Labour’s war on free speech is just getting started

So it begins. The UK’s new Labour government has been in power for less than a month, and it is already training its guns on freedom of speech.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson announced yesterday in a written statement to parliament that the government will block the commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which was due to come into force next week. Under the Free Speech Act, which was passed last year with cross-party support, universities and students’ unions could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech – and students, speakers and academics could seek redress if their free-speech rights were found to be infringed.

Make no mistake, free speech is in crisis in British universities. Cancel culture runs amok. Expressing unwoke views can lead to extreme harassment and even excommunication from campus. The Free Speech Act is a fairly modest attempt to remind university chiefs of their duty to ensure free debate and free inquiry.

Yet Phillipson, writing in the bloodless language of the arch bureaucrat, fears that the Free Speech Act would be ‘burdensome’ on education providers and on the Office for Students, the quango tasked with enforcing it. Certainly, the rough and tumble of free speech may well be ‘burdensome’ to university managers and administrators, but it remains the lifeblood of academic and student life. A university without free speech is a university in name only – a centre for indoctrination, rather than education.

Labour’s keenness to shelve the act, so soon into its term, confirms what we already knew – that this is a party that is hostile to free speech and enthusiastic about woke censorship. It’s a party that sees the cruel harassment of academics like Kathleen Stock – who was hounded out of the University of Sussex for the thoughtcrime of believing in biological sex – and wants to join in on the side of the harassers.

If Labour is prepared to block the Free Speech Act in its first month in office, just imagine what damage it can do to free speech over the course of the next parliament. Last week’s King’s Speech contained plans for a ‘trans inclusive’ conversion-therapy ban, which could criminalise parents and therapists who question a child’s trans identity. Last year, Labour floated plans to turn ‘misgendering’ into a hate crime. There are also fears that ‘Islamophobia’ could be outlawed, which would criminalise not only outright bigotry against Muslims, but also criticism of Islam and Islamism – it would be an Islamic blasphemy law, in other words.

With Labour in power, backed by a huge parliamentary majority, our freedom to think and speak has rarely been so imperilled.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.