 We're expecting schools to start reopening in less than three weeks' time, so one might expect the Education Secretary to be doing everything in his power to try and make schools safe. That means Gavin Williamson should be busy organising improved ventilation for schools, hiring new staff so classes can be split up and making sure headteachers have all the support they need to roll out mass testing. But no, unfortunately the Education Secretary has been busy with other concerns, obviously fighting cancelled culture, that's his priority. On Tuesday Williamson published a long-awaited policy paper on protecting free speech and academic freedom in British universities. Now this document is 42 pages long, people have spent a while writing this, even though there were many other things for the Education Department to be getting on with, they still obviously haven't got laptops to everyone who needs them. It starts with a foreword from Gavin Williamson laying out why he thinks this is such a priority for his department in the middle of a pandemic, pretending to defend essentially free speech and academic freedom in universities. So he writes, within our society's broader recognition of free speech, academic freedom has rightly enjoyed a special status with additional protections recognised both in culture and in law. This is due to the special place our universities have historically held as centres of inquiry and intellectual debate, bastions of free thought from which new ideas can emerge to challenge society's cozy consensus, from Charles Darwin on evolution, to John Spencer Bassett challenging racism, that freedom has been used to advance views which in their time were widely criticised as deeply offensive and immoral, but which today are firmly established as accepted wisdom, a very, you know, impassioned defence of free speech in the university, which he says is under threat. And why does he think it's under threat? He also explains in that foreword. So he writes, there are some in our society who prioritise emotional safety over free speech or who equate speech with violence. This is both misguided and dangerous. The social psychologist, Jonathan Haight, makes the case powerfully, not only do such attitudes suppress speech, they make it harder to draw a clear line against violence. A shocking finding from a recent study by King's College London was that a quarter of students saw violence as an acceptable response to some forms of speech. And indeed, we have seen this played out in the appalling scenes in London when Jewish societies invited speakers who other students did not approve of. Now that latter reference, I'm not sure precisely what those events are that he's referring to. I mean, it could quite possibly be when there are sort of officials from the Israeli government. I imagine that's what it is, officials from the Israeli government and you get protest. I can't speak about what the specific event was in that case. What I can tell you about though is the misrepresentation that happens when he says that a quarter of students saw violence as an acceptable response to some forms of speech as something which is relevant to no platforming at universities. Because the questionnaire he's drawing upon has nothing to do with universities, has nothing to do with people giving speeches at student unions. The question people were asked was, if someone is using hate speech or making rationally charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views. So, you know, that to me reads like racist abuse in the street. This was found by Stephen Bush, I should say, at the New States, but he wrote a very good article on this policy paper and also according to Bush yads, that it wasn't just this question that was in the study. They also did focus groups with students and the respondents when they spoke to them personally, they weren't advocating violence as a tactic for shutting down events. They were talking about the fact that they'd be uncomfortable sitting there and doing nothing if someone's, you know, shouting racial abuse at someone in the street. So, the fact that this has entered into a government policy document, this isn't just a spectator think piece, this is a government policy document, pretty, pretty worrying. Going back to that policy paper, we've got more problems, which Gavin Williams says are undermining free speech on campus in our higher education institutions. The rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses is one that directly affects individuals and their livelihoods. Students have been expelled from their courses, academics fired and others who have been forced to live under the threat of violence. These high profile incidents about the tip of the iceberg for everyone and goal, Carl or Todd whose story is known, evidence suggests there are many more who have felt they have had to keep silent with held research or believe they have faced active discrimination in appointment or promotion because of views they have expressed. Now in terms of those free names there, Carl is a reference to Noah Carl. He was offered a job at, I think it was an Oxford college which was retracted after academics said this guy's research actually doesn't really stand up. He was publishing lots of things which weren't peer reviewed and which were about essentially race science, I think, so sort of differences along those lines. The kind of stuff that I think is to be honest rightly taboo, but also if you're putting that out it better be well researched and it wasn't in his case. Selena Todd, it was trans exclusionary radical feminism, I actually don't know many of the details about that particular case. Let's move on though to what Gavin Williamson is proposing. So he's proposing that universities be illegally required to