The Government is Crying Crocodile Tears Over Free Speech On Campuses Byline Times – Byline Times

The Governments Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill will limit, rather than protect, academic freedom, argue Liz Fekete and Liam Shrivastava

The Government is attempting to take the moral high ground over free speech on campus. But the real purpose of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, is to limit academic freedom and weed out progressive views on campus particularly, though not exclusively, related to racial justice and the teaching of Britains imperial history.

Sir John Hayes, chair of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, has even compared the fight to ban the wicked ways of the self-appointed thought police and their bigoted views to a contemporary Battle for Britain.

His choice of the word bigoted is pretty rich, given his support for capital punishment and a ban on abortion, and the fact that the bill, it has been argued, would provide legal protection for hate speech.

The bill builds on the Conservatives 2019 manifesto pledge to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in universities. As such, it signals the role the Government expects higher education to play in cementing its cultural revolution from the right one that revolves around greater acceptance for nationalist and nativist ideas, while asserting a virtue in colour-blindness.

Through the proposed legislation, institutional barriers to the expression of racist and bigoted views on campus will, in effect, be removed alongside the introduction of a new statutory tort for breach of the duty to actively promote freedom of speech. Under the bill, powers are to be granted to the university regulator, the Office for Students, to impose sanctions on universities and student unions, including fines in case of breaches.

Two reports by the influential right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, calling for viewpoint diversity in universities, have provided the justification for the bill and the Governments wider war on woke.

The methodology used for these reports has been criticised for bias within question-framing and for drawing simplistic conclusions designed to generate clickbait headlines. The reports posit a number of claims, including that Brexit-supporting students are victimised and that right-wing lecturers have fallen foul of a structural discrimination that blights their career paths.

Eric Kaufmann, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, co-authored its report on Academic Freedom in the UK: Protecting Viewpoint Diversity. In a recent article for the American conservative magazine National Review, he attacked the progressive authoritarianism associated with woke culture, called on Conservatives to use the law to limit the institutional autonomy of elite institutions such as universities, and set out a legislative framework for equalities where political diversity and viewpoint neutrality is afforded the same legal protection as race, gender and other forms of diversity.

Kaufmann also called on all freedom-minded allies on the left to join with those on the right in a struggle to prevent a woke takeover and progressive conformity.

But, when it comes to free speech, the Government is cryingcrocodile tears. Because, unless academic freedom comes dressed-up in in a patriotic, socially-conservative wrapper, it is quitehappy for it to be eroded through censorship, bans and legal threats. There are a number of recent examples.

The Equalities Minister Kemi Badenochs suggested that teachers who use critical race theory, or conceptssuch as white privilege, could face action for breaking the law.

The Universities Minister Michelle Donelan said that the decolonisation of British history which shecompared to Soviet-style censorship has no place in universities.

The Education Secretary Gavin Williamson instructed school leaders on framing discussions around Israel-Palestine, in a letter which critics claim fails to guarantee the right to free speech and association in relation to Palestine.

Last years Department for Educations guidelines warned schools against using resources from organisations that expressed views harmful to British society or a desire to end capitalism. The guidelines were only placed under review following the threat of legal action. As lawyers for the Coalition of Anti-Racist Educators and the Black Educators Alliance argued in a pre-action letter, banning resources from certain political groups is a clear statement of the Secretary of States political preferences and limits free speech. Teachers could be prevented from using material from campaign groups including Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, thereby limiting anti-racist or environmental teaching on crucial social matters.

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The legal status of another Government challenge to university research has yet to be clarified. It has indicated support for a recommendation by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities to remove funding from university research departments that continue to use the research terms such as BAME or BME (referring to black, Asian and ethnic minority people) in data collection. This attempt to control the funding of university research, in line with a particular ideological view of how race should be conceptualised, is hardly in line with academic freedom.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill intends to shift the focus from protected characteristics in law such as age or race to protecting beliefs, which will essentially reverse hard-won civil rights for minority groups. In doing so, the Government will arguably create a harmful culture on campus for racial and sexual minorities.

The phrase crying crocodile tears derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey. There can be no doubt that, in promoting this bill, it is the civil rights of racial and other minorities and of all progressive groups that are under threat of being devoured.

Liz Fekete is director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of Europes Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right, published by Verso.Liam Shrivastava is communications officer at the Institute of Race Relations

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The Government is Crying Crocodile Tears Over Free Speech On Campuses Byline Times - Byline Times