My Lords, I start with my declaration of interests: I still hold academic posts at Cambridge, and I was the general secretary of what was the Association of University Teachers, now UCU—it is a rather different beast these days, but none the less, it was part of my history. It is a privilege to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead. I think the distinction he makes, and the way we could embody consistency between potential pieces of legislation, is very important.
Although Amendment 22 is in a different group, I will make a point now which might mean that it does not have to be repeated later. It is very important to
the academic world to know exactly what we as legislators mean by the different terms used. These terms are used very widely in academic life; they always have been and so they should. They were widely defended in academic life as being fundamental to its culture. I would like to believe that they are fundamental to the culture of many other parts of life as well, but they were fundamental to that culture. One of the reasons it is so important to express these concepts in this Bill, and one of the reasons I can understand why the Government have produced it now, is that, sadly, the challenges to freedom of speech and academic freedom have become much more acute and have not been dealt with particularly effectively.
I hark back to the earlier period precisely because the sector itself would have then dealt with these things very firmly and effectively. It was the DNA of the sector. Nobody would have questioned the right of people within the law to espouse views that were unpopular, take sometimes dogmatic positions and engage in every kind of argument under the sun, and, if others wished to try to rebut those arguments, to hear those other arguments in the same spirit. That was—I hope the Committee will forgive me for repeating the point, but it seems so fundamental—the DNA of this sector. I would like to feel that, when the final draft of this Bill appears, it will contain expressions about that which will be instantly recognisable to the people who used to celebrate those values. They will then see this as theirs, not just ours—not just what legislators think is right but what the sector was committed to and always believed was right. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, has done us a great favour in saying that.
I also support wholeheartedly my noble friend Lord Collins’s amendments. I want to make one brief point about the concept of “within the law”. Generally speaking, I would hope that I understand what those words mean, but there are some areas where freedom of expression arises where I am not entirely sure that I do. I want to mention those here, not because I want to restrict people’s freedom of expression but because I do not want us to do undue harm to anybody. I am thinking here of the kind of coverage given in public by some people to the murder of the children at Sandy Hook and the case, which I believe will be reported on “Panorama” this evening—goodness knows how I know, but I have heard this—to do with people making gross allegations about what happened at the Manchester Arena bombing.
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I am not 100% certain—and I shall not pretend to be, as I am not a lawyer but a mathematician by trade—whether those things are strictly against the law, or whether somebody getting up in a university and repeating those conspiracy theories would be breaking the law. I would dearly like to know, and it may well be that there are definitions that would be satisfying to me and to the Grand Committee. But what seems to me worth expressing and exploring is the thought that some things do such egregious harm to the victims of terrible crimes that we should not be negligent about preventing that harm being done to those near and dear to them and others scarred by that experience.
A simple way of dealing with it, I suppose, would be to say, “Here’s a law that prevents that kind of behaviour”, and then it would be contrary to the law. I am not confident enough to know whether that is the case. But on the margins of this, I do not want another parent, aunt, uncle, brother or sister to have references to those appalling crimes repeated ceaselessly and without any chance of redress. I make that point in part in agreeing with what my noble friend Lord Collins has said in his amendment. I would like to believe that the scope is wide enough to deal with what I think would be an appalling act, were it to be committed.
I come back to my fundamental point: at the end of this, whatever we say and whatever mechanisms we put in place, the academic community has to own it. It has to say that the culture of free speech is fundamental, and it needs to know that that is what it lives and breathes by. It will listen to legislation, but if it does not embody it in its own culture, we will have failed.