Why free speech matters to the oppressed
Plus – of course – male boxers smashing women in the head and getting rewarded with gold medals
Apologies for having gone quiet recently – I had some pre-booked holiday, which ended up being a lot busier than I had planned. As I was preparing to leave I was commissioned by the Times of London to write about the tragic decision by the new Labour government to abandon the Higher Education (Free Speech) Act just six days before it was supposed to come into force. So the couple of days before travelling, and my first few days away, were taken up with scrambling to arrange interviews and then writing, and I didn’t even get around to posting here to say that I would be off.
And now I’m back. Here is the article (permalink and share token version, which lasts for seven days).
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And here’s a more detailed explanation of the legal framework within which HEFSA would have sat by Akua Reindorf KC, hosted on journalist Julie Bindel’s Substack. As Akua makes clear, the stated reasons for the law being dropped just don’t stack up. “The Act contains almost no new law,” she explains. But the legal framework that is supposed to secure academic freedom and free speech on campus “yields surprisingly little by way of realistically enforceable rights for individuals whose academic freedom or freedom of speech has been infringed.” That is what HEFSA was supposed to remedy – but Labour seems to have listened to claims that it would harm minority rights, in particular those of Jewish academics and students not to be subjected to antisemitism on campus.
“From a legal point of view this is a puzzling objection,” Akua writes. “It pitches the right to freedom of speech against the rights of minorities not to be subjected to hate speech as though there is not already a mature and well developed framework of legal principle which holds these rights in careful balance, to which the new Act would be subject.” I say much the same in my own piece, and suggest that behind that stated objection lies lobbying by university vice-chancellors who feared that the act would complicate their increasingly constrained efforts to stay afloat by making it harder for them to control what their academics say about authoritarian regimes – especially China, and especially in front of the enormous number of students from China – and demanding greater transparency about the sources and conditions of overseas funding.
I used to cover education – in fact it was my first job at The Economist, from 2005 to 2010, which is when I moved to Brazil. I therefore saw up close the trebling of fees from £3,000 to £9,000 and the introduction of the contingent-loan model, and I think it’s fair to say that nobody at the time thought it would end up here. I may be writing another big piece about universities in the next month or two, not specifically about HEFOSA but about how they have lost their way. I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, here’s an excellent and thought-provoking blog I found doing my research for the HEFSA piece – written by a former special advisor to the Conservatives who is now director of research at Policy Exchange, a right-wing think-tank.
I don’t think anyone reading this will find it surprising that sex-realist, or gender-critical, or whatever you want to call us campaigners care a lot about strengthening protections for free speech, especially on campus. We’re far and away the biggest group of victims of campus censoriousness by numbers, both when we speak at or hold events and in employment. It’s always easier for university managers to issue “I support free speech, but” statements about us and then abandon us, as the senior leaders at Caius college did about me in 2022 – when you’re trying to run a business, people who insist on speaking truth just seem like troublemakers.
But universities aren’t (just) businesses; they’re mission-driven organisations. Many, perhaps most, of them seem to me to have forgotten what they’re for. A university that doesn’t treat academic freedom and free speech on campus as close to sacred doesn’t deserve to survive; in fact it’s not a university.
I know this may sound like pie in the sky, but remember that I spent most of the past 20 years in another mission-driven industry that is going through financial hard times and wrenching change for much the same reasons as universities, namely the internet, political polarisation, a bunch of economic pressures (the changing nature of work, inflation, worsening public finances…) and shifting demography. It’s easy to be cynical about journalism and journalists, but many journalists and editors (and all the good ones) see their pre-eminent duty as being to inform their readers without fear or favour. They take the phrase “editorial independence” very seriously.
For universities the near-irresistible temptation is to please students (customers) by inflating grades; to bring in as many foreign students – who pay what the market can bear – as possible, even if that means turning a blind eye to contract cheating and poor language skills; and to offer more and more cheap but popular courses and cut back on expensive, loss-making ones. For media outlets, it’s to publish clickbait and advertorial that is near-impossible to distinguish from their own copy; to pander to their audience’s pre-existing prejudices with increasingly politically and even factually biased coverage; and to increase the number of hot-take opinion pieces while cutting back on expensive investigations and foreign coverage.
In both cases what looks like a solution to difficult financial times in the short term brings the long-term risk of destroying the brand. For media outlets that means going bust, and my sympathy is zero – something else will replace them, and they’ll deserve it. That’s what Schumpeterian creative destruction looks like. Universities, however, think, probably correctly, that the government will ride to their rescue, perhaps with taxpayers’ money, perhaps by raising the cap on fees. The UK higher-education system is marketised, in that there’s ferocious competition for students, but there isn’t any true market discipline since all the universities charge the same and there isn’t any true differentiation. When I think about the sector’s ability to reinvent itself, or even to live up to its mission, I’m quite pessimistic.
The other university-related piece I’m going to point to also ran in the Times of London, and it’s a shocking example of how antisemitism is allowed to run rife on UK campuses despite a strong legal framework that could be used to tackle it forcefully. (Here’s a share token version, which will expire, and here’s the permalink.) No doubt those who claim, wrongly, that HEFSA would make it harder to tackle campus antisemitism think that stories like this one make their point; they actually do the opposite.
