The battle for free speech comes to Manchester
In advance of Battle of Ideas North on Saturday 7 March, Claire Fox explains how the authorities are increasingly stifling our ability to express our opinions.
A video doing the rounds on social media seems to epitomise some of the problems we are facing in relation to free speech. Campaigners set up a stall outside the London College of Communication to talk to passersby about the idea of mass deportations to tackle illegal immigration. When the stall was attacked by opponents, the campaign’s cameraman tackled the assailant – but ended up getting arrested instead. The police seemed more concerned about the political views being promoted than a physical assault.
Meanwhile, students at the University of Sussex are planning a protest against the formation of the Reform UK society on campus. Creating a student society in support of a party that has been leading UK opinion polls for months should be uncontroversial, but the society’s president has revealed opponents have ‘used violence, death threats against us, and they’re literally carrying out these fascist actions against us, but we’re not standing for it. We stand up for free speech.’
The trend towards bans and censorship of speech is now a routine aspect of political life. ‘You can’t say that’ and ‘Think before you post’ are normalised background injunctions against speaking freely. With new hate-speech regulations, more powers to the speech police in workplaces and heightened hysteria over social media, the battle for free speech is omnipresent, although contested, across a diverse range of issues. Why are the authorities so keen to curb speech and how can we oppose such trends?
On hate speech, while high-profile campaigning does seem to have resulted in the demise of infamous non-crime hate incidents, the ideology of subjectively defined hate crimes remains firmly embedded in the law and institutions. Indeed, the government is using legislation to expand the protected characteristics that can be used to criminalise offensive speech. Labour’s proposed rebranding of Islamophobia as ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ will, according to Toby Young of the Free Speech Union (FSU), likely result in more prosecutions and more guilty verdicts for speech-related offences. Among other things, it could end up silencing Iranian dissidents in Britain criticising the Islamic Republic’s Muslim ‘laws’ in Tehran, such as mandatory veiling.
In workplaces, it’s EDI diktats and public-sector equality duties that are often used to create a toxic atmosphere of grievance culture, identity politics and lawfare. An ever-expanding number of disciplinary codes unrelated to the nature of specific jobs means that over the past year there’s been a 23 per cent rise in cases at employment tribunals and a two-year waiting list for hearings. Almost half of the FSU’s cases (44 per cent) occur in the workplace.
For those working in higher education, even the much-heralded Higher Education (Free Speech) Act seems to be stalling. Recently, more than 370 academics – including three Nobel Prize-winners – accused the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, of foot-dragging on implementing measures designed to tackle cancel culture on university campuses. But given that one opinion poll suggests that 35 per cent of undergraduates want to ban Reform politicians from campuses, is the battle over expression increasingly driven from the bottom up?
In schools, teachers have been disciplined, even sacked, for allegedly sharing political views that breach safeguarding rules. One teacher was sacked and barred from working with children for telling Muslim pupils that ‘Britain is still a Christian state’; another teacher was reportedly referred to the authorities and paid off from his job for showing videos of Donald Trump in an A-Level politics class. Meanwhile, a visit by the Jewish MP Damien Egan was cancelled by a local school following objections from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the National Education Union. Is ‘safeguarding’ an excuse either to police teachers or views that are disapproved of?
That familiar tug-of-war between free speech and safeguarding is now the predominant feature of restrictions on online speech. It is just a few months since the Online Safety Act came into effect – legislation that has already led to the censorship of articles critical of migration policies or quoting explicit details of the ordeals suffered by victims of the grooming gangs. Yet the government, with popular and cross-party support, now cites the need for more safeguarding restrictions, whether threats of a ban on social media for under-16s or to ban Elon Musk’s X because it’s AI Grok bot has been ‘undressing’ users.
Is the rush to restrict speech driven by a genuine desire to protect the young and citizens, or about reasserting control of the narrative? While real-life social tensions are evident, from failed integration and increasing radicalisation, will curtailing hate speech create more social harmony or is this a means for governments to sidestep the root causes of discontent and to contain justified anger? Which frontiers will emerge as the next battlegrounds for free expression? Are there any red lines in speech that should not be crossed or is every restriction on what we say censorship?
We’ll be debating these issues in the final session of Battle of Ideas North, a day of discussion taking place in Manchester on Saturday 7 March. To see the full programme and buy tickets, click here.