Britain has a problem with free speech. The exploration of difficult ideas is being discouraged in the very places we would expect to see it flourish: our universities and the traditionally progressive spheres of the arts and publishing – areas that exist to expand knowledge and encourage debate, not shut it down. Even science is not immune. Research is suppressed if its conclusions are uncomfortable, books are sanitised or not published at all and academics are bullied out of their institutions. A creeping censorship has captured Britain’s liberal establishment. But the new government doesn’t seem to recognise there’s a problem.
One of Labour’s earliest decisions in power was to put on hold a law that would have forced universities to promote and defend free speech on campus and deal with disputes quickly. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 received royal assent in May last year, but was due to come into force in August 2024. Defending the government’s move to stall its implementation, the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, argued that the duties required of the act were “disproportionate, burdensome and damaging to the welfare of students while not addressing hate speech on campuses”. Higher education sources told me that a number of university vice-chancellors had lobbied for a pause in the act’s implementation in part because they were concerned about putting off overseas students (and the money they bring).
More than 600 scholars have signed an open letter to Phillipson, urging her to reconsider and pointing out that, “Hundreds of academics and students have been hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked over the last 20 years for the expression of legal opinions.” The signatories – who number seven British Nobel laureates, as well as Kathleen Stock (who resigned from Sussex University in 2021, after a campaign to get her sacked over her stance on sex-based rights and gender identity), Richard Dawkins, Robert Tombs and Niall Ferguson – warned that failing to strengthen free-speech obligations on campus would continue to allow staff and students to be penalised for their legitimate, legal views.
Some believe the crisis has long been overstated, and that the veneration of freedom of expression leads to the normalisation of harmful hate speech. “A moral right to express unpopular opinions,” Nesrine Malik writes in her 2019 book We Need New Stories, “is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence.” Opponents of the 2023 act – including many in academia – argue that it lacks proper guidance: a Russell Group spokesperson called Labour’s decision to pause the legislation “a sensible and proportionate step”. Others feel the very issue diverts attention from bigger problems facing the sector. The open letter, however, claimed that “nothing could be more false”. All is not well in the world of British higher education.
Edward Skidelsky, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Exeter, launched the Committee for Academic Freedom in February 2024. He was alerted to a new censoriousness in 2019, when a student told him about an incident: “He had been on his own in his room talking on the phone to a friend, in the course of which he had said… ‘Veganism is wrong’, ‘Gender fluidity is stupid’, and a few others. His next-door neighbour had overheard all this through the wall and reported him to the university authorities.” The student, Robert Ivinson, was found guilty of harassment and put on a “behavioural contract”, which put him at risk of expulsion.
“Universities, having been neutral forums, started to conceive of themselves as activist institutions that were there to push a particular version of social justice,” said Skidelsky, who helped organised the letter to Phillipson. “They started to see themselves as occupying one side of this ideological division rather than being above it.” This not only damages the sector’s reputation, as universities are no longer seen as independent, but also the quality of debate within institutions, he said.
Academics tell me there are several dangerous areas in higher education. Race and empire constitute one: in 2021, when Skidelsky wanted to make a change to a module he taught, he was told to specify how the change “broadened epistemological and ontological horizons by moving away from a white, Eurocentric curriculum”. Also cited are gender (it is not acceptable to say biological sex is immutable), net zero (one cannot question the policies and trade-offs required to achieve it), the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Certain viewpoints are “right”, and others not even up for discussion.
Since the 7 October attacks, numerous campus events to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas – including at Durham University, King’s College London and Birmingham University – have been cancelled or postponed following complaints or intimidation. In January 2024 Jo Phoenix, a professor of criminology, won a case for constructive dismissal against the Open University after it was found she had been subjected to a “targeted campaign of harassment” because she held gender-critical beliefs. In March a petition for the dismissal of Martin Speake, a saxophonist and jazz teacher, circulated at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, because of a private email he sent that allegedly “perpetuated harmful and defamatory narratives about black musicians in the jazz industry”. That same month, UCL’s Michelle Shipworth was suspended from teaching a module after a complaint from a Chinese student about a case study that mentioned the scale of slavery in China. The Telegraph reported that Shipworth was told the action was necessary because “in order to be commercially viable” the university’s courses “need to retain a good reputation among future Chinese applicants”.
