Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

“right to free speech is vital too”.

Areas of disagreement do not always have to be met with hostility; there is scope to agreeably disagree. I am looking forward to hearing the views of noble Lords during today’s debate, and I thank those who have come to contribute to it.

The Bill will protect lawful freedom of speech and academic freedom on campus. The measures will strengthen existing legislation and address gaps in existing law. As I shall explain, these are very much active measures, not just a means to address a problem once a breach of the duties has taken place. New duties will be placed on higher education providers and constituent colleges to take “reasonably practicable” steps to secure freedom of speech within the law for staff, members, students and visiting speakers. They will be duty bound to pay particular attention to the importance of free speech when taking these steps. Importantly, these duties also, for the first time, clearly extend to “academic freedom”.

In a new measure, the Bill will require providers and constituent colleges to promote the importance of freedom of speech and academic freedom. The Office for Students will be bound by a similar duty. Furthermore, higher education providers and their constituent colleges must develop and publish a code of practice, which must include an overarching statement of the values and procedures they will uphold, and which they must bring to the attention of their students at least once a year.

Student unions are at the heart of many students’ university experience; they offer a distinct space for students to come together and engage in areas particularly close to their heart. This legislation, therefore, contains duties that apply specifically to student unions at approved fee cap providers, which is the majority of registered higher education providers. Like higher education providers and constituent colleges, under this legislation they must take steps to secure lawful freedom of speech. Similarly, they must publish their own code of practice.

At present, there are no effective means of enforcing the current law if higher education providers are in breach of it. This may explain some individuals’ hesitancy to express their views. To address this, the Bill creates a new statutory tort for breach of specified freedom of speech duties by providers, constituent colleges and student unions. This will enable individuals to seek legal redress for the loss they have suffered as a result of a breach.

The higher education sector will play a leading role in delivering the ambitions of this legislation, but the regulator also has an important part to play. The Bill gives new powers to the Office for Students, which will identify best practice and provide guidance on how to secure and promote free speech. The Office for Students will be required to impose mandatory registration conditions on providers relating to freedom of speech and academic freedom, as well as monitoring the compliance of student unions with their freedom of speech duties. As with the lack of an enforcement mechanism, there is currently no specific route for all those who might be affected to lodge complaints relating to freedom of speech. The Bill creates a requirement for the Office for Students to provide a complaints scheme that will provide a right of redress for students, members, staff and visiting speakers. This scheme will be overseen by the Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, a new position on the Office for Students board. These measures will enhance the strengthened freedom of speech duties and encourage compliance.

On Report in the other place, my colleagues introduced several minor and clarificatory amendments. Two substantial amendments were also tabled. The first creates a duty for providers, constituent colleges and student unions not to pass on security costs associated with free speech events to the organisers, unless there are exceptional circumstances. The second was an amendment on “overseas funding”: this creates a duty for the Office for Students to monitor overseas funding received by higher education providers, their constituent institutions and student unions. This will enable them to assess the extent to which the funding presents a risk to freedom of speech and academic freedom.

I finish by emphasising that the Bill is not about allowing unlawful speech. The right to freedom of speech is not an absolute right and it does not include the right to harass others or incite them to violence or terrorism. This is definitely not a licence to break the law. The Bill is about encouraging varied and thoughtful debate, so that future generations develop the ability to think critically, challenge extreme narratives and put forward new—and sometimes controversial—ideas. I firmly believe that these are essential skills in a modern, forward-facing society. I look forward to the debate ahead of us today and beg to move.

She said that she believed it to be true. This seems a flimsy base for legislation from a Secretary of State who says that he believes in an evidence-based approach. Can the noble Earl please tell the House to which “institutions” his honourable friend was referring? As my honourable friend Kate Green MP said at Second Reading over a year ago,

“it is an evidence-free zone when it comes to underpinning the concerns that he says it is addressing.”—[Official Report, Commons, 12/7/21; col. 53.]

