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Those of us lucky enough to have enjoyed university before the Great Madness took hold tend to pity today’s students for the stifling political monoculture that now permeates their world. But, as so often, a dubious nostalgia is at work: the problem is not unique to the post-2014 Progressive era.
35 years ago, the government felt the need to add section 43 to the Education (No.2) Act 1986; it required universities to uphold freedom of speech, and was passed in response to a spate of No Platformings that feel depressingly familiar. “The most dishonourable case”, it was said, “was at Sunderland Polytechnic, where the Jewish Society was banned on the pretext that all Zionists are racists”. “From the objectionable to the absurd,” the Bill’s sponsor continued drily, “Guildford law school banned the Solicitor-General.”
But it’s not quite plus ça change. Manchester University’s students may have been spraying Michael Heseltine with red paint when he visited in 1983, but this year the institution graduated to deprecating the use of the word “mother”. Things do seem to have become worse.
Gavin Williamson certainly seems to think so. Yesterday, as he introduced The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in Parliament, the Education Secretary declared it a “milestone moment,” promising to counter “the chilling effect of censorship on campus once and for all.”
The plan, first proposed by Williamson in February, is that instead of the toothless statutory duty we have now — a prescription without a penalty — academics and students who suffer for their speech will in future be able to sue for damages. And universities will have to “actively promote” free speech rather than merely “secure” it. In a similar vein, the requirement to maintain a Free Speech Code of Practice will be transformed — into a requirement to maintain a Free Speech Code of Practice “with minimum standards”. There will be Free Speech Champions. And a new Regulator.
The reaction to the White Paper on this Bill was divided along expected lines: excitement from the Telegraph, disdain from the Guardian. But while it might look like a step in the right direction, is any of it really capable of reducing self-censorship — or what Williamson refers to as “a climate where individual staff members are fearful regarding their employment status”? The Index on Censorship, in its lukewarm response, noted that “you simply can’t legislate for cultural change”. The Right would do well to ponder that observation.
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SubscribeI caught part of an interview, on this topic, with a spokeswoman, on BBC Radio 4 yesterday. All so good, until the presenter asked her as to whether she would support David Irving right to free speech, denying that the Holocaust took place. She should have said, without pause, “absolutely”, instead she became mealy mouthed and evasive. Truly pathetic. David Irving’s basic premise (as far as I’m aware, or much care) is that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Frankly a quite risible notion, if not out and out bizarre, at least to my mind, but if he want’s to try and convince people and argue the point with others, who can argue or debate back, then as far as I’m concerned “Go for it”. Instead we got a spokesperson, for free speech, who fell at the very first hurdle, rather than have the courage of their convictions. And this is from somebody who has, I have no doubt, been to university and should therefore be intellectually bright enough to question what she hears. Indeed, it is a point I thought to make earlier, it is the infantilising of university students, as if they are still at primary school and need protection from views, views that they don’t have the intellectual tools to debunk.
Well said.
A bad idea is a bad idea and the best way to kill it off is by holding it up to open, rigorous and constant scrutiny.
Darwinian-like, surely it will either live or die on its own merits, or lack of, accordingly?
To turn things into legally enshrined sacred cows that can no longer ever be discussed surely only ever affords them a cachet that they for the most part don’t deserve and leaves them ripe for exploitation by individuals or groups largely based around that very legally and socially forbidden quality itself.
The ‘they’ don’t want ‘us’ to talk about ‘this’ schtick to those who might fall into the more ‘suggestible’ category…well, yes, we do actually.
I can thoroughly recommend the Triggernometry interview with the Eton schoolmaster regarding this which certainly chimes with your last point regarding ‘infantilising’ the supposed brightest and best in our society at our finest educational institutions who are en masse apparently now totally intellectually incapable of making up their own minds about these things any longer.
In the most part I agree, that all ideas should be out in the open and discussed. But our society is based on ideas and lines that can-not be crossed, and those lines should be made clear.