Full disclosure, I met the couple profiled in the article at an event a couple of years ago run by the University Jewish Chaplaincy, an organisation that places chaplains, and chaplaincy couples, in UK universities with substantial Jewish student populations. They offer pastoral, spiritual and practical support to students at those universities, and also in the region. The rabbinic head of UJC is my friend and business partner Harvey Belovski. He, his organisation and these chaplains know more than anyone else about what is happening to Jewish students and staff on UK campuses, and on what needs to happen to protect them and to tackle antisemitism more generally.
I first met Harvey shortly after my book came out in 2021. He got in touch to offer me moral support because he had seen that I was being smeared falsely as antisemitic – an act of generosity on his part for which I’m abidingly grateful. For an atheist from a country with a very small Jewish population, it’s been an extremely interesting and rewarding friendship – not the least of the many silver linings to the bizarre experience of becoming a thought criminal in my middle age. As someone who takes freedom of belief every bit as seriously as I take freedom of speech, I’ve learned a lot.
Anyway, the Times piece describes a horrific, sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment directed at the chaplain couple at Leeds University. The behaviour described is clearly unlawful in many respects. Abusive texts and emails are covered by the Malicious Communications Act, and if they meet the threshold (which rape and death threats would), they are criminal offences. If they’re motivated by racial hatred, that’s a “hate crime aggravator”, and the sentence is likely to be higher. (I am not a lawyer, but I talk to lawyers all the time, and I’m sure this is broadly correct and that there are other laws too that cover such behaviour.)
Everything described in the article happened before HEFSA, so obviously HEFSA cannot be to blame. And nothing about how it could be tackled would have been changed by HEFSA either, since that law merely added teeth to existing laws about free speech, and those don’t cover – and never have covered – the sort of abuse, harassment and threats this couple experienced.
In fact, HEFSA might even have helped them. The couple were employed by UJC but treated by Leeds University as “honorary staff members” and provided with university email addresses and library, internet and printer access. Those privileges were withdrawn after the abuse started. The reason they were given was unspecified “security concerns”, and although they asked repeatedly for more details, and for the decision to be reversed, they got nowhere. That’s the sort of failure to stand up for speech rights in the face of intimidation on campus that HEFSA was supposed to penalise.
Repeating that I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know whether “honorary staff members” would have been covered by HEFSA. Nor do I know any more details about the case than are in the Times. The point still stands: the new law would have been on the side of Jewish students, academics and visiting speakers whose speech rights are being curtailed as a result of antisemitic harassment and threats. As I said in my piece in the Times, it would have “protected trenchant yet legal criticism of Israel but it would also have protected Israel’s staunchest defenders. If HEFSA had been in force in 2018, when City, University of London cancelled a talk by the Israeli ambassador because of death threats, the OfS could have penalised the university for failing to beef up security to ensure the talk went ahead.”
The big story while I was away, of course, was the two male boxers who won Olympic gold medals in women’s competitions. If you somehow managed to miss it, here is a briefing from Sex Matters published soon after the scandal broke.
This has perhaps been the single most depressing story to emerge from the sex and gender wars yet. Every time I think “surely people will get it now”, I turn out to be wrong. I thought people would understand that you can’t have men identifying into women’s prisons, because that would inevitably lead to rapists locked up with vulnerable women. I thought they’d understand you can’t have male medical staff identifying as women because that would mean female patients who have requested female health care being subjected to intimate medical exams by men without their consent. I thought that surely – surely! – they would understand that whatever about fairness in sport, you really can’t have people with male strength punching women in the head and getting medals for it with people literally all over the world seeing exactly what is happening, indeed watching for entertainment… but no.
I’ll return to this subject in my next newsletter, because this one is already long enough. And the scandal of male athletes being permitted to compete as women is not going away: there’s a 50-year-old man, Valentina Petrillo, competing in the Olympics as a woman (Times article permalink and share token link). His age on its own shows just how unfair male inclusion in female sports is – in the last Paralympics, the oldest woman in any of the events Petrillo will be competing in this time round was just 33.
In the meantime, here’s a piece I was commissioned to write for the Telegraph about the extraordinary abuse of sports journalist Laura Woods, who simply retweeted a piece by the paper’s chief sports writer, Oliver Brown, about the boxing scandal, with a few approving words. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s a quote:
For many of those who shape our society, the desires of a tiny minority of men outweigh the rights of women, which depend on us being able to exclude all men from our spaces, whatever their paperwork and however they identify. Over the past decade the trans lobby has confused and bullied many politicians, journalists and business leaders into treating trans-identifying men as the world’s most vulnerable minority.
I also recommend this striking analysis from a Substack called “The Female Category”. As the author points out, Petrillo runs faster than all women in his age category – yes, all of them, including the able-bodied ones. He also runs about as fast as a woman 15 years younger than him who has a similar disability (he’s partially sighted). Of all the criteria used to create sports categories – age, weight, disability status – the single most important is sex. So isn’t it madness that the female category is the only one that the authorities fail to protect?
And finally, the maddest outworking of the boxing scandal is surely that my friends at Fair Play For Women were contacted by the Taiwanese embassy in London and asked to delete tweets and commentary claiming that Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting is male. Needless to say, they won’t. FPFW’s blog is here, with all the details, including the full correspondence. And here’s an article in the Telegraph quoting both Nic and Dr Emma Hilton, Sex Matters trustee, developmental biologist and expert on male sporting advantage. As Emma says:
“If Lin is actually female, it would have been very straightforward to successfully challenge the IBA’s decision through the Court of Arbitration for Sport last year. We can only speculate about the reason this option was not taken up.”
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