The lack of an evidence base is one challenge the noble Earl will have to face as the Bill progresses through your Lordships’ House, but there are others. There is an understandable concern that the Bill may undermine existing protections against discrimination. That it introduces a new mechanism that some believe may allow hate-filled individuals to sue a university if they feel that their opinion has not been adequately heard may allow extremists, racists and Holocaust deniers to have a voice and a much-craved platform on our campuses. We will need to test these things during the passage of the Bill.

Additionally, we need to ask how the resources to fight those challenges will be found. We will test the effectiveness of the new clauses added by the Government. From these Benches, we will seek to amend the Bill to require an independent appointments process for, and prevent party-political donations from, the new, to-be-appointed director of free speech. We will seek to broaden the definition of academic freedom to include, for example, criticism of institutions, conducting research and joining a union. We will seek to add a sunset clause, so the legislation expires after three years unless an extension is approved through an affirmative SI. We will seek to require the Office for Students to consider competing freedoms when investigating free speech complaints and seek to prohibit the use of non- disclosure agreements by universities in relation to sexual harassment.

I want to raise with the noble Earl the appointment of the director of free speech. This job was advertised on 13 June or thereabouts, which is, of course, the date that the Bill completed its passage through the Commons but had yet to reach your Lordships’ House. The closing date for applications is 13 July—so be quick if you want to apply for this almost £100,000-a-year job. Can the noble Earl address the question of pre-emption? When will the appointment be made if the closing date is 13 July? Will it before the position has been agreed by Parliament? What parliamentary scrutiny will the appointment receive?

Looking at the job description—which I recommend noble Lords to read—the position seems to require no legal background. I hold no brief to create work for lawyers, but surely if we are to have a director of free speech, a person tasked with the job of settling contentious cases, it must be in all our interests for that person to have a broad understanding of the sector, the legal framework around free speech to which I have referred and the sector’s regulatory framework, but these elements are not essential in the job description.

In conclusion, the issue here is evidence, and that is why these Benches have deep reservations about the unintended consequences of this Bill. Its top-down, one-size-fits-all approach demonstrates the weakness at the heart of the Government and their misplaced lack of trust in our academic community. I have great hope that the many noble and learned Lords and the phalanx of chancellors, vice-chancellors and heads of colleges who inhabit your Lordships’ House will cast their eyes on the Bill and between us we might knock it into some sensible shape. At the least we can do no harm, and if we are very successful, we may enhance free speech in higher education. I look forward to the debates to come and the next stage of the Bill.

There is a problem of toleration of dissent by the current student generation in our universities. The Higher Education Policy Institute has just published a survey which indicates that students have become more protective of what they see as vulnerable minorities, less willing to accept that freedom of speech necessarily includes the right to offend and less willing to tolerate university teachers whose views clash sharply with their own. We have seen a small but painful number of instances in which universities have failed to defend their staff in such circumstances, most sharply the University of Sussex in the case of Professor Stock.

University leadership needs to underline the importance of tolerance of different views among staff and students, but in a free society that role should be played by university leaders and not be imposed by government. In any case, how severe and widespread a problem is this for the over 100 universities? Is the challenge we face worse than in in previous cycles of student activism, which universities have come through without requiring heavy-handed government intervention?

Gavin Williamson in his preface to last year’s White Paper specifically deplored attempts to block Ministers from speaking at and ambassadors from visiting universities. The very first lecture I gave as a newly appointed lecturer at Manchester University in January 1968 was disrupted by a protest at the suspension of a student for assaulting an Education Minister the night before. I went to a ceremony at King’s College London some weeks ago to unveil a portrait of one of the students who had disrupted my lecture, who has since become an adviser to Governments and a globally recognised academic.

Some noble Lords may be old enough to remember the Stop the Seventy Tour and the wider student campaign against apartheid South Africa. My wife can still remember the song she and others sang as they blocked the South African ambassador from speaking at Oxford University. I have just read a memoir of the Stop the Seventy Tour which confirms that at least two of its most activist members have since become Members of this House.