actively promote free speech and with the office for students to be given the power to impose fines on institutions if they breach this condition. So if they don't actively promote free speech, a new free speech champion will also be appointed to the office for students. Presumably it won't be Toby Young as they already tried to appoint him to the office for students and there was such an uproar they had to U-turn but anyway, we'll get someone else in there, maybe less controversial. The office for students if you want to wear is the independent regulator of higher education institutions in Britain. In response to this because the proposals are still quite vague, it's difficult to explain exactly what they are because it's pretty it's pretty murky at the moment. This isn't proper legislation yet and this is just what they're proposing to do in sort of vague terms but let's go to some responses. The NUS, the National Union for Students, have said there is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus and student unions are constantly taking positive steps to help facilitate the thousands of events that take place each year. So that's a NUS representative, one from the UCU, sorry from the University College Union. In reality, the biggest threats to academic freedom and free speech come not from staff and students nor from so-called council culture but from minister's own attempts to police what can and cannot be said on campus and the Russell group so that's the group of I suppose the more established universities has warned against creating unnecessary and burdensome bureaucracies. So most people seem to think this is kind of pointless but the Tories want to start a culture war. Aaron, what do you make of this? I mean there are many people on the left who say yeah, council culture, maybe people are a bit too quick to say language is violence and we have to be protected from it. At the same time, everything being proposed here seems like just a very like a bare naked attempt to get headlines. Yeah, I mean I disagree with quite a few people on the left about this. I think council culture does exist. I don't think it's peculiar to the left. I think it's actually generally a liberal formation and actually you see it, you know, again anybody who has the misfortune who follows us on Twitter, you know, knows at the level of council culture thrown at Navarra media. There are many, many people, particularly it seems in a culture which is increasingly mediated through the digital environment who is pathologically incapable of living with different opinions. Those people do exist. I actually think generally speaking they're in the center of politics and mostly on the right but obviously it's a thing and I think it's a general social phenomenon. However it's not new, it is not new and what did people in societies do to protect this right of freedom of speech? They had constitutions. They legally enshrined them in the constitutions so that everybody had those rights protected and so, you know, my response would be why are you only trying to defend free speech in universities? Why not in workplaces? Why not at home? Why not in the pub? Why not on the street? Hey, you know what? Why don't we have a written constitution protecting everyone's freedom of speech? I think the fact it's so constricted as a proposal, as a piece of legislation just to universities and clearly it's just about the cultural. If you care about freedom of speech let's have an honest conversation about a written constitution and making it a legal right. The Tories don't want to talk about that by the way because it's an arbitrary limit on state power and their ability to dominate and exploit people, which is what they're all about. But until we have that broader document, I mean it's a lot of crap. Let's have a written constitution. I'm a bit old school on this, Michael. I suspect you agree with me. I'd be happy to have a written constitution. I think I agree with you basically on cancel culture. I think people can be a bit quick to say we can't discuss this. There are probably more taboos than there need to be at the moment, I'd imagine. But it doesn't seem that that's what Gavin Williamson is interested in here in the slightest. And evidence as to why he's not interested in this is that Gavin Williamson is not known as someone who has been an avid defender of free speech in university, free speech in higher education institutions. Because Gavin Williamson has been one of the most vociferous proponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, definition of anti-Semitism and all its examples, and has actually been pressuring universities to adopt it, also threatening sanctions if they don't. And we've talked about this before on the show. The fact that it has its examples calling the foundation of Israel a racist endeavor, which obviously is not actually an unreasonable, it says that it's anti-Semitic to say that, which is not an unreasonable thing to say, given the Nakba, given that there was a dispossession of the people who lived in Palestine on the basis of their ethnicity, on the basis of their religious background. That's not an unreasonable thing to say. But the IRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, definition of anti-Semitism says you shouldn't. And it's not just us saying this, it's also the academic boards of universities who Gavin Williamson so powerfully wrote in that policy document should have autonomy and should be able to speak their minds. Well, they think that Gavin Williamson's policy is not really helping. So UCL adopted that definition of anti-Semitism after pressure from Gavin Williamson or after prompting from Gavin Williamson. But in a development just this week, a vote by UCL's academic board has called on the university