Robert Ivinson, the student accused of harassment due to a conversation overheard through a wall, is not an isolated case – even at Exeter. Jack Barwell graduated under a cloud this July, under investigation by the Student Cases Team for alledgedly bullying and causing harm due to an Instagram comment about another student whom Barwell had not named.
Barwell imagined that at university he would leave behind playground squabbles. “But the adults are encouraging a culture where you can report anybody, and they then go through a long investigation process,” he told me. He describes himself as a “moderate conservative” and is an active campaigner for the Tory party. When he ran for president of the Exeter Debating Society, “somebody started up a campaign called ‘Stop the fascist’”. He was viewed that way, he said, because he was standing up for free speech.
“I was told by the university that in order to prove that I shouldn’t be disciplined,” he says, “I had to prove I didn’t cause harm – even if I didn’t intend to – to the student.” Exeter’s regulations state that disciplinary offences include “actions which cause actual or potential distress or harm to others irrespective of whether or not distress or harm was intended”. A spokesperson for the university would not comment on individual cases, but said, “If concerns or complaints are raised by members of our community, we are duty-bound to investigate them fully.” They added that “the university is committed to ensuring freedom of speech and academic freedom within the boundaries of the law”.
In a 2022 survey of UK university students by the Policy Institute at King’s College London, although 80 per cent of students said they were free to express their views at their university, 34 per cent of students said free speech was threatened in their university – up from 23 per cent in 2019. Half of students thought “the climate at their university” prevented some people from saying things they believed, as others might find them offensive.
As with so much of British cultural life, wars over language, speech and behaviour are US imports. But many would see the ideas underlying this new condemnatory mood as having originated in France in the 1960s and 1970s, and with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Everything, they said, could be deconstructed, made relative or reduced to the level of discourse; objective truth was impossible to establish. As these ideas permeated US campuses, new areas of study emerged, each striving to reveal and challenge power structures and foster social justice. But as these liberating, enquiring disciplines hardened into the orthodoxies of identity politics, they helped create a divisive, illiberal culture.
Ian Pace, professor of music at City St George’s, University of London, and founder of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom, says he is “of the left”, but has become increasingly “dismayed” by this direction of travel: “Ideas of relatively objective truth and rational argument,” he said, have been abandoned, “in favour of a highly reductionist, identity-based approach.”
“What is dismaying is when some try to dismiss academic freedom as a ‘right-wing culture wars’ issue,” Pace said. “This is at odds with a long tradition of the left being those who have campaigned most arduously on the subject against right-wing censors.” For free speech to become seen as a “right-wing” issue would be a disaster, agreed Skidelsky – “but it’s also a disaster for the left, because it makes them appear censorious and intolerant”.
That freedom of speech is seen as a culture-wars issue is, in part, a failure of left-leaning politicians and media, who are reluctant to discuss thorny issues because of fear of causing offence. “The only papers that will report this sort of thing are the Telegraph and the Mail,” Skidelsky said. “Of course, they do play it up for their own purposes. But there is a real problem there. One shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it just because you think you might give comfort to the wrong side.”
Publishing and the arts are traditionally the vanguard of challenging ideas, but they are increasingly reluctant to give a platform to voices deemed controversial. The historian Nigel Biggar has claimed Bloomsbury cancelled his book on colonialism and paid out the contract after being told by a senior staff member that, “We consider that public feeling on the subject does not currently support the publication of the book and will reassess that next year.” Kate Clanchy and the publisher Picador “parted company” after a row in which her Orwell Prize-winning book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me was accused of containing racial tropes. And Penguin faced criticism after releasing more “palatable” versions of classics by Roald Dahl in 2023, removing words such as “fat”, “mad” and “ugly”, and adding in gender-neutral terms.
While the giants of publishing grow more fearful, smaller independents have stepped in. “It’s just not our job as an industry to prejudge what the right answer to anything is, but especially [regarding] complex, sometimes controversial topics,” Mark Richards, co-founder of Swift Press, told me. “It’s our job to enable the debate to happen, rather than to shut it down. I think on too many topics, publishing has decided that one side of the argument is the right answer, and it publishes endless books into that space. And then the other side of the argument is wrong.”
Richards launched Swift with Diana Broccardo in June 2020, and it has since come to be seen as a stalwart of free speech in the industry. Two of Swift’s early books were Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage – which explored the growing number of teenage girls identifying as transgender – and Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. Swift acquired and reissued Clanchy’s book after the split with Picador. (Swift is the publisher of my book about the downfall of the Tavistock’s gender service for children; 22 other publishing houses turned it down.) “Publishing has an important role to play in liberal democracies,” Richards said. “You’ve got to enable disagreement, especially when rights will conflict or when these are genuinely difficult conversations.”