Last year, I spoke to a number of vice-chancellors about this Bill and the issues it raises. One retired VC reminded me that he had struggled to maintain order on his campus in the face of deliberately provocative speakers invited by the then chairman of his student Conservative Association, one John Bercow. A current vice-chancellor told me that the biggest problem of this sort he faces is keeping the peace between his Chinese and Hong Kong students.

There is nothing new about student protest or arguments about the limits of freedom of speech in universities—and I have been an academic for 40 or more years. The question is whether the imposition of a heavy external burden of intrusive regulation, with the introduction of a new tort that will transfer large sums of money from university funds to lawyers through litigation, is a proportionate response to the limited number of unacceptable instances we have seen, above all related to trans rights. I suggest that the proposals are disproportionate. This extension of state interference over autonomous institutions is authoritarian and not Conservative.

The Bill covers not only students and student unions but also staff, visiting speakers and the loosely defined “members” of higher education providers. I understand that, as a retired professor, I may count as a “member” of the LSE, with standing to sue or be sued under the Bill—I shall have to check with the director. The provision that permits discontented staff to sue if they consider

“the likelihood of their securing promotion or different jobs at the provider being reduced”

opens a huge can of worms. I declare an interest: I was once passed over for promotion at the department of government at Manchester on the grounds that I was “too interested in politics”.

The anti-intellectual right in the United States, with its claims that universities are hotbeds of liberalism actively discriminating against honest conservative thinkers, has close links with right-wing bodies in the UK. Policy Exchange in London has claimed on its website to have provided the foundations for the Bill, with almost all of its recommendations in two reports being accepted. I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Godson, is not here today to take credit for that achievement. He might also wish to tell us how much of the significant American funding for Policy Exchange has come from those right-wing foundations that have fuelled Trumpian Republicanism. Think tanks, like universities, should be transparent about their foreign funding.

I was struck when I read the Policy Exchange papers that they had almost as many references to American examples as British, including some from hard-right foundations. They included the claim that the staff of British universities are overwhelmingly left-wing: 80% apparently failed to vote Conservative or UKIP in the last two general elections. Given that over 20% of staff in most universities are not British citizens, and that a large proportion of that staff are scientists and medics and not particularly interested in politics, I find this statistic completely unbelievable.

I am concerned, however, about the undertow of anti-intellectual, anti-rational argument from right-wing critics about Britain’s alleged liberal elite and its allegedly malign hold on our cultural and educational institutions. The Times gave Douglas Murray two pages last Saturday to develop this theme, in which he stated that it’s now virtually impossible for a climate change sceptic to gain appointment as a university chancellor or museum director. If challenging the allegedly oppressive liberal cultural elite means insisting on climate change sceptics being appointed to senior academic positions regardless of their attitudes to evidence and reasoned debate, then our universities and their reputation are, indeed, at risk.

The shadow of Brexit hangs over this, of course, as over so many other aspects of British politics and public debate. The claims that appointments and promotions are biased against conservatives comes from leading members of Historians for Britain and a handful of political scientists. There is no evidence that I am aware of of structural bias against conservative academics; indeed, the founder of UKIP was a friend of mine and a colleague at the LSE. Opening appointment and promotion procedures to challenges over alleged political bias would be a serious incursion into the autonomy of our universities and a feast for lawyers in civil cases.

This is not the first time that structural bias in universities has been alleged. When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, she was determined to abolish the Social Science Research Council. She believed, as a hard scientist, that there was no such thing as social science; that what was taught in universities was intrinsically socialist. She asked Lord Rothschild to report. He, thankfully, responded that careful social and economic research was essential to good government, and that public money should continue to underwrite it. She nevertheless insisted on removing the word “science” from what has since then been labelled the Economic and Social Research Council.

Allegations about left-wing bias in universities focus on social science and humanities, and above all on historians, but history faculties have always argued among themselves, often bitterly. The political balance among academic historians in Britain has been adversely affected by the choice too many of our self-declared patriotic historians have taken to emigrate and take better-paid posts in the United States. Different disciplines have different tendencies. One vice-chancellor told me that his university has a structurally left-wing sociology department and a structurally right-wing economics department: it goes, he said, with the disciplines. Those who want to use this Bill as a lever to promote more solidly conservative views in our higher education institutions should reflect that Britain’s most clearly conservative institution, after the University of Buckingham, is Christ Church College, Oxford: not the greatest example of toleration of dissent and diversity.