to retract and replace IRA working definition with a more precise definition of anti-Semitism. It follows a report published in December by a working group of UCL academics that warned the IRA definition conflates anti-Jewish prejudice with political debate over Israel and Palestine, which could have potentially deleterious effects on free speech, such as instigating a culture of fear or self-silencing on teaching or research or classroom discussion of contentious topics. And I think just what this shows you is just how cynical this whole thing is by Gavin Williamson. Because if you really care about free speech on campus, when you've got a bunch of academics saying, if you impose this definition on us, it's going to limit what we can say about geopolitics, then you would listen to them. But no, Gavin Williamson, because he thinks that this is something he can attack the left for because this is pro-Palestine activists who are being discriminated against. He's like, oh, no, we need to implement all of these, all of these loose definitions which criminalize speech. But then the moment someone wants to do badly researched scientific papers comparing people of different ethnicities, then that's all good. That should be it. It would be shocking if someone were to disallow that kind of thing, which, I mean, to me, just shows this is not, this guy's not serious. Aaron, do you think this is going to have real consequences? I mean, it's quite easy to just dismiss this as just they want to generate telegraph headlines to rile up their base. But do you think this could actually have long-lasting effects in universities, these kind of policies being put forward by Gavin Williamson? Absolutely. I think it's part of the tourist vision really is to take Britain on a path, continue on a path, which is a bit like all bands hungry, which is to foreclose a pluralistic, diverse debate to make impossible a pluralistic media, which of course we barely have already, but they're trying their best to shut down any institutions that kind of offer an alternative channel for the BBC when it actually does its job. And I think this is a big part of that. And in the short term, no, it's not going to make a huge difference. But I do think, I do think you can see in 10, 20 years' time that the hope would be effectively that universities become this sanitised, entirely depoliticised space. And I think it's sort of a kind when people say that, well, should school teachers have the right to strike? Should they have the right to be in a trade union? They're key workers, like police officers. And you ultimately get, I think, to university lecturers and university support staff. And so this removal, I think, of rights, whether as workers or as citizens, it is part of their broader project, absolutely. And this is put in the bank for 10 years, 20 years' time. And we've been on this path for 40 years. So no, I think it's very, very dangerous. Can it be resisted? I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, ultimately as well, if the university doesn't become a site of freedom of expression and diversity of views, then other institutions will do that. People will just do it elsewhere. This is a fundamental human need. It's not like it'll just stop. But ultimately, people will no longer go to universities if they want to engage in meaningful intellectual expansion. They'll do it to get a well-paid job, which isn't necessarily guaranteed with a degree these days. But that may just change the nature of the university, which suits them fine. I think, finally, they view, I think rightly, higher education as a source of left power, one of the few sources. The Tories have media. They have obviously financial and economic elites. They've destroyed the trade unions. They have a big base in society now on the basis of home ownership. So if you're looking for where does the left have any sort of institutional power whatsoever, local government in major cities, universities, public sector trade unions, they're going after all of them. So I think it's an important thing to defend, both as a philosophical principle, but also this is part of a broader political censure, which the Tories, I think, would include within a broader suite in terms of what they want to change over the next generation. It shouldn't be taken lightly as ridiculous as Gavin Williamson is. And you're right to say this is all about getting headlines and the telegraph and the spectator of the times. I think it's more than that. And I think it's really critical to say freedom of speech really matters. It's a left principle. Rosa Luxemburg, meaningful freedom is freedom to disagree. And one reason, for instance, why you don't get bylaws in the US, like anti-vagrancy, for instance, is that somebody begging for money on a street is exercising their freedom of speech, right? Those bylaws and Westminster council moving people on, asking for money, begging for money. If you have a formally recognised rights-free speech, that's a very difficult thing to implement. Or prevent. Prevent starts to have real problems if we have meaningful freedom of speech in this country. Like you say, the IHRA, we could carry on. The Tories don't want that. They want to destroy a political base of power for the left. We've got a comment which sums up, actually, the argument quite well. This is Rob Hogg, 68, with Tenna. Thank you very much. To quote a friend on Facebook, if they really believed in freedom of speech, they would scrap, prevent, and back off on the threat to withdraw fundings from universities which don't adopt the IHRA definition. Quite right. I think that is very well put. And we take Gavin Williamson more seriously on free speech if he wasn't trying to ban loads of speech. It just doesn't gel very well together.