 We've got the last part of tonight's show. We're going to talk about free speech and the free speech union, which has been started by professional provocateur, Toby Young, the free speech union. This is their founding statement. Free speech is the bedrock on which all our other freedoms rest. Yet it is currently in greater peril than at any time since the Second World War. The free speech union is a non-partisan, mass membership organization that stands up for the speech rights of its members. If you think there's a risk to be penalized for exercising your legal right to free speech, that doesn't exist in Britain. Whether it's the workplace or the public square, you need the protection of the free speech union. How might we protect you? And then it lists a bunch of things basically. Basically, if you find yourself being targeted by a digital outrage mob on social media for having exercised your legal right to free speech, we will mobilize an army of supporters. I mean, okay, that's kind of strange. Talks about petitions about, if you're no platformed, how we can collectively respond. If you're punished by your employer, give you legal assistance, et cetera. Basically, it's providing, establishing a network for collective action for those who care passionately about free speech. We're now gonna look at an interview between Steve Edgington from The Sun. Also works for Guido Fork sometimes. Didn't even know he was at The Sun. I thought he was at Guido still. He moved on from Guido very quickly. Yeah, he was also involved in some leave campaigning. So he's hardly a progressive voice. Steve Edgington and Toby Young. Let's see how quickly he embarrassed himself and reveals just how stupid this entire endeavor really is. It's Tommy Robinson in your free speech union. Would you allow him to come in? Well, Tommy Robinson hasn't applied to be in my union yet. And I think that would be, again, a decision for the board and the advisory council rather than a decision for me. But I would say that he's welcome to become a member of the union. We have a statement of values and we encourage our members not to criticize people in the course of making an argument for their membership of various groups. So not to criticize them because they're a member of a particular ethnic group or a particular religious group or because they happen to be a woman or even because they happen to be a man. Provided he'd be willing to sign up to that statement of values, then, yeah, I think we'd let him in. So don't be racist, don't be sexist, basically. Yeah, but... Do you think he has been? Do you think he's said those comments in the past? I think some of the comments he's made about Muslims cross the line. Which ones? He's... I couldn't pull anything out of my hat, but the implication is that I think in the past he has strongly implied that there is a direct causal link between being a Muslim and being a member of a grooming gang. That's the context in which you have to understand those terrible crimes. And I don't think that's right, and I think that borders on Islamophobia. What did you make of that, Joe? As an academic who's, you know, your job is rigor and precision. What did you think of Toby Young's argument? Not particularly bulletproof, was it? Where to start? I mean, I think there's a big difference between you saying that your freedom of speech is being curtailed and people just not wanting to hear it. I think that there's been so much mixing up of terms amongst these debates. I think, you know, if we link it back to academic freedom, for example, the academic freedom, as we understand it in the UK, comes from the 1997 UNESCO. They published clear recommendations on academic freedom, and it's not just the ability to say whatever you want and outrage people. What actually academic freedom within that document outlines is two recommendations for people, and that is about concerning the self-governance of the universities that they work at and the right to criticise your own employer. Now, if you think about other countries where that doesn't exist and, you know, whether that's a very right-wing government where you can get sacked for criticising your employer or that, you know, you aren't able to regulate your institution, the idea that he manipulates that in the way that's, you know, being put forward by this union I think is quite disreputable, actually. And I think that, you know, if you think, link this back to the disputes that UCU members are involved in, what we've seen before, during previous strikes, so obviously, often people take to Twitter to say what they think about their employer. That sometimes means criticising your employer. We have seen some instances where universities discipline academics for making those views when they've brought negative comments about their institution that they're bringing them into disrepute. You give me any examples, or, I mean, obviously, you can't verbatim, but kind of ballpark what kinds of things are being said. So there were some examples during the last USS strike in 2018 where UCU members who were on strikes set up parody accounts that, you know, were not defamatory or anything, but just poked fun at university managers with paper-thin skin, and they didn't like it. And there were instances where they were threatened with disciplinary procedures if they didn't delete things and if they didn't, you know, sort of toe the line. That is a real threat, and that's in the UK. You know, if you go to sort of other countries where those restrictions and the protection of academic freedoms don't exist, you