My Lords, encores are rarely worth the value of the extra time, but the noble Lords, Lord Grabiner and Lord Willetts, have shown that it can be done. I will be very brief, because they have said so much.
I draw attention to an interesting contribution from Professor Jo Phoenix, who was interviewed recently on Radio 4. She supported this clause on tort, on the grounds that the University of Essex had treated her appallingly—it clearly had; this was acknowledged—but she had not been able to obtain loss. She was not employed by the University of Essex, so the loss was some theoretical appreciation of whether she would be invited somewhere else because of what had happened at Essex.
I commend the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for attempting to meet the debate in Committee, but I think we have opened another can of worms. You go through the Office for Students and the adjudicator and you have the facility of judicial review and, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, employment law—which I used to teach—which could involve constructive dismissal if
you are employed. If you are not employed there but have been treated extremely badly—the right of free speech has been denied you and that has been acknowledged —you might believe that the acknowledgement itself may persuade others not to invite you and you would use the law under this tort to go to court to get redress.
What is the redress? Who will make a judgment on the financial value of what you might have done had you been invited to speak elsewhere, when you do not know whether you have not been or would have been invited? It is a bit like Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. If you go to court with known unknowns, you will be in a disaster area. The only people who will benefit—I say this with some humility to my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner—are the lawyers.
The simple way around this is to do two things: approve the rest of this Bill and encourage civil society to be civil and people to stand up for each other, rather than always running to the courts, to deal with this small minority of intolerant, anti-democratic bigots—they are bigots, in terms of not being able to debate properly the rights of women. That is really what we are talking about in lots of these cases. We should not have a merry-go-round of trying to compensate somebody for something which you could never know and, if you did, probably would not have resulted in a loss of income in the first place. Let us get rid of Clause 4 and get back to common sense.