Hello, welcome, and thank you to all the new members joining us since news broke that our member, Newcastle United Football Club fan Linzi Smith, has been banned from attending games at St James' Park until 2026 for expressing her 'gender critical' belief that sex is binary and immutable.

We are continuing to support Linzi with her case, which you can find out more about below.



Whether you're a new member, or someone who's thinking about joining us, here's a short 🧵about who we are, and what we do to stand up for the free speech rights of our 12,000+ members, in the workplace and the public square...freespeechunion.org/football-fan-b… Linzi's shocking case is just one of the 2,250+ cases the FSU has been involved with in the past three years, helping people who've been punished for something they've said — and when we're involved with a case all the way we achieve a favourable result for our member 73% of the time!

The case and legal work we do that makes the headlines is really just the tip of the iceberg, but here are a few of our highest-profile recent cases...

1/ THREAD: West Yorkshire Police Force has now dropped its investigation against an autistic girl arrested on suspicion of a hate crime for telling a female officer: "You look like my lesbian nana." Good. We wrote to the Force's Chief Constable today, outlining our concerns...

https://twitter.com/WestYorksPolice/status/1690042791395569681

2/ As we pointed out in our letter, this case raises serious concerns about officers’ lack of understanding of free speech. The incident did not meet the threshold for a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) recording, much less a prosecution, for the following reasons...

1/ "Over the past three years, the Free Speech Union has supported more than 2,000 cases of people who’ve lost their jobs or been disciplined at work for lawful #freespeech." Great to be mentioned by Equalities Minister @KemiBadenoch in @thetimes today!
thetimes.co.uk/article/73977f… 2/ The de-banking scandal currently impacting people from across the political spectrum is "just the tip of the iceberg", she says. In recent years, an obsession with 'diversity' has led to "Kafkaesque madness" whereby "people's livelihoods are being threatened for their views".

1/ Following the de-banking of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage by NatWest subsidiary Coutts, more NatWest customers are now coming forward to say that "political posts on social media" may have been behind the bank's decision to shutter their accounts.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… 2/ Despite public denials that they carry out checks on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the four biggest high street lenders and several others have quietly introduced the right to monitor customers’ social media into their privacy policies.
telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/2…

1/ Documents obtained under a subject access request by @Nigel_Farage reveal his Coutts account was closed after a risk committee decided his friendship with Donald Trump, and his views on Brexit and LGBT rights, "do not align with our values".
telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/1… 2/ Closing his accounts was not justifiable on a monetary basis, a Coutts briefing document noted. Nevertheless, the bank took the decision to "exit" Mr Farage, on the basis that "his publicly stated views were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation".

🧵THREAD

1/ When Yorkshire Building Society asked longstanding customer Rev Richard Fothergill for feedback, he politely queried why his local branch was festooned with Pride flags. Four days later the UK's third biggest mutual closed his savings account.
thetimes.co.uk/article/buildi… 2/ FSU member Rev Fothergill approached us for support after @Yorkshire_BS notified him of its decision. As FSU Head Toby Young told @thetimes: “If you respond to a bank’s request for feedback in good faith you shouldn’t lose your account if you say something it doesn’t like."

1/ When the Yorkshire Building Society asked longstanding customer Rev Richard Fothergill for feedback, he politely queried why his local branch was festooned with Pride flags. Four days later, the UK's third biggest mutual closed his savings account.
thetimes.co.uk/article/buildi… 2/ Rev Fothergill approached the FSU after his bank notified him of its decision. FSU Head Toby Young told @thetimes: “If you respond to a bank’s request for feedback in good faith you shouldn’t lose your account if you say something it doesn’t like."

OfS figures show a rise in the number of scheduled events not taking place at English universities—but the higher education watchdog warns that the data "may not show the full picture" of #cancelculture's chilling effect on the public sphere on campus.

timeshighereducation.com/english-regula… As we point out in our research briefing on the Higher Education (#FreedomOfSpeech) Bill, which recently received Royal Assent, cancellation of visiting speakers isn't an adequate measure of the scale of the #freespeech crisis at English universities.

🔗freespeechunion.org/higher-educati…

The Worker Protection Bill will have grave implications for #freedomofspeech in this country, as well as imposing huge compliance costs on Britain’s businesses. This week, the legislation reached second reading in the #houseoflords, and there were some terrific speeches. Clause 1 of the Bill imposes a duty on employers to take "all reasonable steps" to protect staff from overhearing upsetting remarks made by customers. As a publisher and museum trustee, Lord @IanStrathcarron was able to explain why this part of the Bill wouldn't work in practice.

🚨 BREAKING: The FSU has written to the CEO of the Charity Commission, Helen Stephenson, asking her to open an investigation into Jamia Masjid Swafia, the Wakefield mosque at the centre of the recent 'Quran-gate' scandal.
freespeechunion.org/letter-to-the-… Jamia Masjid Swafia is the Wakefield mosque at which the mother of a 14-year-old Kettlethorpe High School pupil recently appeared, seemingly in an effort to protect her son, who had been receiving death threats after accidentally dropping a copy of the Quran.

The University of Kent is advising all staff and students to call everyone "they" until their preferred pronouns are confirmed — according to the university's website, this will help to create an "authentic culture of inclusion" at the institution.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… But will it? As Toby Young told the Mail: "Demanding that everyone declare their pronouns will require some people — e.g., gender critical feminists, orthodox Christians — to affirm something they don't believe to be true, i.e., that it's possible for a person to change sex."

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…

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.

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…

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 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.

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…

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…

The FSU has been demonetised by @PayPal for daring to stand up for #freespeech.

Thank you to all who stand in solidarity with us – existing members, supporters, and the many new members joining us today.

Here's a thread about who we are and what we do. The FSU supports members that have been sacked, cancelled, penalised, harassed or attacked by outrage mobs simply for exercising their legal right to free speech, whether in the workplace or the public square.

You can find out more about us below.

freespeechunion.org

With our help, Simon Isherwood has won his Employment Tribunal case against West Midlands Trains! The rail conductor was dismissed for gross misconduct after asking whether indigenous populations enjoy 'black privilege' in African countries during a diversity training course. We drafted in leading civil liberties barrister Paul Diamond to represent Simon, and the Employment Tribunal has now judged that Mr Isherwood was unfairly dismissed.

Adam Afriyie (@AdamAfriyie) in the
@HouseofCommons today, setting out the amendments to the #onlinesafetybill debate that the FSU helped to draft.

Amendments 48 and 49 seek to ensure online providers have the option of 'doing nothing' in response to "legal but harmful" content. Amendment 50, which is that in online service providers' terms of service, "the presumption should be tipped more in favour of #freedomofexpression, more in favour of debate", by obliging providers to leave controversial content that doesn't cross the line into illegality online.