know, you can see people losing their jobs. But, you know, in the UK, you don't, if you're not an academic, you're not covered by academic freedoms. So our members of UCU and professional services, you know, can't fight back in the same way. But in addition to that, what we also see, and this is part of the broader criticism that we have of higher education, is punitive funding regimes, where you have to align yourself with a particular type of research, and that that then has to be favored by the RET, which is an audit of research, the abolition of tenure and casualization. That impacts on your academic freedom if you have to toe the line in order to benefit from the continuation of employment. All of these things actually impact on your ability to exercise academic freedom. And, you know, if we think about the prevent duty, that recently came into the news because what it revealed was that universities were acting in a really overzealous way and were reporting student essays to be investigated by the police that were, you know, flagged up as counter-terrorism. These are genuine attacks on people's academic freedom. You know, if you've got objectionable, bigoted views and people just don't want you to come to their event anymore, I just don't even see that in the same league as what we're talking about. You know, particularly if you compare it to countries where, you know, academic freedoms leads to people being sacked by oppressive regimes. So yeah, I'm not really very impressed by that, I guess. Michael, yeah, I suppose just a comment on the video. So that particular video has sort of started a bit of a, I mean, kind of interesting debate in a way on Twitter as to whether or not Toby Young, in that explanation, really undermined the point of his union. And the debate is clearly in that video, he is accepting there should be some sort of political limits to freedom of speech or at least freedom of speech or at least the right to be defended on Twitter, as that seems to be what this union is designed to do. And that's seen as incoherent if what Toby Young's argument for is for free speech absolutism, basically. So anyone should be able to say anything and we should completely remove politics and power and consequences from the discussion of speech. Now, including incitement. I mean, where does he draw the line here? Well, so other people have responded to say that actually this free speech union isn't about free speech absolutism. And so what it is about is a concern that legitimate speech is being infringed upon, not in terms of the police knocking on your door, but in terms of, you know, people being driven out of their jobs, et cetera, et cetera, which, I mean, could be a legitimate concern. But I think that the significant thing here is to say that what Toby Young definitely does do there is to say that it's a political decision where we limit what's acceptable to say. Not, you know, I think we all believe that you should be allowed to say pretty much anything if it's not inciting violence before, you know, you get arrested or put in jail or something. But in terms of what should it be acceptable to say and believe for you to be in a particular job? So for example, with Sabiski, who was the person who was employed by Dominic Cummings, I don't think it should be illegal to talk about black people being genetically less intelligent than white people, even though I think it's complete pseudoscience and nonsense. But I do think that should make it inappropriate for you to have a job in the civil service or in the highest echelons of government. What this does show about Toby Young's project though is it is political where you draw this line. And what's clear about this free speech union is that they're not interested in free speech in general because everyone in it is a right winger. Everyone in it, the only time they've got in trouble is because they've said something about trans women or they've said something about gender equality or they've said something that other people consider racist. There's no one in this free speech union on the advisory board and it's a huge list of the standard right wing as you see on TV and in the comment pages of the times. There's no one who's interested in, I mean, for example, the fact that there's Julian Assange is about to be extradition, whatever you think of him personally, he's someone who has published materials and is gonna be extradited to America for espionage and potentially put in prison, well, we wouldn't be in prison for 175 years, but that would be the sentence he gets. These aren't people who are interested in the prevent program, which as you were describing, means that some people get reported to the police for what they've written in their essays. And these aren't people who have ever cared about the Palestinian people's right to talk about racism in the creation of the state of Israel, which displaced them and their descendants because of their ethnic background. And who get told that you can't keep your job or you can't keep your role in a political party because you're called anti-Semitic for that. So what Toby Young has to admit is that this is a political project and it's a political project specifically to allow people to say things which, many black people consider races to say things which many trans women consider transphobic and to say things which many women consider to be sexist. Nothing else. They're not concerned about things that those in power are telling us we cannot say because it will threaten their interest about that. They don't give a shit.