The Education Secretary shelved the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in part because British universities wanted to protect their commercial operations in authoritarian states such as China. The Telegraph has more.
Earlier this month, Bridget Phillipson halted the introduction of a law aimed at forcing universities to actively promote free speech on campus, just days before they were due to come into force.
She announced that she was shelving the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 – a flagship Tory policy – and she said she will now consider repealing it.
The Department for Education (DfE) said the Bill would have a “negative” impact on vulnerable groups and that it opened universities up to costly legal challenges from academics if they fell foul of the new law.
But legal documents, seen by the Telegraph, reveal that vice-chancellors’ fears that the law would cause difficulties for their relationships with authoritarian states were also considered.
Responding to a legal challenge from the Free Speech Union (FSU), government lawyers noted that “concerns” had been raised with them about the “consequences for delivering English [higher education] in foreign countries which have restrictions on free speech”.
Several British universities operate overseas campuses as a way to attract more international students, as well as boost opportunities for lucrative research partnerships.
According to the latest figures, 18 universities have 38 campuses in 18 countries, with China and Malaysia the most popular destinations, followed by Dubai and Singapore.
The Russell Group, which represents the country’s top universities, has previously warned of the difficulties institutions would face if they had to implement the new free speech law in their campuses overseas.
The legal document also refers to concerns about the “costs of overseas transparency requirements”, which would have required universities to declare donations from foreign countries, over a certain amount.
While experts believe this points to their fear that the transparency requirement may put off prospective donors, Universities UK, the vice-chancellor membership group, said this refers to the cost of filling in forms.
A spokesman for Universities U.K. said that its members are “strongly committed to free speech and to academic freedom and they are bound by law to uphold both”, but said that the free speech law would have made working with other countries more difficult.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: More than 500 academics, including Sir Niall Fergusson, have written to Bridget Phillipson asking her to implement the Freedom of Speech Act in full. The Mail has more.
Stop Press 2: The Free Speech Union has mounted a legal challenge against the Government, convinced that Bridget Phillipson’s decision to suspend the Act was unlawful. You can contribute to the legal costs of that judicial review here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Amused to see that Paul Staines is apparently in favour of freedom of speech, given the comments system used on Order-Order that’s so pathological that it censors such vile unacceptable hate language as “dirty”, “damn”, and the name “Paul Staines”.
I was blocked there long ago.
Off topic but does anyone have the graphic or stats about how only 833 under 50s have “died solely of covid”? It was posted BTL recently but I can’t find it.
Hope this is helpful – https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/only-6183-people-died-solely-of-covid?r=2mnu5&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Desperately needed in Sturgeon’s Dark Fiefdom!
No doubt Blair is smugly content with the the results of his “devolution” designed by Globalists to wreck the UK – it seems to have worked a treat !
Looking forward to the event tonight!
Best wishes to all those involved. Anything / body seeking to protect freedom of speech deserves and needs support.
“Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.”
Yay! Free Speech!
Breaking one of my rules but…
Hey EF,
Fuck Off.
Careful, I can smell that ban coming for you!
Thanks, but he is an utter waste of space.
Your free speech is not violated by the site having rules
Yes. This comment led me to write the following response to another of your posts.
Reply to Hugh
No, she was a censor who believed everyone except her had no brain at all.
Your ‘both ways’ doesn’t exist, she was a totalitarian.
Reply to Moist Von Lipwig
From the person who said that this site having rules doesn’t curtail freedom of speech?
I hadn’t heard that she was in favour of banning opinions. Merely upholding parts of the Obscene Publications act that she considered important. Why shouldn’t people object to swearing on tv before the watershed (for example)?
I still say campaigning for standards of basic decency is not necessarily the same as being anti-free speech. She was campaigning about analogue t.v. and radio broadcasts which are easily accessible to the general population, rather than something, for example, available via mail order. For me, that makes all the difference. Absolutely there should be different standards for a private members club than for things done in public, i.e. a tv broadcast which may be watched by half the country.
