Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2022 – The Church of England in Parliament

Bishop of Manchester asks about right to protest and service operation

The Bishop of Manchester asked a question on the balance between right to protest and ability to operate and access services on 21st January 2025, following a government statement on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023:

The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to ask questions on this Statement, particularly as the noble Lord, Lord Mann, who is sitting behind me, raised issues of anti-Semitism. In Manchester, where I live among a very large Jewish community, it is an ongoing issue that we are always very sensitive to.

We have heard a lot about free speech, which, unsurprisingly, I am in favour of, and of difficult conversations from the noble Lord, which, again, I am in favour of. But sometimes the language shades over into what can only be called mob intimidation. It is about how we make that distinction between a difficult conversation and people being intimidated by loud, vociferous, angry behaviour that seeks deliberately to make them uncomfortable.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill: Bishop of Coventry speaks in support of amendments

On 31st October 2022, the House of Lords debated the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in the committee stage. The Bishop of Coventry spoke in the debate in support of various amendments, with reference to use of religious and spiritual spaces:

The Lord Bishop of Coventry: My Lords, I support Amendments 5 to 7 in particular. I shall follow on from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Mann, because I had similar concerns about unintended consequences. I wonder whether your Lordships would mind me sharing some rambling thoughts that have come through my mind. I was not going to, but the reference by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, to nothing before 1680—I think it was 1680—strengthened me.

In many countries in Europe, today is Reformation Day. I happened to be in Dresden yesterday, where you cannot help but see the statue of Martin Luther, which I was admiring. That is not irrelevant to these discussions. The history of academic freedom in Europe—freedom of expression and of religion—will have different views about the Reformation, but I cannot help celebrating the fact that, 500 years later, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation said that they agreed over the doctrine of justification by faith, which was the great thing that divided the Churches at that time. As this fascinating debate has continued, I could not help thinking that, if there had not been a suppression of academic freedom at the time, there may not have been that great bust-up, which caused a lot of tearing to society and Church. I simply share that to reinforce that which we are all committed to—academic freedom and freedom of speech—and to recognise that institutions did not always get it right. Certainly, the Church has not.

Bishop of Coventry on Freedom of Speech in Universities

On 28th June 2022 the House of Lords debated the Government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, at its Second Reading. The Bishop of Coventry spoke in the debate:

The Lord Bishop of Coventry: My Lords, intense competition for students, jostling for promotion among lecturers, vigorous, often intense and sometimes rancorous debate, with dashes of sharp practice and occasional mob violence—not a preview of some future Office for Students report but a snapshot of the early academic career of Augustine of Hippo. One of his first publications was advice to lecturers and, significantly for this debate, he later asserted that “By force we can make no one believe.” I will make some general points about the Bill and then raise three more specific issues.

Timothy Garton Ash speaks of three “vetoes” that silence the ability of people to express themselves: shouting them down, the “heckler’s veto”; declaring what they say to be offensive, the “offensive veto”; and, in extreme cases, threatening to kill people, the “assassin’s veto”.

Sadly, it seems that we have seen each of these techniques in action within higher education, as some of the evidence submitted to the Bill Committee demonstrated.

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