Bridget Phillipson tried to pull the plug on new free speech laws in her first act as Education Secretary just days after the general election, court documents reveal. The Telegraph has more.
High Court documents show Ms. Phillipson received a briefing from Department for Education (DfE) officials in July on how she could go about revoking new laws promoting academic freedom.
She took the university sector by surprise when she announced on July 26th that she was shelving the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, just six days before it was due to come into force.
Ms. Phillipson said at the time that she had chosen to “stop” the flagship Tory legislation before it was set to be implemented on Aug 1st “in order to consider options, including its repeal”.
However, court documents obtained by the Telegraph reveal the Education Secretary had already sought advice weeks before that on how to scrap the main elements of the free speech legislation.
In a briefing addressed to Ms. Phillipson on July 8th, the Monday after Labour swept to power, DfE officials said: “We understand you do not wish to implement the main provisions of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.
“A decision is needed on whether to allow the commencement of the provisions of the Act that are due to come into force on Aug 1st, or to pause.”
The DfE document informed Ms Phillipson that failure to intervene over the Act would mean the legislation automatically going live at the start of August.
It said that “therefore, immediate decisions are needed to revoke these regulations following which you can consider different options relating to repeal of the Act”.
It suggests Ms. Phillipson set the wheels in motion to shelve the flagship Tory legislation just days after the General Election, in her first major act as Education Secretary.
The Telegraph understands it came after she consulted Jewish groups and other interested parties over their concerns about the legislation while still in the Opposition.
Days after she entered office, DfE officials advised Ms. Phillipson on various courses of action for scaling back the free speech legislation.
Documents show the Education Secretary was told she should “consider whether you wish to repeal the Act, in part or in full, or leave it on the statute book without the main provisions commenced”.
The Act, which received royal assent in May 2023, would have introduced a new complaints scheme for academics, students and visiting speakers concerned about free speech violations on campus.
It would have also allowed victims of ‘cancel culture’ at universities to seek compensation through a statutory tort.
Ms Phillipson’s decision to mothball the laws has received widespread backlash from academics, who argue it leaves them vulnerable to being “hounded, censured and silenced” for holding legitimate views some may deem offensive.
Sources close to the discussions told the Telegraph they were furious the Act has been painted as a “Tory hate charter” designed to stoke the culture wars.
The Education Secretary insisted the move followed concerns from Jewish groups that the Act could have created a platform for hate speech on campus.
Critics have branded the suggestion a red herring, insisting that the legislation would only have strengthened protections for free speech “within the law”.
Ms. Phillipson now faces legal action over her decision to pull the plug on the Act, after the Free Speech Union was granted permission to appeal the move.
A judicial review hearing is set to take place in the High Court on Jan 23rd.
Worth reading in full.
You can contribute to the CrowdJustice fundraiser the FSU has set up to help pay the costs of bringing the legal challenge against Ms. Phillipson here.
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I wouldn’t be too blasé saying “Gov inevitably lost..”, but it does increase my confidence in the judges! Also reported on GBN recently.
Call me paranoid but my guess is the judges’ motivation is to expose evil Tory incompetence and corruption rather than getting to the real truth about covid.
“unredacted”….. Highly unlikely.
BREAKING.. the Daily Sceptic has received the first glimpse of Johnson’s papers.. verdict.. clear as mud..
Squeaky bum time for Gove, Cummings and Sunak me-thinks.
I wish I could believe that, but the whole premise of the inquiry is that there was a pandemic, so the focus will be on poor execution of the stupid, evil rubbish they made up pretending it was to do with public health. The basic lie will not be exposed in our lifetime because there are too many vested interests who were all in on it in some way or another. In fact, name a powerful institution in the rich world that wasn’t an enthusiastic supporter of the covid scam.
Yes TOF.. name one indeed.. I certainly can’t..
We were lied to about the efficacy and safety of the jabs just like we were lied to about the severity of the pretend ”pandemic”. The maniacal obsession with getting everybody jabbed, using whatever means necessary ( not just the PsyOp, remember the crazy examples of bribery from all around the world? Remember when they did that for previous years’ flu vaccines? Nope, me neither! ) looks even more sinister now doesn’t it? That’s why I’ve personally done a 180 and now think no world leaders and no people with real influence took the damn things at all. They’d have just had placebos, I’m convinced of it. Because they *knew* the whole thing was a hoax and the death jabs were both unnecessary and highly risky, in a dangerously ‘mass global human experiment using novel technology’ kind of way.
”Drug regulators and public health agencies have saturated the airways with claims that serious harms following COVID-19 vaccination are “rare.”
But there has been very little scrutiny of that claim by the media, and I couldn’t find an instance where international agencies actually quantified what they meant by the term “rare” or provided a scientific source.
The best evidence so far has been a study published in one of vaccinology’s most prestigious journals, where independent researchers reanalyzed the original trial data for the mRNA vaccines.
The authors, Joseph Fraiman et al., found that serious adverse events (SAE)—i.e., adverse events that require hospitalization—were elevated in the vaccine arm by an alarming rate—1 additional SAE for every 556 people vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.
According to a scale used by drug regulators, SAEs occurring at a rate of 1 in 556 are categorized as “uncommon” but are far more common than what the public has been told.
In response to the criticism, Fraiman, an emergency doctor and lead author on the reanalysis said, “To be honest, I’m not that surprised that agencies have not determined the rate of SAEs. Once these agencies approve a drug, there’s no incentive for them to monitor harms.”
He said it’s hypocritical for health agencies to tell people that serious harms of the COVID-19 vaccines are rare when they haven’t even determined the SAE rate themselves.
“It’s very dangerous not to be honest with the public,” said Fraiman, who recently called for the mRNA vaccines to be suspended.
“These noble lies may get people vaccinated in the short term, but you’re creating decades or generations of distrust when it’s revealed that they have been misleading the public.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sorry-but-serious-harms-from-the-vaccine-are-not-rare_5373840.html
We still have the core question: why? To me the elephant in the room is that only the (gullible) people of the collective west were given deadly mRNA, while China’s sphere of influence were given what I assume were basically placebos. This seems incredibly significant to me. If the shots are a bioweapon, which I think they are, and the mRNA tech is owned by China, which Naomi Wolf and others have shown, what does that suggest? To me it suggests that world war 3 is a biological war…
Anyone else having probs with the site being slow or not loading tonight? I posted something over an hour ago and it’s disappeared into the ether. Oh well…just some friendly neighbourhood gremlins perhaps…
From Peter McCullough’s Telegram;
”After high volumes of downloads overnight @TheLancet censored our paper. They don’t want the truth to get out on autopsies in C19 deaths. Why not let people read it and make their own conclusions?”
No wonder the shady buggers censored it. Look at the authors and you’ll see at least six names of doctors/experts who have been outspoken and opposing the narrative from the start. You can still access it here;
https://www.zenodo.org/record/8120771
All a pantomime for those that believe any of this stuff still matters.
The fact is that during the “deadliest virus the world has ever seen” members of the govt, opposition, civil service and expert class were swanning around drinking and screwing while they told the rest of us it was too dangerous to sit in a cold church 20 feet from someone else. If you can’t work out what that means then you need to listen to a little more “London Calling”.
Described brilliantly AMAT..
Never mind, the waste of yet more taxpayers’ money is par for the course of all governments.
Nothing like this happens by accident. I suspect they want to paint the picture of the chaotic response to Covid by our elected government so that they can push the line that we need to hand over our sovereignty to unelected technocrats at the WHO.