Others will touch on the tangle of vexatious lawsuits that this Bill will impose on universities. I briefly mention the comment of another vice-chancellor that it will be completely impossible, in the current heated political atmosphere, to find a candidate for the post of free speech champion who will be acceptable to all sides. Nor can we have confidence in Ofcom assuming this role, when the noble Lord, Lord Wharton, as chair, associated himself with Viktor Orbán and the authoritarian right at a recent Budapest conference. I speak with particular feeling on this as a former visiting professor at the Central European University and a member of its senate in Budapest in its early years, when Viktor Orbán still called himself a liberal.

At a time when trust in this Government is at an all-time low, when suspicion of No.10’s political appointments is high, when the contamination of the Conservative Party by American Republicanism should concern all decent Conservatives, we will have to do our best, as the revising Chamber, to mitigate the damage this Bill could do to the global reputation and standing of our universities.

“statements criticizing public policy and the implementation of it must be … protected”

to give freedom of expression the breathing space it needs.

It is an old and tested argument that the answer to hate or offensive words is more speech, to ensure that dissent remains within the political sphere and does not stray into criminal actions. This Bill recalls many issues that have given your Lordships’ House concern in the past: banning potentially noisy protests; tolerating dissent; hate speech; and now the freedom to express contentious views in the academic context.

There is an array of Bills that afford protection to free speech, as the very useful Library briefing has set out. These include the Education Act 1986 and the relatively recent establishment of the Office for Students, which requires all publicly funded education bodies to comply with public interest governance principles. However, the Government argue that these protections are spread among a number of statutes and, despite the well-publicised events in very recent years of no-platforming and campaigns against individual academics, the Office for Students has been reluctant to exercise its regulatory authority.

The current framework allows judicial review of a decision made by any educational body, which, in turn, permits only discretionary remedies and no scope for damages. The Government’s rationale is to bring all these laws together under a single banner and to strengthen monitoring and action.

Despite the many safeguards in our political system, the worry is that this spread of free speech rules and regulations may well itself have a chilling effect on free speech, while at the same time failing to eradicate vicious attacks. The law will permit a platform for those opposed to, say, gender terminology, and it may even prosecute those who attempt no-platforming. But the culture of intolerance will continue in other outlets, perhaps with even greater vigour.

It is useful to ask how far laws change the prevailing culture. The anti-smoking laws have certainly very successfully banished smoking in public areas; compulsory seatbelts have drastically cut fatal accidents. Will this Bill enable the academic sector to remain safe from attacks by those who hold contrary views? Will it eliminate “cancel culture”? Not in a hurry, I do not think. The self-righteous anti-lobby, or “woke culture”, is well entrenched in our social media and in actions against those who do not share its views. It requires rather a lot of courage for an individual, even though backed up by legislation, to face these kinds of onslaughts. The context of protest has led to self-censorship, possibly one of the most insidious kinds of censorship. Many academics would admit to modifying views and words in order to avoid attacks, and this is not conducive to intellectual exchange or opportunities to bring new ideas into the public arena. Darwin had a really tough time in the 19th century and JK Rowling is having a tough time today.

Then there is the question of necessity. I am informed by one of my grandsons that the Oxford Union has only ever cancelled three debates, none due to protest. Are the instances of interference in academic freedom numerous enough to justify the increase in monitoring and potential criminal charges in the Bill? Are the bodies mandated to bring formal complaints and action sufficiently distanced from the Government of the day? Will potential criminal sanctions contribute to the free intellectual discourse we all wish to see flourish? There are other loopholes in the legislation that could see the regulations abused and have the opposite effect with unintended consequences. Will this legislation have the desired effect in the absence of other legislation to limit online harms, and will it eliminate cancel culture?