The crisis in the arts is similarly insidious. In 2022 the ceramic artist Claudia Clare had a lecture about her work cancelled by the Craft Potters Association and Central Saint Martins because of her gender-critical views (which were not the subject of the lecture). In 2023 the playwright David Greig had to apologise to staff at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, where he was artistic director, for being “careless and harmful” after “liking” two tweets that a writer alleged were transphobic.
The British choreographer Rosie Kay told me she has witnessed a “slow sweep” of censoriousness over the past 25 years, during which the arts has ceased to be a place where ideas are explored and boundaries are pushed. In 2023 she co-founded Freedom in the Arts with Denise Fahmy, who won an employment tribunal against Arts Council England on the grounds that she had been harassed due to holding gender-critical beliefs. Kay described being “cancelled” at her own dinner table after expressing her belief that sex is immutable to several young dancers due to appear in a production of Romeo and Juliet. They later submitted a formal grievance against her.
“Before we set up Freedom in the Arts, I did a scoping exercise,” Kay said. “I spoke to about 30 artists across the UK nations. Every story was unique. And every story was really harrowing. It started with an artist having a sense of being pushed into either signing things or making statements or being asked for their work to be changed. Some had the sense [of], ‘This goes against my morals and my freedom of conscience.’” As soon as they started to question or push back, “the response was often hysterical”, said Kay, with “people taking huge offence over factual statements”. After that would come “deplatforming, ghosting and the silent cancelling”. Invitations to speak would dry up; artists’ work would be removed from galleries, or not commissioned.
Censorship has also made its way into disciplines most associated with the pursuit of objective truth: science and medicine. “When ideological concerns leach into medicine, it can have a negative impact on patient care and distort the evidence base for that care,” Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at University College London, told me. “The medical landscape has been transformed by the inclusion of ‘experts by experience’ [individuals who have a certain medical condition or who hold a particular identity] in the past ten years.” Some of these changes were necessary, she acknowledged: “Doctors who don’t listen to their patients are bad doctors.” But while patients “are undoubtedly the experts when it comes to how their condition impacts them and what it’s like to live with it, they may not be the expert when it comes to knowing the best way to treat it”.
This conflict has played out in several hotly disputed areas of healthcare. The Spectrum 10K research study, led by Simon Baron-Cohen, which aimed to “better understand autistic people’s mental and physical health” was paused because of concerns raised by the autistic community. Last month, Louis Appleby, the UK’s leading expert on suicide prevention, revealed that a research paper written by the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health, of which he is the director, had been rejected by a leading academic journal on the grounds that its focus – homicide and mental illness – was “not a suitable subject for academic study”. It was, apparently, “too stigmatising”. “Well meant, I accept,” Appleby posted on social media, “But which is worse for stigma? Denial or data?”
And in 2021 NICE guidelines on how best to help people with ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, were changed, removing the recommendations that those with the condition should try to increase their levels of exercise, or undertake cognitive behavioural therapy. Those with ME argued that the measures had not accepted that theirs was a physical illness. But a number of doctors claimed “that patients may be denied helpful treatments and therefore risk persistent ill health and disability” as a result of the change. Baxendale said a “combination of experts by experience and a consumer model of healthcare can create a dangerous dynamic where people demand treatments from their doctors as a right, regardless of the evidence base for it”.
Having studied the brain for 30 years, Baxendale was surprised by claims that the effects of drugs used to block puberty in adolescents experiencing gender-related distress were reversible. She found almost no evidence behind them. So she wrote a paper on the dearth of research into these drugs’ impact on cognitive development. Several medical journals rejected it. “One person was upset and said, ‘We can’t say this because it’s going to stigmatise an already stigmatised group.’ They… didn’t like the conclusion.” If we are to help those most vulnerable and protect others, the starting point must be accurate data. “Refusing to publish conclusions that don’t fit a particular narrative is a really effective way of controlling information, which is the opposite of what science should be,” Baxendale said.
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Explaining why this shift towards intolerance and excess safety has occurred is complex – but the burgeoning equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) industry has played a crucial role.