She was campaigning for censorship.
She gave so much publicity to what she campaigned against, Alice Cooper sent her flowers for the career boost he received from her.
https://edernet.org/2022/03/15/mary-whitehouses-pursuit-to-stop-alice-coopers-song-schools-out-from-airing-on-british-media/
“During the twentieth century, a moral activist and former teacher named Mary Whitehouse waged a battle against the BBC. According to Whitehouse and her group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, the network continued to show content that damaged the public.
She expressed her displeasure with Doctor Who for teaching youngsters how to make bombs. She voiced her displeasure with comedy characters that used the phrase “bloody.” She expressed her dissatisfaction with BBC coverage of the liberation of concentration camps (“It was destined to shock and offend,” she stated, describing the coverage as “extremely off-putting”).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/26/ban-this-filth-ben-thompson-review
“Should the BBC’s function be to improve public morals? Or should freedom of expression, even if that involves broadcasting a once-great rock’n’roll guitarist’s wretched foray into the innuendo-laden novelty single genre, always be paramount? And was the “My Ding-a-ling” imbroglio really the right forum for these issues, as old as Plato and still vexed, to be debated?
The then-director general, Charles Curran, thought not. “‘My Ding-a-ling’,” Curran had written to Whitehouse on 21 November 1972, “begins with such a clear account of the contraption in question including bells, that although the possibility of a double entendre was recognised, we decided that it could be broadcast … We did not think it would disturb or emotionally agitate its listeners and we believe that the innuendo is, at worst, on the level of seaside postcards or music hall humour.” That phrase, “contraption in question including bells”, is surely worth the licence fee alone.”
“The exchange was typical of the collection of letters that Ben Thompson has so astutely assembled and comments on so drolly in this book. Here, the bottomless capacity for affront of morally upright, often evangelically Christian, middle England clashes repeatedly with the patrician disdain of those men (and they were overwhelmingly men) who ran the culture industries, be they telly, theatre, cinema, magazines or pornography. Thompson ingeniously suggests that Whitehouse shared much with her punk contemporaries – both were socially excluded, both rebelled against establishment values they detested. Mary as a punk rocker? Not quite. But both she and Johnny Rotten knew how to needle grandees and relished the experience.
But here’s the twist. At the end of his Ding-a-ling letter to Whitehouse, Curran wonders “whether the record would have remained in a high position in the charts for such a long time without the publicity attendant upon the publication of your comments.” Intriguing point. Perhaps Whitehouse, far from cleaning up society, was instrumental in bringing about the nightmarish scenario she prophesied.
Certainly her complaints could have unintended consequences. On 21 August 1972, Whitehouse wrote to the BBC’s head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, complaining about Top of the Pops giving “gratuitous publicity” to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”. “Because of this millions of young people are now imbibing a philosophy of violence and anarchy … It is our view that if there is increasing violence in the schools during the coming term, the BBC will not be able to evade their share of the blame.” Cooper sent Whitehouse flowers in gratitude for the publicity her campaigning brought him.”
“Mary Whitehouse didn’t only fight against the BBC. During the 1980s, unsurprisingly, she was affronted by and complained about Channel 4’s output. “I am glad to see the home secretary’s unexceptional reply to your unnecessary letter,” wrote Jeremy Isaacs, C4’s chief executive, in 1984, responding to some dyspeptic jeremiad. She also took on the pornography industry: “Thank you for your letter concerning our bookstall at Crewe Station,” wrote John M Menzies on 28 May 1984, after Whitehouse complained about finding a pile of Knave magazines at a level where “almost any child could see and pick it up”. “Our policy … is not to sell these magazines to children.”