Personally I think holocaust denial comes out in these discussions because its border line – in that there are people that say it should be allowed. There are other topics that are even more contraversial that most people wouldn’t want to be discussed or debated, or shouted at from street corners.
Could you image if some-one stood perfectly legally stood on your local high street with a huge banner proclaming that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 5? – Would you support their right to do it?
I wouldn;t, because saying some things does actual harm to people, it causes people to have a false perspective on what the agreed position of society is, and allows those that shout the loudest to set the debate.
Yes, that is absolutely their right. That should not even be close to being in question. I find it a bit creepy that you think otherwise.
The only speech that should be outlawed is actual incitement to violence.
What a horrible suggestion. The “agreed position of society” is not something that should be subject to legal oppression. A person has every right to disagree with the “agreed position of society”.
Apart from anything else, the “agreed position of society” has been wrong, many times in the past.
I may not have come across as I intended. My real position is that there are limits to free speach based on where / when you say things. Discussions about holocaust denial are absolutely fine in a university (for example) as part of a debate, but not outside a synagogue, campaigning for changes in the the age of sexual consent don’t belong outside schools.
Saying the wrong thing in the wrong place makes incitement to violence a grey area.
The logical implication of defending peoples right to say what they like where they like means amongst others the removal of the watershed, advertising inappropriate things to children, and opens up society to brainwashing based simply on the people who shout the loudest.
By that line of reasoning then right-to-lifers should not be allowed to protest outside Planned Parenthoods and vice versa.
“proclaming that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 5”
Wasn’t that Green and Labour policy at one point?
Words and thoughts which are specifically not an incitement to violence are not actions.
Lobbying to lower the law of the age of consent to 5 ain’t exactly going to find many takers or make you many friends more generally, no more than denying that the Holocaust ever happened I suspect.
The point here is isn’t it better if society at large and arguably you as an individual gets know who these individuals who make these outrageous, at least in my opinion, claims and demands are?
Free speech isn’t a panacea whereby you and those that think like you only ever get to say and hear what you want, it’s forever an uneasy bargain for the greater good that allows you to have your right to have your say and hear what you want precisely because that is a right that’s universally extended to everyone else.
‘They’ have no more right to legally restrict ‘you’ than you do ‘them’.
Your last paragraph again makes the assumption that in many ways underscores this whole debate ie I can of course be trusted with the privilege of free speech, but I’m not convinced others can.
To be fair David Irving’s view, as I recall is that the Holocaust certainly happened, but two million not six million were killed.
That is not Holocaust Denial by any stretch of the imagination.
However he has compounded his ‘crime’ by suggesting that the Holocaust has become an industry, a view also held by a ‘self-hating’ American Jew by name of Finkelstein if my memory is correct.
I understand why there is a discussion to be had about all the legal nitty gritty, definitions, what can actually be enforced in practice etc..and I do agree wholeheartedly with the notion of not being able to legislate for cultural change. However, I am absolutely in favour of the government acknowledging, by enacting these laws, that there is an issue, it is being taken seriously and core British values are being reinforced.
The value of this action may not necessarily lie in the grant of enforceable rights, but in sending out a signal. That may, in turn, embolden those who have been self-censoring to speak up – including in situations where the law would not have applied. So the law itself cannot be expected to turn the tide, but it can help to create an atmosphere where individuals feel confident to speak and eventually turn the tide themselves.
I think the pearl-clutching about truly unsavoury opinions (i.e. holocaust denial) becoming “acceptable” by allowing them to be openly expressed is overdone. It is far more hygienic for a society to talk about unsavoury opinions openly and hear their rebuttal than to suppress them.
(And I would also like to add that my English university education was the greatest privilege I have ever been given. Being able to talk and debate all kinds of ideas and theories taught me how to think, be critical, question. Those are priceless skills for life far beyond one’s chosen field of study and I do fear that today’s students aren’t getting the chance to fully develop them.)
I enjoyed your post until the last paragraph where you virtue signalled. Delete it and ill delete my comment. With due respect of course.
