In speaking to my Amendment 5, I shall comment briefly on the previous speech. In all my experience of universities, the problem has usually been getting academics to stop disagreeing with each other, rather than their agreeing with each other and being scared to differ. I do not recognise the picture the noble Baroness has painted. In the universities I keep in touch with, and certainly in the case of the London School of Economics, it has been rare for any department—except the economics department—to have a clear consensus that we were not allowed to dissent from. In that case, the consensus was not a left-wing one, and I am afraid it probably still is not.
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We are also very grateful to the Minister for the way she has handled discussions between Committee and Report; it is exactly what should happen. I read the front page of the Telegraph last Saturday, and I recognise that there are those who think that Ministers should under no circumstances give any attention to those who suggest that the Bill might be improved a little. I hope we are helping, in a constructive relationship with the Minister, to improve the Bill a little.
My amendment simply questions the workability of one part of the Bill. I read at the beginning of our deliberations the Policy Exchange papers on which the Bill is largely based. There were allegations of political bias in appointments and promotions, and it was argued that the Bill should therefore make some attempt to redress that alleged bias. I have taken part, as has my wife, in a great many promotion and appointment processes, and we cannot remember any occasion on which the political bias of members of the committee or those who were to be appointed to it came into question—or, indeed, any occasion when we knew the political bias of all the members of the committee. There are many things one disagrees on in the academic world, within one’s own discipline and across disciplines, but the politics of it does not come into the case very much, and it would not be professional to allow that to happen.
I ask the Minister to ensure that the guidance is very cautious about providing encouragement to those who feel disgruntled at the idea that their particular view of the discipline may be affected by their political
opinions, whatever they may be. That should not be allowed to lead to excessive litigation, complaints, et cetera—that is what we fear. I remind the Minister, as I said at Second Reading, that one of the founders of UKIP was a member of the Department of International History at the London School of Economics while I was there. I got on very well with him, and in his teaching, he was entirely professional, as academics should be—and, indeed, as most academics are.
I also remind those who listened carefully to the noble Baroness’s speech that, when we talk about universities and departments, the majority are scientific departments. They are not concerned with sociology, which many would say has a structural left-wing bias, at least in origin. Of course, some extreme left-wing sociologists move hard to the right as they get older. Economics has in some ways a structurally right-wing bias, whereas international relations, my own profession, is all over the shop in terms of bias. But that is the social sciences; for the hard sciences, the politics hardly come into play at all. What I am asking for is that very careful guidance be given which does not encourage extraneous issues to come into these very professional processes of appointment and promotion.
Lastly, I remind the Minister that when we come to the later stages, she may well find herself arguing that the process of appointing the free speech champion is undisturbed by any outside considerations whatever, or any outside consultation on who should be involved in the appointing process. That seems to me to be in direct contradiction to the argument here.