TOBY YOUNG: It’s a crowded subject, however Bridget Phillipson’s failure to guard free speech in universities makes her probably the most ineffective Cabinet minister
Yesterday, 370 academics, including three Nobel Prize-winners, wrote to Bridget Phillipson urging her to make good on her pledge to defend freedom of expression in our universities.
The Education Secretary has been promising to shore up free-speech protections on campus for more than a year but, so far, there’s been no sign of action, despite the desperate need.
At the Free Speech Union, the organisation I set up in 2020, we’ve fought more than 5,400 cases in the past five years, with around one in eight involving an attempt to ‘cancel’ – or silence – someone at a British university.
Not that you have to take our word for it. According to a prestigious global survey last year, British universities rank 64th in the world when it comes to academic freedom, below Malawi, Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea.
It won’t surprise you to hear that the censorship tends to work in one direction only: Left-wing, woke, green, pro-trans and pro-Palestinian voices are welcomed at British universities. Dissenting views less so.
Polls of students underline the problem, with half the respondents in a survey carried out by King’s College London reporting that those with conservative views are reluctant to express them for fear of reprisals.
Three Nobel Prize-winners wrote to Bridget Phillipson, pictured, urging her to make good on her pledge to defend freedom of expression in our universities
Last week, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) surveyed more than 1,000 students to gauge their attitude. The findings were far from encouraging, with 35 per cent saying no one representing Reform UK should be allowed to set foot on campus. In the absence of an effective complaints system, a democratic party which tops the nationwide polls would have nowhere else to turn.
The appalling treatment of those, such as Professor Kathleen Stock, who have been brave enough to defy the pro-trans bullies and assert the reality of biological sex needs no further explanation.
Yet 12 months on from the Labour Government’s firm promise to address this poisonous situation, the planned protections are nowhere to be seen. No wonder academics concerned about open discourse and freedom of expression in our universities are frustrated.
‘Until the complaints scheme is in force, universities can disregard their duties with impunity,’ says their letter to the Education Secretary. And ‘disregarding their duties’ is exactly what our institutes of higher learning have been up to.
Take, for example, the case of Professor Laura Murphy, head of the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University.
Last year, her employers forced her to abandon research on the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province after coming under pressure from the Chinese government.
More recently, Professor Peter Pormann, a language specialist at Manchester University, was suspended for using the N-word in an internal discussion about the changing meaning of words over time. He was using it not as a racial epithet but as part of a serious academic discussion. Nevertheless, in the Orwellian world of academe, Professor Pormann is still under investigation.
Yet, until Bridget Phillipson decides to pull her finger out and implement the promised protections – and, in particular, a proper complaints procedure, a bad situation is likely to get a good deal worse.
The staggering thing is that the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act is already law. It was passed by both Houses of Parliament under the previous Conservative government and received royal assent in 2023. It should be in force by now.
That legislation was an attempt by the last government to rescue our universities from the scourge of cancel culture, but Phillipson torpedoed the Act within days of becoming Education Secretary.
Defying the will of Parliament, she reversed the ‘commencement orders’ that would have brought in the Act’s most important clauses, and only reluctantly did a U-turn – an early sign of this Government’s modus operandi – thanks to an effective campaign waged by many of the academics who signed this week’s letter, spearheaded by the Free Speech Union. We threatened the minister with legal action.
The most important clause in the Act would have created a new statutory scheme under which academics, students and visiting speakers who felt their speech rights had been breached could complain to the Office for Students, the higher education regulator.
If their complaint was upheld, they would have been entitled to compensation and the university in question subject to a swingeing fine.
Professor Kathleen Stock, who have been brave enough to defy the pro-trans bullies and assert the reality of biological sex
Yet Phillipson – true to her woke roots and no doubt wishing to curry favour with the out-of-control activists on Labour’s backbenches – has been dragging her feet.
As a result, and despite her promises, protections vital to the free exchange of ideas that should be at the heart of academic life have yet to come into force.
The consequences go well beyond a few junior common rooms, by the way. Thanks to their mindless group-think, our universities are churning out dogmatic enforcers of progressive orthodoxy who are bringing their intolerant attitude into the workplace, too.
Academic free speech is not the only issue that Bridget Phillipson has failed to grip. In her capacity as Women and Equalities Minister, she has been sitting on the advice of the Equality and Human Rights Commission since last September about updating the guidance on access to single sex spaces in the wake of the Supreme Court judgement about the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act.
That delay has real-life consequences because NHS trusts and other public bodies are still relying on the outdated guidance which, for example, permits biological men to use the female changing rooms.
This is only possible because Phillipson has once again dragged her feet and failed to implement the law.
Why is she so ineffective? In a crowded field, she must rank as the most useless member of the Cabinet.
Phillipson’s only ‘achievement’ to date has been to pull the plug on the Free Schools programme, in spite of its extraordinary track record of educational achievement, with Free Schools outperforming every other type of state school.
Surely, even a Prime Minister as hopeless as Keir Starmer can see that the Labour member for Houghton and Sunderland South has, to put it kindly, no place running a large department of state?
It’s time to replace her with someone who can do the job and restore freedom of debate to pride of place in our universities.
Until then, we can be certain that students and academics who dare to go against the herd will be bullied and abused into silence – despite gaslighting assurances from university administrators that all is well! If only that were true.