No I will not delete it, because it is my honest opinion. I don’t understand why that should be seen as virtue signalling.
I’ve upvoted you both for the previous post and this one. I would like to add, however, that as well as university I’ve always found several (usually to far gone to remember) pints of decent beer also had the effect of being able to discuss anything. Even when you had no idea what it was the next day.
Thanks. Oh yes, a couple of good beers greases the wheels of discussion nicely. Discussing politics can be a bit dicey though – especially if you are a gobby rather than a mellow drunkard 😉
On one occasion I turned the tape recorder on. Listening to it the next day I was impressed by the “wide ranging” nature of the discussion.
if ‘virtue signaling’ is what got from that paragraph, you may want to look up the term, for it does not mean what you think it means. With due respect, of course.
Personchester, you mean.
Haha. That actually works at all levels since Manchester is from Mamucium which means either Mother-town or Breast-town.
I despair for my alma mater – or as should I really say; alma hominem
The students union was always full of activist types focussing on any pet cause that wasn’t their actual education, but it appears to have been fully consumed now.
Humanchester
Manchestfeeder
You won.
And if you don’t mind, i’m nicking it. Manchestfeeder. Brilliant!
You may not be able to legislate for “cultural change”, but the thing is, this is not cultural change. When a group of people grab a Man U fan by the throat, slam him up against the wall and demand he sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, that’s not a cultural change. Neither is there a cultural change when another group — and a pretty small group at that — grab appointed offices in universities and NGOs and use them to force words into the mouths of people who don’t want to say them. A cultural change happens when said group puts their ideas to the public at the polls and gets elected. But of course, that’s not going to happen because the group in question knows they couldn’t get elected to the parish council with their ideology.
Universities, by the way, are not parties at private houses which the owner is free to invite people to or not. They live off the public purse — pretty greedily most of the time — and don’t get to refuse to treat with ideas because the elite vanguards which control them don’t like the people who posit those ideas. Ideas are what we pay these idiots to handle.
There also seemed a shift from I defend your right to say something to If you say something I don’t agree with , you must be wrong. People seem to have lost the ability to debate a subject , they think an argument is purely a shouting disagreement , not a civilized debate. This isn’t helped by programmes like Question Time when people cut across each other and deliberately shout each other down. Some people also seem almost proud to display their ignorance- claiming somebody from the past must be cancelled when a few minutes on the internet would show they had got that person’s opinions wrong ie they have confused both Gladstone & Peel with their father’s opinions -yet Liverpool University students for example won’t admit this.
It’s the very fourth and unelected branch of government, the bureaucracies that are the problem. Reduce them and stop giving them the power to control the state.
Perhaps the great Bard was onto something?
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.*
(* Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2)
And universities will have to “actively promote” free speech rather than merely “secure” it. That this must be written speaks, nay screams, volumes about the state of academia and much of non-academic life where free speech is treated as a relic of a bygone era.
I have no doubt that introducing a duty of care on universities will be an incomplete solution. However, if we see a few universities fined heavily for tolerating censorious thugs to act with impunity on their campus, there might be more movement towards institutional antipathy to censoriousness.
W’ve got a long way to go before we begin to slow the runaway train, let alone halt it and then reverse it.
It feels – and this is very wishy-washy – as if there has been a tectonic shift. I wouldn’t call it a paradigm shift, it feels other than a collective change in perception. It feel more subterranean, more in the unconscious. I think the reasoning faculty as a commonly held property of the human being has diminished. I think what aspiration there ever was to be governed by reason has diminished. I think, perhaps, that fewer people than ever even understand what it means to be governed by reason.
What appears to be in the ascendency is the uncontrolled outpouring of the ungoverned ego, and it is making a heck of a racket as all those competing egos seek to dominate public discourse.
These people seem quite impervious to reason; they show no appetite for reflection or intellectual exploration. All they seem to want is to hold sway and impose a narrow world view on us all. They seem opposed to thinking itself.
