January 16, 2025 - 1:15pm

It appears Labour will allow the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act to proceed, but with both arms tied behind its back. Progressive illiberalism is simply too close to the hearts of Left-wing activists to be jettisoned.

The bill is a shadow of its former self, and is therefore unlikely to prevent no-platforming, cancellation mobs or the chilling of academics through the extended opaque disciplinary processes which I experienced several times at my former university. Left-wing forces inside and outside the party have clearly managed to hamstring the Act.

I have had numerous run-ins with woke illiberalism. All it took was a radical group of students or staff members to file a complaint with phrases such as “investigation”, “bringing the university into disrepute” and “violating our policy in work and study” featuring prominently. Until you receive this kind of missive, you cannot understand its psychological impact. The subsequent hearings and correspondence take months or more to resolve, driving home the message that doing something such as retweeting a clip of Justin Trudeau being unable to pronounce “LGBTQ++” is forbidden speech. Best to keep quiet.

Labour’s initial attempt to kick this late-term Tory legislation into the long grass by pressing the pause button is a worrying sign. It shows that the party is not seriously committed to protecting academic freedom when it inevitably collides with hurt feelings. As Government sources have alleged, the act was a “hate speech charter”. Ministers have only acted because of overwhelming opposition and lobbying from high-profile academics such as Richard Dawkins and an imminent judicial review brought by the Free Speech Union.

The legislation, which a number of academics including me were involved in drafting, creates a duty on universities to not only protect but promote academic freedom. It establishes an Academic Freedom Directorate on the sector regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), led by an Academic Freedom Director — a solid proponent of academic freedom, Arif Ahmed of the University of Cambridge.

The Academic Freedom Directorate initially also made a provision for an ombudsman to whom staff and students could complain if universities violated their academic freedom or slow-walked their complaints. It extended to cover student unions, some of the most intolerant actors on campus today. It also established a statutory tort to allow plaintiffs a right to sue their universities for violation of their rights, so that institutions could not just ignore OfS rulings. However, this right was conditional upon the plaintiff first exhausting OfS and internal appeal processes and was thus extremely unlikely to be abused by vexatious claimants as its detractors charged.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has done the bidding of the radical lecturer’s union, the UCU, by removing student unions from the legislation. They are now free to no-platform “hateful” gender-critical feminists or even ordinary Right-of-centre politicians. Meanwhile, the right to sue has been struck off at the behest of the universities’ lobby group, UUK. Students will no longer be permitted to use the OfS complaints scheme but must instead shout into the wind to the notoriously ineffective Office of the Adjudicator for Higher Education, a body whose failure to act helped give rise to the legislation. Finally, while Arif Ahmed has been permitted to remain in post, Phillipson has signalled that he will be on a tight leash by suggesting that his appointment was political.

What this means in practice is that when Ahmed tries to issue guidelines about how to reform notoriously illiberal policies around “respect” or “bringing the university into disrepute” or harassment, he will meet obfuscation from Government and bureaucrats. With his hands tied, there will likely be no penalty for universities which fail to protect, much less promote, academic freedom as is their duty under the law.

The process will be the punishment, and progressive illiberalism will continue to be the order of the day at Britain’s universities. This reflects the new morality of the Left, in which equal outcomes and emotional harm protections are more important than free expression and the pursuit of truth. With wokeness dominating the ethos of elite universities, as well as the Labour Party and its clients such as the UCU and UUK, we can hardly be surprised at the defenestration of the academic freedom law.


Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

epkaufm