I will speak to Amendment 35, to which I have put my name; it relates to amending the Equality Act, as has just been
discussed. I will also speak in support of Amendment 69 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, which would strengthen the academic freedom protections of the Prevent duty.
I start with Amendment 69 on Prevent. On Monday, a noble Lord—I think it was the Minister, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, but I cannot find it in Hansard so I cannot say; I wrote it down at the time—said that there is no place on campus
“for extremist views that masquerade as facts”.—[Official Report, 31/10/22; col. GC 21.]
I do not know who said that but somebody did, and it is quite a frequently said thing. I want to probe who the extremists are; indeed, I want to probe who the fact-checkers are in this instance.
During his first unsuccessful leadership bid, the present Prime Minister suggested an expanded definition of extremism to include anyone who hates Britain. It hit the headlines for a while, with people going around saying that there would be Prevent orders thrown at all sorts of people who might have been heavily critical of Britain or the UK. He backed off from it, but my point is that the whole concept of extremism has become so elastic and broadened that it has discredited whatever it was that Prevent was trying to do.
I have had a problem with the Prevent scheme since its inception. Such is the nature of today that, as this is recorded and in Hansard, I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not because I have any soft sympathies with Islamist terrorists of any nature; in fact, if anything, I think that the Government have been rather lackadaisical in not dealing with them more harshly. Putting that to one side, I was always worried about Prevent, particularly in an educational setting.
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Prevent asked staff to monitor the behaviour and views of their students and look out for signs of whether they were extremists of a particular type. If you read the original Prevent duties, you will see that universities and prisons were discussed in very similar terms as dangerous breeding grounds for extremism. I ought to say that it is also the case, as is well noted, that while at university I was indeed an extremist—I think we can safely say that; some would say I have not grown out of it—but that is the problem with extremism. If we are talking about what Prevent was really about, which was the rise of Islamist and nihilistic terrorist activity—and there were undoubtedly people on university campuses who were sympathetic to that—then we all have an absolute interest in ensuring that that is dealt with.
However, because nobody wanted to be accused of being Islamophobic, Prevent ended up being a sort of diktat about extremism, and I am concerned that, as broadly applied, it has ended up arguing that students should be restricted in what they are able to think or say, or listen to and so on. This clashes with the idea of universities as institutions dedicated to truth and questioning. It certainly has made people very nervous about the kind of debates that they have. We know that it has been misused, as in the infamous and well-documented case of the postgraduate student who was caught up in Prevent when he was doing research for his PhD.
The Prevent duty—your Lordships will hear this very often—is used as an indication that there are double standards when it comes to free speech. Here are a Government saying that they want to encourage academic freedom and more open free speech on campus, and yet they have created and promoted the Prevent duty. When students ask if there are double standard here, I think they have a point.
More broadly, once free speech is presented as something which should be balanced with and traded off against security issues—that is, as a threat—in the way that Prevent does, then free speech loses its moral authority. We have seen this in the way that students’ attitudes have been shaped over recent years, not by themselves but by the way that we as a society have socialised them into seeing free speech as frightening; hence the demands for safe spaces and to be protected from dangerous speech. There is a sort of moral blackmail that says, “I can’t have that person speak on campus because it means I won’t feel safe”. This is the language that students who are more censorious use, and it is exactly what the Bill is trying to challenge. We have to look at this again.
It is one reason, by the way, why I am worried by the duty of care proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Mann. Again, I understand its intention, but I am absolutely with the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, on this one. The duty of care for students to be protected from harm was exactly the language used last week in saying that Helen Joyce, by speaking on her book, was a threat to students at Cambridge. I always find the harm, distress and duty of care argument problematic.
Finally, on Amendment 35, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, explained the point about the Equality Act very well, but I think we all received the SOAS briefing on the Bill beforehand. It complains that the Bill requires universities to protect the speech of Holocaust deniers and others seeking to deliberately provoke or offend. It goes on to say that it directs universities to ignore equality law, which in effect is trumped by free speech. It argues that the Bill should be got rid of, because there is a real problem if the duty to ensure freedom of speech overrides the Equality Act.
The point I make, as I made on Monday, is that one of the difficulties is that the Equality Act has been used in a censorious fashion, often because it has been misinterpreted by university authorities. Informally, universities and student unions will say that they need to protect a group of students from harm, as provided for by the Equality Act, and so will ban X, Y or Z; it is frequently used in that way. Students with protected characteristics are dragged out as some kind of stage army, as though all women or all racial minorities have the same views. Those are some of the more dangerous aspects of identity politics.
It is always equality legislation that is used to clamp down on free speech. For me, that is abhorrent. As someone who has fought for equal rights and who wants diversity—diversity of opinion in particular—and to include as many people as possible in higher education, “diversity”, “equality” and “inclusion” are three words that I dread in the context of universities and many other institutions. These words are used to silence or often demonise other people who have different opinions. We have to be careful that equality legislation does not
end up drowning out the good intentions of this Bill. If the free speech bit can be strengthened, that is all to the good.