The UK Labour Party has announced that it is going to “pause” implementation of the Higher Education (Free Speech) Act 2023 (the “Act”). This will, in all probability, likely be followed by a repeal.

This is a good thing.

The Act, when enacted, was celebrated by British free speech activists such as Baroness Fox and the Free Speech Union. I am not sure why: far from creating a broadly-enforceable right for university students to speak their mind, the law instead created duties on the schools themselves – institutions which serve as temporary babysitters – to protect those freedoms in accordance with rules they themselves set, so-called “codes of practice.”

Solemnly ordering foxes to write rules for the henhouse is a curious approach to reducing predatory behaviour. It is all the more curious when we consider that the Act’s penalty for failing to comply with those duties took the form of a new civil action for “loss” suffered as a result, payable through taxpayer funds (as nearly all UK universities are public bodies), which in most cases will amount to travel, lodging, and booking expenses which, added together, likely cost less than the legal fees required to file a lawsuit, meaning that such lawsuits are exceedingly unlikely to be filed.

Nor does the bill address the deeper problems with free speech in British society on the streets, in print, or online. The Israel-Palestine protests have seen Jews threatened with arrest for wearing a Kippah in public, or pro-Palestine protestors arrested for taunting counterprotestors and nothing more.

The picture online, the primary forum for political thought everywhere in the world, is no better, with long-time censorship laws like the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 still in force and the new Online Safety Act promising to impose duties on social media companies to act as content police for any material deemed violative of a nebulous “Duty of Care” imposed upon them by the British state.

In Scotland the position is even worse, where viewpoint discrimination has been expressly baked into substantive law.

I thus celebrate the Act’s untimely death, and the fact that it happened under a Labour government. This is not because censorship isn’t one of the most, if not the most, pressing civil rights issue in the United Kingdom today (it is and continues to be), but because perhaps now outfits like the FSU which have tried to play things safe and down the middle, sending a couple of dozen strongly-worded letters to employers and adhering to strict political neutrality, will come to realize

• that free speech is a partisan issue;
• as such, protecting free speech requires an organized partisan response through the political system; and
• that anything short of profound reform to UK free speech law which entitles those victimized by public bodies to permanently enjoin them from the infringing conduct, and does so across all domains, is a failure.

The Adam Smith Institute’s draft UK Free Speech Act was written with the above in mind. A milquetoast bill which penalizes censorship with a nominal payment from the taxpayer for a hotel bill is not a solution to the wide-ranging problems the UK faces. No progress will be made by crowdfunding piecemeal victories under the Equality Act before employment tribunals. What is needed is a political effort, undertaken in conjunction with political parties, to enact a pervasive new bedrock legal principle, one that smashes existing norms and practices across society, by entitling a claimant to obtain permanent injunctive relief against any public body, from a university to Ofcom, from the police to the courts themselves, daring to choose what opinions people can and cannot express.

As we have seen with the quick work the Labour government made of the Act, anything short of radicalism in this matter is easily brushed aside with even the gentlest change of the winds.