Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill — House of Lords, 2015-01-28
Topic: Civil Rights
Sarah Virginia Brinton (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 112A, 112B and 112D. I shall start by speaking to those amendments and then to the others in the group. It is a matter of serendipity that I follow my noble friend Lord Macdonald because Amendments 112A, 112B and 112D try to address the exact points that he has raised and insist that the two duties must be examined together in order to balance the right to freedom of speech. I defy officers of universities and colleges to achieve that and I think that it would be a tall task for civil servants. One of the reasons I have been keen to table these amendments is that, as a senior university administrator, I have sat with two codes of practice and two different sets of statutory guidance which are completely in conflict with one another. We have to make it clear to those who will try to deliver the legislation on the front line exactly how it would happen. That is why the first part of the amendment talks about the recognition of the duty on free speech and the second part makes it clear that any guidance must be produced in the form of a single document so that staff do not have to trawl through parallel sets of guidance and codes of practice to try to find out which trumps the other I hope that the amendment is straightforward and simple, but it is included in a group which seeks to tackle the absolute, fundamental problems around the duty and how it conflicts with the duty on freedom of speech. I want to make two points. The first goes back to the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, which many noble Lords have quoted. Clause 43(4) states, "(including where appropriate the initiation of disciplinary measures) to secure", those rights, but that is a two-way right, and universities have certainly used it where there might be either radicalisation or something close to the infringement of personal liberties or, worse than that, the possible incitement of a crime. On 20 September 2013, the Guardian reported that a number of our universities and students unions across the UK had banned the song "Blurred Lines", a song that is degrading to women and which encourages rape. That demonstrates that the current boundaries for freedom of speech are well understood in our universities and are applied by them and by the student bodies. I come back to this. I do not understand why we need a duty when it is absolutely evident that this is already working in practice. I repeat my request for specific recent examples of where this has not succeeded and has not been followed through The other point I want to make on academic freedom moves away from the purist freedom-of-speech argument. Much of our debate has been about societies, students and academies talking outside the normal framework. Recently I was talking to a postgraduate student who is working on Middle East peace studies. He and his colleagues have just completed a module in a Masters course on suicide bombers. How free will they be to access information on that issue and thus actually help this country and the wider world to understand what motivates these people to become so radicalised that they are prepared to give up their lives? Would accessing videos online to try and understand the linguistic and pedagogic emotions behind those decisions be caught as radicalisation, would it require a special exemption in order to have that debate, or would it just be banned completely? We need to understand how the pure academic freedom to research would be affected by this duty.