The Government is in a mess with its free speech bill it has already sabotaged its own legal definition – iNews

Its jarring enough that the Governments new law to protect free speech does nothing to protect free speech. Whats most alarming is that it actively works to undermine it.

No.10s war on woke, to give it the tiresome title used by the right-wing press, follows an established pattern. It takes universal values like free speech and then weaponises them for use by one side of the culture war. The progressive side of the cultural battlefield is silenced and the conservative side is legally safeguarded.

When the National Trust published a report into the links between colonialism and slavery at its properties, for instance, ministers flew into an extraordinary rage. Culture secretary Oliver Dowden demanded heritage bodies refrain from making statements which were not consistent with the governments position on contested historical subjects and issued a not-so-subtle threat to withdraw funding if they failed to comply. This is especially important as we enter a challenging Comprehensive Spending Review, he wrote in a letter, in which all government spending will rightly be scrutinised.

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In universities, the Government takes the opposite approach. It aims to safeguard the rights of academics and visiting speakers against protests from students.

Section A1(10) of the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, introduced in Parliament earlier this month and which will soon be debated by MPs, defines free speech as the freedom to express ideas, beliefs and views without suffering adverse consequences. For academics, those adverse consequences include anything that damages the likelihood of their securing promotion or different jobs.

Its worth keeping that definition in mind when you read the press release the Department for Education put out to promote the bill. As an example of the chilling effect of censorship on universities, it cited an open letter from academics critiquing a research project by Professor Nigel Biggar, in which he said that British people should have pride as well as shame in their history.

Under any normal assessment of liberal values, the open letter would itself be an instance of free speech. It did not call for Biggars research to be halted or censored. In fact, it went out of its way to affirm that he had every right to hold and to express whatever views he chooses.

But far from treating the letter as an example of free speech, the Government treated it as a threat to it because it came from progressive voices. And in doing so, it accidentally sabotaged its own legal definition.

After all, government ministers are highly influential. University authorities want to stay on the right side of them and avoid their bad side. So they are likely to support the promotion of academics the Government likes over those it does not. The Department for Educations criticism of the academics therefore potentially damaged the likelihood of them securing promotion or different jobs.

The press release is a fascinating artefact in the deterioration of governmental competence. It might be the first instance of a government breaching its own legal definition in a document intended to promote the legislation which would enforce it.

The same lopsided power dynamic applies to students who protest against a speaker coming to the university. Under any normal liberal view, both the protesters and the speaker have a right to free speech. But the government legislation protects only the speaker. It provides them with new legal remedies against universities or student unions who cancel their talks and hands the universities regulator the power to issue fines.

The bill contains no specific safeguards at all for the students demonstrating. However, other government legislation works actively to silence them. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which is also going through Parliament, allows police to impose tough new conditions including dispersal, size limitation and volume control on protests whose noise levels may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation.

Its easy to write this off as a torrid little battle in the culture war, with minimal impact in the world outside universities. But there is something profound and ugly lurking within it.

Freedom of speech is one of the most demanding qualities of a liberal society. It asks everyone to sacrifice something so that we can all gain something. We lose the right to silence those we disagree with and gain the right to speak, regardless of whether people like what we have to say. Its a delicate balance, which goes against our hair-trigger emotional instincts, but rewards us with much richer first-order benefits.

By using the rhetoric of free speech to silence progressive young people, the Government is teaching them something altogether different. It is mangling free speech from a universal value into the weapon of the enemy. It is treating it as a mechanism which conservatives use to rig the game in their favour.

If it truly cared about free speech, No.10 would defend the rights of those who disagreed with it as much as those who did not. But that is not the game it is playing. It is cynically misusing basic liberal values in its pursuit of a culture war. And by doing so, it risks turning off a new generation from the principles that maintain a free society.

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The Government is in a mess with its free speech bill it has already sabotaged its own legal definition - iNews