I’ve been thinking along this line for sometime now also. And I think it is the effect of social media on a human brain system which evolved to operate in small groups. Too much information. Availability bias. Frequency bias. Selection bias… etc. It’s affecting us kind of like a disease – like it must have been in the Americas when Europeans first arrived and their diseases fanned out across the continents ahead of them. People read far more sources to far less depth than ever before. The most common thing in the world these days is to ask someone if they’ve read this book or article and have them say ‘yes’ only to discover that they only browsed a few paragraphs here and there, usually only at the front end. They “read” it.
Permit me to offer a theoretical explanation.
Technology has provided us with too much luxury and too much time on our hands, and do-gooding has been reduced in most instances from tangible things such as providing goods and shelter to attempts to provide mental goods, such as self-actualization and preventing bad feelings.
While understandable on some level, what arguments for this system ignore is the fact that it makes self-reported mental states the basis for power, and unlike hunger and cold, those states are open-ended. What you incentivize, you get more of. If your house is warm, you can’t get or benefit from more heat, but if all you have to do to get goodies is to say you feel bad and it’s someone else’s fault, then that’s what we’re going to get more and more of, using whatever -ism is needed, of old and new coinage both, to provide rationalizations.
That this is pushed by the same people who want more of someone else’s money in the form of redistributive taxation is no accident, because Big Business sucks up much of the energy of opposition to the cultural Left to defend itself from the economic Left.
What an interesting piece from UnHerd.
A few days ago I posted a comment questioning Darwin and Evolution. Equating in certain cases it to a religion.
Within hours my post was taken down, together with comments from braying Atheists, protesting in various forms that I had effectively insulted the great man Darwin and his unquestionable ramblings
I think you will find the meaning of the word ‘libertarian’ has changed. A libertarian is now someone who agrees with the content of a Guardian editorial, a hyper-libertarian is someone who doesn’t.
People who freely express the opinion that (for example) all Tories are fascist pigs are entitled to do so under libertarian principle, but people who guardedly express the opinion that (for example) a man isn’t necessarily a woman just because he says he is are not entitled to do so because to do so is an abuse of free speech, which is typical of the hyper-libertarian.
This term ‘hyper-libertarian’ is very useful. People who question the efficacy of masks and lockdown are hyper-libertarian. They may think they are entitled to question the prevailing orthodoxy when they look at it and find it more or less unsupported by anything a reasonable person would regard as evidence, but they would be wrong, because they are hyper-libertarian and trying to kill everyone.
One certainly should not go too far down the road of Gavin Williamson the saintly defender of free speech in UK universities.
As a quick internet search will reveal to you, he wants the very flawed IHRA definition of anti-semitism adopted by the universities and is even threatening to cut funding to those who do not.
The Blair government legislated very effectively for “cultural change”…….the Equalities Act, amongst others…
“We all have a principled passion for our own particular brand of “tolerance”. Each side accuses the other of intolerance — and both are right. There is an intolerance inherent in the expressing of any idea, because time and attention are limited. I might sincerely claim to defend to the death your right to say something, but if I’m talking, you’re not. My ideas, my memes, which replicate between minds as genes do in bodies, are looking for the chance to spread in place of yours. That’s what a culture war is, and it’s never-ending.”
I don’t think this is what this current culture war is, ie a simple difference of opinion. I agree that deeper structural changes in the law would be better than these more surface changes. No one would care much if peoples’ jobs/future prospects weren’t on the line.Or if the Hate Crime legislation was not hovering there, ready to criminalise one’s thoughts and remarks. But frankly, in the absence of anything much at all until the advent of the Free Speech Union, I am very grateful to them for pointing out the outcropping of this madness. That is what it is, not a harmless alternative opinion.
The old adage ‘the older you get, the more conservative you become’ is the only thing that can counter the insane group think of the left, along with all its conflicting ideas. This is the only hope. Laws cannot stop anyway of thinking, it just drives people underground. I truly believe, that if this ‘group think’ continues, in the years to come millennials will vote in a totalitarian regime, and only then they will learn, but it will be too late to reverse their naive stupidity.