She tried to stiffen the established church in what she thought should be its homophobic resolve: “Will you state publicly and quite specifically,” she wrote to the Bishop of Southwark on 22 June 1979, “whether you are endorsing the practices of mutual masturbation common among some homosexuals, and whether you expect the church to do the same and whether you see such practices as the will of God.” “Yes, I jolly well am and jolly well do,” replied the bishop. I’m kidding. If only he had.
She demanded politicians revise obscenity laws. That prompted a reply from David Mellor, home office minister in 1983, arguing that her proposal that depictions of explicit acts of human urination or excretion be banned would outlaw “a picture of a baby urinating in a nappy advertisement; or a photograph of the mannequin in Brussels which serves as a fountain”. Similarly, Mellor argued, the NVALA’s proposal to ban depictions of mutilation, flagellation or torture would ban King Lear, certain religious paintings, and the films of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Nicholas Nickleby.
She campaigned against blasphemy and homosexuality, especially when, as in James Kirkup‘s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name”, they came together. Whitehouse privately prosecuted Gay News’s editor, Denis Lemon, in 1977 for publishing Kirkup’s necrophilic account of sexual assault on Christ’s crucified body. After Lemon’s conviction for blasphemous libel, she received a letter from the clerk of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church Synod, informing her of its unanimous motion thanking Whitehouse “for your unflinching stand against Sodomites in a recent court case”.
For Whitehouse, taking offence and imputing mucky motives to those who didn’t share her worldview weren’t so much tactics as irrepressible ways of being. In 1990, she was sued for libel by Dennis Potter’s mother. During an interview with Dr Anthony Clare on his Radio 4 series In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, Whitehouse had claimed that Margaret Potter had “committed adultery with a strange man and that the shock of witnessing this had caused her son to be afflicted” with the skin disease psoriasis. Whitehouse thereby confused a storyline from Potter’s The Singing Detective with the playwright’s life. No doubt her misdiagnosis and jejune psychosexual analysis was prompted by her loathing for Potter’s TV drama, which she believed had “made voyeurs of us all”. Similarly, perhaps, TV made Whitehouse a voyeur, though sometimes not a discerning one.”
Yes. I heard about the “Alice” Cooper business (vile toerag, even if he was on Top Gear), and some of the other stuff. She’s entitled to her opinions though at the end of the day. And if people don’t defend their culture, it will not survive – a point not lost on the Russians.
Besides, are some of the liberal woke fascists today very different.? And as for you satanists…
Remember that in the 1960’s the BBC was engaged in a biased campaign of subterfuge which helped result in changes which have since led to the deaths of millions of children. The BBC, who push minority views when it suits them, and other times refuse to give voice to minority views they consider beyond the pale, all the while posing as an impartial public service broadcaster. Of course there was going to be pushback.
Alice Cooper is a Christian.
This one elementary fact blows your flatulent balderdash completely out of the water.
Mary Whitehouse is the kindred spirit of today’s woke Maoists.
As for Satanists, I’m not one so your accusation is entirely the work of your imagination.
Mary Whitehouse didn’t defend ‘her culture’, she demanded witless, mindless, brainless conformity, something Russia has had centuries of, with the result being centuries of absolute monarchy, three quarter of a century of Communism, a religion that worships the omnipotent state, followed by the socialist dictatorship of a former Communist secret police officer who hasn’t essentially changed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed.
Russian culture has long worshipped death, the evidence speaks for itself.
Your anti-culture is the hatred of man’s mind.
Alice Cooper is in no way vile, he’s essentially an actor, comparable to Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, his shows are theatre, fantasy.
By contrast, Mary Whitehouse, in her quest to obliterate the individual human mind, was the villain from ‘Inherit the Wind’ in drag.
Her spiritual father was William Jennings Bryan and her effect was to give publicity to what she most hated, thereby ensuring it became far more popular than it would have been without her truly cretinous intervention, such was her mindlessness that she couldn’t comprehend that people didn’t take to have Nanny tell them she knows best.
We’ve just had two years of Mary Whitehouse in full control in Scotland.