Free speech champion move unlikely to help students

Jason S. Reed, The Independent

Over the weekend, it was revealed that the Office for Students, a non-departmental public body of the Department for Education, will soon be empowered to fine student bodies for meddling with free speech. A new “free speech champion” will be appointed by Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to oversee on-campus debate and punish universities, unions and societies, which they believe are guilty of “no-platforming”.

The theme of free speech being under threat in universities has been consistent in government rhetoric since at least the creation of the Office for Students three years ago, but this latest move marks a change in direction.

In 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission published guidelines stating that no-platforming is “often misunderstood and misreported”. It said that, effectively, the government would only consider intervening where there is a clear conflict between two student bodies – say, a political society and a students’ union – in which an external speaker’s invitation has been forcefully blocked.

It would appear that, in the two years since that announcement, the EHRC’s advice has been shunted to one side in favour of the government’s preferences. The new “free speech champion”, due to be announced next week, seems to have an alarming amount of discretion over who gets fined and why.

The problem here is that the government is operating according to a narrative which it would very much like to be true, but has no actual basis in fact, no matter how many sensationalist news stories are published on the subject. As I have written before, Tory students like me are not censored on campuses in this country, however convenient it might be if we were.

The government is desperate for Conservative students’ free speech to be under attack, so it can swoop in and save us. But when asked for examples of no-platforming, the best it can come up with is the Amber Rudd controversy at Oxford, which was not a free speech issue.

As is so often the case, it was a cock-up, not a conspiracy. There was a last-minute panic among organisers that some promotional material might have been misleading. This triggered a hurried cancellation. It was an embarrassing mistake, awkward for everyone involved, but it ought to be clear from the last-minute fumble – and subsequent PR disaster for the society involved – that this was not a malicious, co-ordinated effort to stop a Conservative from speaking to students.

In fact, a 2018 report from the cross-party parliamentary human rights committee found that, apart from a few isolated incidents whose causes can be easily traced, there is no problem to be solved here. “We did not find the wholesale censorship of debate in universities which media coverage has suggested,” it said.

No-platforming is a non-issue. Students, people who speak to students, and indeed everybody else, already have their right to freedom of expression enshrined in the law. What they don’t – and shouldn’t – have is the right to a platform. Students like me should be able to invite whoever we like to speak to us at university – which we are.

Campus debate is organic, as it should be, and that means it is often messy. Different groups disagree about which events should be held, when, where and with whom. But students are not children. We resolve those disputes when they occur and, for the most part, nobody sues anybody else. Sometimes, we even exercise our right to protest.

The state interfering with perfectly functional campus discourse is not a pro-free speech move.

The government is trapped within its own culture war discourse. It sees imaginary woke militants everywhere it looks – from local councils to students’ unions. By insisting that universities are controlled by censorious rabbles, it is hurting, not helping, students – even Tory ones like me.