The Lords Amendments to the Higher Education (#FreedomofSpeech) Bill were debated in the #HouseofCommons last night and there was a great outcome—Amendment 10, which seeks to remove the right of students and staff to sue universities that breach their speech rights, was rejected!
Clause 4 of the legislation creates a statutory tort, which Amendment 10 sought to delete. The FSU's position is clear—the tort is what gives the legislation's new free speech duties teeth, and if it's removed then the Bill is essentially a dead letter.

🔗freespeechunion.org/higher-educati…
Among the MPs who rose to support the Government's decision to reject Amendment 10 were John Hayes, who described the tort as "an essential method to give weight to the Bill and teeth to the principles it embodies, and one that gives voice to those who currently feel voiceless".
Miriam Cates said the tort will enable staff and students whose free speech rights are infringed to seek "rapid redress in a financially affordable way". Without it, she said, the Bill's free speech protections could only be enforced via a prohibitively expensive judicial review.

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More from @SpeechUnion

Nov 29, 2022
The new version of the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous version, although the devil will be in the detail.

Let's start with the positives.🧵
Plans to introduce a new harmful communications offence in England and Wales, making it a crime punishable by up to two years in jail to send or post a message with the intention of causing “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress” have been scrapped.
That's good news because, as Kemi Badenoch said in July, “We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.”

The bad news is, the new communications offence was intended to replace some of the more egregious offences in the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act.
Read 36 tweets
Nov 18, 2022
Great news via WeAreFairCop! Non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) are/were a threat to #freespeech in the UK — like @WeAreFairCop and @BadLawTeam, the FSU has supported people who've fallen foul of this sinister form of thoughtpolicing.

Here's a brief 🧵on the history of the NCHI...
Back in 2014, the College of Policing's original guidelines defined NCHIs as incidents “perceived by the victim or any others to be motivated by hostility or prejudice”. Around 20,000 NCHIs have been recorded per year since then.
spiked-online.com/2022/06/01/the…
At the time, NCHIs could be:

1⃣ Reported by the victim or by any other person who witnessed the incident.

2⃣ Recorded irrespective of whether there was any objective evidence to identify the hate element.

They also showed up in enhanced DBS checks for potential employees.
Read 10 tweets
Nov 4, 2022
The FSU has looked at the terms and conditions of the major payment processors and crowdfunding platforms and given them a score out of 10 according to how friendly towards free speech they are. It's not great news.

🧵1/5
freespeechunion.org/how-free-speec…
❌ Five of the seven get a score of 4/10 or below.

❌ We don’t recommend any of the crowdfunding platforms.

✅ The only payment processors we recommend for users concerned about protecting their free speech are Worldplay (8/10) and Stripe (7/10).

🧵2/5
The difficulty the FSU's Research Officer, Carrie Clark, identifies is that most of these companies include subjective, ambiguous words and phrases in their policies, prohibiting things like ‘misinformation’, ‘hate speech’, ‘offence’ and ‘intolerance’.

🧵3/5
Read 5 tweets
Oct 28, 2022
The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill has reached committee stage in the House of Lords. This means that after much debate, peers now have the opportunity to propose amendments to the Bill. The FSU has been monitoring amendments put forward and these are our top 3...
1⃣ Lord Moylan’s amendment which provides a definition to the phrase “#freedomofspeech within the law” which is premised on common law philosophy: freedom = anything that isn’t expressly prohibited. Lord Hope would outsource the job of defining the phrase to Strasbourg.
It is better to have a clear, certain and strong definition of #freespeech — Moylan’s amendment does just that, even spelling out what is expressly prohibited (including Holocaust denial) and clarifies the relationship between free speech and other legal obligations.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 28, 2022
Online ticketing company Eventbrite has pulled tickets for a gender-critical event over fears it would provide a platform for "hateful" views. This isn't a one-off aberration — politically motivated financial #censorship is on the rise in the West.
thecritic.co.uk/why-is-eventbr…
As evidenced by GoFundMe's decision earlier this year to withhold donations to Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates.
spiked-online.com/2022/02/06/big…
Or by PayPal's decision to demonetise left-wing, alternative media sites that published stories contradicting some of the West’s reporting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
thecritic.co.uk/financial-cens…
Read 11 tweets
Oct 19, 2022
The IMF says it needs to "understand" people's "strong preference for cash" so that it can better dispel "hesitancy" towards digital currencies.

It's not rocket science. People don't want to be cut off from their money due to their lawful political views.
reclaimthenet.org/imf-ponders-wa…
As happened earlier this year when GoFundMe withheld donations to Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates.
spiked-online.com/2022/02/06/big…
Or when PayPal shut down the account of @UsforThemUK, a parents' group that fought to keep schools open during the pandemic, due to "the nature of its activities".
telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/2…
Read 8 tweets

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