Can a law adequately define contentious speech and views separately from the context in which they take place? Freedom of expression and its regulation depend on context; students at educational institutions are especially in need of protection because they are usually a captive audience addressed by teachers regarded as authoritative. The conundrum is that precisely because of these factors, students may also need to be protected from language that borders on incitement; for example, pro-Nazi or extreme religious views. The task of distinguishing between offensive talk and a call to action might be a very delicate one. So my inclination is towards non-interference by the state, and this Bill will need careful scrutiny to avoid undue regulation of what is a fundamental right.

Truth will set you free. By definition, we are all invited to share in this liberative function, to seek the truth as a basis for our common life. Therefore, although we cannot legislate for civility, my hope is that the letter of this proposed law, which is to protect freedom of speech, might make room for the spirit of the law, which is to seek truth without diminishing or dehumanising others.

Indeed, this Bill alone will not accomplish its objectives or guard against potential harms through purely statutory or regulatory means. Alison Scott-Baumann’s work on free speech provides some deep wisdom on nurturing communities of inquiry through an “etiquette of argument”, as she calls it—a way of communicating over divisive issues without causing harm. We are having a go at developing similar principles of conversation in the Church of England at the moment, with some success. At the core of these principles is a fundamental understanding that the truth that we seek is written into our human dignity; therefore, one cannot be compromised without the other.

I turn to some points of detail. The House of Lords Library highlights continued concerns about the potential confusion between the responsibilities of individual institutions, the Office for Students and its new director of freedom of speech and academic freedom, and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. While new Schedule 6A provides some helpful clarification, I would be grateful for further assurances from the Minister about the interaction between these various, potentially overlapping bodies.

I share concerns already expressed about the new statutory tort. While the Office for Students will be able to dismiss unmeritorious, vexatious and frivolous claims, there remains a real concern that this provision will lead to increased litigation, including through the small claims court, which universities will inevitably need to defend, incurring expense and time, even if the case is dismissed, as I understand it.

Finally, new Sections 3 and 4 in new Part A1 may be read as posing problems for the provision of premises and facilities that meet the religious and spiritual needs of a range of staff and students—a concern also raised in the written submission of the Free Church Federal Council of England and Wales. I am grateful for the assurances given in yesterday’s briefing that there is no intention to compromise dedicated faith premises. Nevertheless, I would welcome a discussion with the Minister, as requested by the Second Church Estates Commissioner in his letter to Minister for Higher and Further Education, to resolve the matter fully.

Augustine was of course right: “By force we can make no one believe”. But sometimes we need legitimately to use the force of law to restrain actions that adversely affect the rights and dignities of others and to protect the rights we have for free speech and freedom of expression. So, although the Bill needs clarification on a number of matters, it is a measure whose intentions I support. I hope to see how the Bill can be better shaped to serve those intentions.

Secondly, will the Minister explain whether the aim is that all lawful free speech should be permitted in universities? That would be a very simple and clear starting point, which seems to be what Ministers are saying. However, on the very first day after the legislation was proposed, we already had an example of how tricky this is when the Minister said that it would enable Holocaust deniers to speak and was promptly slapped down by No. 10 saying that they should not. The Ministers in the Department for Education are currently pressing universities, for very understandable reasons, to endorse the wide-ranging IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Everything covered in that definition is clearly objectionable, offensive and wrong. I am no lawyer, but it is not clear to me that everything which would be in breach of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is illegal. If it is not illegal, would it therefore be protected under this free speech legislation—in which case, why are Ministers currently pressing universities to take and act on a definition of anti-Semitism that seems potentially in conflict with the legislation they are now trying to pass?

Let me give a second example: the Prevent duty. As a Minister, I was very much aware of the pressure from the Home Office, which was interpreting the Prevent duty and definitely wanted universities not to invite speakers it thought would foment Islamic extremism, but it did not regard what they were going to do as necessarily illegal. The Home Office thought that universities had a responsibility that went beyond simply the protection of an absolute freedom of speech within the law. The Minister needs to explain exactly what he means when he says “lawful free speech”. If, as I suspect, in reality there will be statements that the Minister would expect not to be protected by the new director of free speech, he will understand as soon he has conceded that point why the appointment matters so much. We are passing legislation that will enable a regulator not to protect under free speech free speech which, nevertheless, in its most absolute form, would be allowed. No wonder there is considerable anxiety in this House about that power.

