properly tested before they make their way into society. This Bill, with the inclusion of clause 4, will bolster those freedoms and perhaps nudge us back in the direction of truth and reality.