HR departments have become all-powerful, and the number and scope of roles connected with diversity and inclusion have grown rapidly. According to data published by LinkedIn, the UK employs almost twice as many diversity and inclusion employees (per 10,000 workers) as any other country. Between 2015 and 2020, globally the number of people with a “head of diversity” title more than doubled. But, as an independent government report on inclusion at work concluded in March 2024, “In recent years some well-meant practice has been shown to be counterproductive and, in some cases, unlawful.”
“For me, one of the big things that changed publishing culture was the introduction of diversity and inclusion training,” Diana Broccardo of Swift Press said. “You instantly get people afraid to talk. Once you get down a road where everyone’s thinking the same, it’s quite difficult… to think any different.” She recalled sitting in a diversity and inclusion training session in which the trainer had assumed that because the majority of the management team were white, they therefore all had similar backgrounds and ideas. “This was simply wrong,” Broccardo said. “We had very different backgrounds, socio-economic statuses and outlooks. In my experience, the training encouraged people to be wary of differences rather than celebrating diversity.”
Bosses often feel powerless to push back against an EDI agenda. “They’re very nervous because they feel that they don’t understand the topics,” Sarah Rutherford, a researcher and consultant on organisational culture and gender, told me. “And because it has been framed in terms of rights, who wants to be opposed to that? No one.” Younger generations, Rutherford argued, are more aware of identity politics than those above them, and more “fragile” about it. Older generations “feel nervous and want to attract the talent, and therefore they’ve given in an awful lot more than they would have done”. Senior leaders “really don’t understand this stuff. But they don’t want to be seen to be dinosaurs.”
Higher education, too, increasingly commodified, is not immune to these pressures. University managers need happy “customers”. “You want to bring in as many students as possible; it’s assumed that students are all woke – which actually is not true… So they’re nervous about anything that might deter students from applying to their institution.”
EDI often leads to empty virtue-signalling. Regardless of their industry, managers are increasingly being told that “silence is violence”. Public statements must be made on the pressing issues of the day. This leads to absurd outcomes, such as the car manufacturer BMW changing its logo to rainbow colours for Pride month on social media, but not on its accounts in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is illegal.
Attacks on EDI and “woke madness” appear daily in the right-wing press. But some on the left fear that unless progressives push back against some of the more malign features of this industry, its positive elements will be lost along with the bad. Diverse, inclusive workforces can bring huge benefits to both businesses and workers, reducing groupthink and generating creative solutions. “It’s stifling to work in a place where you can’t speak up,” says Rutherford. “That is completely the opposite of what diversity is meant to be about.”
Underpinning all of this is a distrust of authority and expertise: in government, medicine and elsewhere. Doctors, Sallie Baxendale said, don’t know everything. But “the pendulum may have swung too far, whereby their expertise isn’t being recognised. I think there has been a disintegration of respect for those in authority in general. Witnessing those at the very top of government breaking the rules during the Covid-19 lockdowns introduced a whole new chapter in loss of respect for authority.”
Edward Skidelsky agreed. We have become so cynical, he said, that underlying motives are always supposed. “We think that whenever someone defends the right to say X, they must be in support of X.” His Committee for Academic Freedom has defended many people with whom he disagreed. “But we take the classical liberal view: I will defend your right to say this; it doesn’t mean I agree with that.”
From John Milton’s Areopagitica to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, freedom of expression is embedded in Britain’s politics and culture. At the same time, its capacity to cause harm is understood: illegal hate speech and incitements to violence are rightly condemned, and were punished after the summer’s riots. This is, on the whole, a liberal, tolerant country. Support for racial equality, reproductive rights and gay marriage are at the highest they have ever been. There is an opportunity for Labour and those who hold progressive views to intervene to protect free speech and halt the spread of intolerance. According to Ian Pace, the Department for Education has shown a willingness to engage with academic-freedom groups as it considers what to do with the Higher Education Act. But others fear that the rot is deep.
As Skidelsky told me, free speech “should be seen as a basic civilisational value that we all share”. It is also a basic civilisational value to treat people with respect, regardless of their race, religion, sex or identity. But the two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to be respectful, even compassionate, and to allow views we disagree with to be aired.
In the pursuit of offence-less discourse, we are enabling a creeping censorship that will deny the next generation of academics, politicians, scientists, artists – citizens – the power of free thinking. We do young people, our future leaders, a disservice by infantilising them, by believing they need protecting from difficult ideas and truths. Do we want Britain to be led by those who cannot think openly and critically, who cannot tolerate different views, and who wish to shut down, or even punish, those who disagree with them?
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war