My third point to the Minister arises from my respect for the wide range of roles he carries out in this House. Yesterday, in this very Chamber, I think he was speaking about military personnel and defence issues. May I invite him, as he is clearly seen as an extremely senior member of the Lords ministerial team, to consider also taking responsibility for the online harms Bill when it comes to this House? I look forward to hearing him explain the importance of protecting not just children but adults from “harmful content” and “harmful communication”. When Ministers are pressed on why these provisions are necessary, we are told that it is because they will cause “serious distress”. This is snowflake culture. “Serious distress” is to be used in a separate piece of legislation going through Parliament in this Session. There will also be two sets of secondary legislation: one to implement this Bill, which will be about freedom of speech, and a separate body of secondary legislation to provide for the regulation of online harms. It is perfectly possible for a university to be fined for breaching this legislation because it would not permit something to be said which an online tech giant would be fined for transmitting. This is a ludicrous position to have got into. As both measures are going through Parliament at the moment, I very much hope that this Minister, above all, will ensure some consistency between them.

That is a great statement that seems to suffice.

I am concerned about politicisation of this issue. I suggest that such an important role as chair of the OfS requires the best person for the job, and I suggest that perhaps the person in office at the moment is popular with the Prime Minister. The responsibilities of the chair are immense, especially as the Bill provides for the Orwellian director of freedom of speech, who will have sweeping powers, act as judge, jury and executioner in free speech complaints and potentially monitor overseas funding of universities. The fact that the chair spoke via video link at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest calls into question his judgment in relation to free speech. He said that he did not know that he was appearing on the same platform as a notorious far-right, anti-Semitic, racist journalist—a poor excuse. In his speech, he endorsed the recent victory of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose Government have curbed freedom of expression and countless other human rights. The OfS said that the noble Lord, Lord Wharton, was not speaking in his capacity as chair of the OfS. Frankly, that is not good enough.

Today, I learned that Minister Donelan has written to all vice-chancellors suggesting that the Race Equality Charter is

“potentially … in tension with creating an environment that promotes and protects free speech”.

I am speechless. Can the Minister really defend such a suggestion? I am often asked whether wokeism is rife in our universities and specifically at Oxford. I suggest that it is not.

The Bill appears to require in statute that providers place greater relative importance on always securing free speech. It does not make any mention of the other legal duties that universities, student unions and constituent institutions need to abide by, despite the fact that these duties may potentially conflict with securing free speech in some cases, as the noble Lord suggested. Can the Minister say which duties have primacy?

The new statutory tort is far too open-ended. Safeguards against misuse are needed to ensure that this would be a genuine protection for staff, students and speakers. The Government make much of not involving judges in political questions, but I fear that this Bill could encourage frivolous litigation by provocateurs and draw the courts into very difficult political terrain.

The Bill’s current wording around the scope of the OfS’s free speech complaint scheme appears to allow for complainants to escalate their “free speech complaint” through multiple routes simultaneously. This is likely to lead to immense confusion. A situation of competing judgments could undermine faith in local disciplinary processes and in the procedures of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator and the OfS. At present, the OIA considers student complaints only once the local process has been completed. Does the Minister agree that a similar principle should apply in relation to the proposed framework for free speech-related complaints?

The Bill allows simultaneously for the imposition of sanctions by the OfS for breach of a registration condition and for the issuance of recommendations that higher education institutions, student unions and constituent institutions pay fines. Is it the intention that they could be hit by a number of simultaneous penalties? If so, that could be particularly damaging to student unions.

In relation to overseas reporting, the Bill imposes a general monitoring duty on the OfS that the regulator “must” request information pre-emptively from providers, regardless of whether it has reasonable grounds to suspect a risk to freedom of speech, and seemingly without limitation by the country and potentially exposed persons exemptions, despite the risk-based exemptions set out in subsections. Does the Minister agree that it would be sensible for the OfS to request information only where it has reasonable grounds to suspect a risk to freedom of speech and/or a provider being in breach of a freedom of speech duty owing to overseas funding, and that information in scope for any OfS reporting requests should be restricted to funding from certain countries or individuals?