FU.
Intelligent reply.
Fortuna ultima.
Haha, OK.
I think we’ve yet to surpass J.S. Mill on free speech.
Freedom of speech is more than important, it’s essential, as nothing in society works without it. There is no idea, or conception of an idea, statute, norm, etc., that, to some degree or other, is not always and forever being contested. No one has the final say on anything, and I take that to be a simple, even commendable, fact about human life and politics. We have only settled-yet-shifting kinds of consensus to work with; if we’re lucky, neither mad-dog relativism, nor absolute dictate. But how can that be achieved or maintained without the freedom to say and hear any and every kind of speech? How could we know truth by any other means?
Following Mill: if we’re wholly in possession of the facts about an issue then, in hearing and debating some false counterpoint, we sharpen both our understanding and our arguments. If we’re wholly wrong on an issue, we then have the privilege of being corrected, and enlightened as to the truth by a dissenting voice. But by far the most common circumstance for all of us is that, by varying degrees, and on any number of issues throughout our lives, we will find ourselves to be both right and wrong on the facts. It follows that we must hear any and all speech, at all times, even and perhaps especially if that speech is risible or ridiculous. Indeed, those very terms only have meaning via some means of comparison.
The right is right we must not stifle speech (though maybe don’t be castigating corn dealers outside their homes before a baying mob). The left is right that you don’t really get to hide from the consequences of that speech; or, at the very least, you probably can’t demand protection from other forms of free speech that your own may prompt.
Legislation, or the threat of it, to own the libs – an alarmingly not-infrequent tactic of this particular cabinet – is as much a self-own as it is anything else.
I hereby upvote this article, especially the final paragraph
“Much of our speech-crime legislation has become difficult to interpret in a fair and consistent way. For example, the least serious of these offences (section 5 Public Order Act 1986) has as its key elements words that mean different things to different people”
I have serious misgivings about that piece of legislation : it seems to me to give carte blanche to a copper to threaten and control a member of the public for totally arbitrary reasons. It’s a sort of coverall “don’t make waves” provision. I was discussing this with a lawyer friend a while ago, saying that I find many of the pronouncements of imams in the UK deeply offensive, and wondering (hypothetically) whether that would give me grounds to report them to the police. His view was that nothing would be done, but I would leave myself open to action under s5 POA. Apparently the ‘official’ line is that anyone is allowed to perceive offence – except for straight, white males, who can only give it.
A couple of weeks ago I was watching a ‘cop’ reality show where some yob swore at a policeman (this yob was from a culture where every third word was a swear word) and the policeman told him that if he swore again, he would be arrested for a public order offence (section 5, more than likely.) I changed channel and watched some armed officers from the Met carry out an arrest : “Get on the f*****g ground now! Put your f*****g hands where I can f*****g see them!”. (They’re excitable little chaps, the Met.) Definitely a mixed message being given, if not outright double standards!
As we used to say: “The Met….the best Police money can buy”
Trying to restrict freedom of speech often produces the opposite result to the one intended. Here’s an example. We abhor the use of one particular expression, choosing instead to refer to it as the ‘N’ word. Presumably the hope is that it will eventually disappear. However, this proscription on its use actually serves to keep it alive and kicking, for when in conversation a speaker refers to it as the ‘N’ word, the listener automatically translates it to its fuller form (Go on try it yourself with the ‘C’ word. See what I mean?). Worse still when children ask what is meant by the ‘N’ word, invariably they are told that its meaning is unpleasant and forbidden, whilst not actually being told what it refers to. The outcome of this is that the child inevitably seeks an explanation of its meaning elsewhere and in the process perpetuates its use.
Are really well written article. Quite thought-provoking and logically expressed. He is of course quite right and I haven’t personally thought through all the implications that have been so well highlighted, thank you.
Brilliant!