This Bill will represent the first and only direct way in which the OfS regulates student unions. It spells out how the OfS will take enforcement action against student unions it considers to be, or to have been, in breach of the new free speech duties that will be incumbent upon them. Like colleagues from many other universities, I am concerned that the Bill provides only for a disproportionate punitive approach and fails to offer a gradated scheme of interventions short of a monetary penalty.

Benjamin Franklin said:

“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.”

It is my belief that our universities are already proud bastions of freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

But this new Bill is not only superfluous and riddled with contradictions and ambiguities but is likely to make the situation worse if activists use the complaints system to be instituted in the OfS and even take to the courts. A student life is only three years, and taking to the courts in any subject, as we know, is likely to last long beyond their graduation and do them no good. The complaints system will be in addition to the long-established and—I would say—successful one run by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, which I set up. I cannot see how the director of freedom of speech at the OfS cannot be but conflicted. Moreover, I cannot see the point of duplicating what is already available at the adjudication office. It is possible under the Bill that the OfS might deal with one side of a complaint, from a staff member, and the OIA will receive a complaint from a student about the same incident. There needs to be clear demarcation. The OfS will be able to offer a remedy only for the free speech aspect, while the OIA can offer broader remedial action.

Sadly, I have had significant experience of trying to help Jewish students as a patron of UK Lawyers for Israel. Those students have faced threats to their safety and even refusals of references when trying to assert their rights to free expression. The London colleges, notably LSE, SOAS, KCL and UCL, are often regarded as hostile environments for Jewish students and, right now, Goldsmiths has embarked on a study of anti-Semitism in its college. This new legislation must not undermine the existing protections, flimsy though they are, to stop anti-Jewish racism and Holocaust denial.

The Bill refers to freedom of speech within the law without giving a definition. One can easily imagine a Holocaust denier or a Hamas leader taking legal recourse for being denied a platform. Holocaust denial is not actually illegal, but it has been argued that the Equality Act and Prevent duties will ensure that it is not permitted on campus. Not only has this not been tested, we know that every year extremist Islamist speakers are allowed on campus preaching hate.

Do the universities not also have duties to prevent harassment and foster good relations under their public sector equality duty? Are they doing it? Will freedom of speech trump the other values, not expressed in straightforward law, that universities promote? There is no requirement in the Bill to consider competing freedoms. How does an authority decide between, on the one hand, Holocaust denial as an exercise of freedom of speech, and, on the other, the right of Jewish students not to be harassed and defamed? Will there still be a duty to prevent serious psychological injury? What about the freedom to speak against transgender issues? Will academic freedom triumph over demonstrably false assertions? What about a lecturer who wants to say that the US election was stolen from Trump or that climate change is a lie? The emphasis in the Bill might in future provide a cover for knowingly malicious and mendacious conduct.

Conspiracy theories put forward together with intimidation and vilification may be permissible and tolerable as political speech, but not as academic freedom, which they are not, or free speech, which has to be based on truth, not pseudoscience or neglect of the truth. We have seen the dangers of that in the political sphere also.

How relevant will the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, already mentioned and now adopted by 103 UK and Irish universities, be? The definition is not legally binding, but it addresses modern anti-Semitism, which is dressed up as opposition to the very existence of the only country in the world that offers a safe haven to Jews in a world of rising anti-Semitism. The definition should help universities to understand this. Far from it dampening criticism of Israel and exploration of the Palestine/Israel issues, there is no issue more explored on campus. Just Google and see endless debates and actions relating to boycotts, targeting of Jewish students, violent protests and day in, day out debate about those very issues. Will the Bill prohibit the boycott by institutions and organisations of Israeli academics and universities and, sometimes, the refusal of professors to support Jewish students who want to study Israeli matters or require references? There really is a problem but the Bill may very well make it more complex, more expensive and even worse.