Rosie Duffield
MP for Canterbury · Independent · United Kingdom
“Our APPG on birth trauma report in 2024 was the first in Parliament on that subject. We heard from more than 1,300 women and families. The report was titled, “Listen to Mums”. I am glad that an independent maternity commissioner will finally be implemented, after our years of calls for one.”
“In the 25 months since Theo Clarke and I produced the first ever parliamentary report on birth trauma, and nearly four years since we discussed the East Kent Kirkup report in this place, we have seen more and more reports, more and more scandals, more and more heartbreaking stories, and several Health Secretaries.”
“Detransitioners often experience years of extreme distress and choose not to speak publicly about their own personal stories, but some would willingly engage with Ministers and Members.”
“Separated parents, many of whom will not agree with each other about whether to affirm their child’s chosen gender identity, how to treat their gender distress or what, if any, social transition to accommodate at home or school, will be potentially battling each other over whether or not their child should be participating in this or futu…”
“Last autumn, on the announcement of the trial of puberty blockers on children, a cross-party coalition of Members and peers assembled who have serious concerns and are campaigning together for the Government to reverse this terrible decision.”
“I was told no—categorically no—so a child presenting with possible gender dysphoria pre puberty could actually have been as young as eight years old.”
The complete record
Every one of 545 lines we hold for Rosie Duffield, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 5 of 11.
“Yesterday, Bectu, Equity, the National Union of Journalists, the Musicians’ Union and the Writers’ Guild wrote a joint letter to the Secretary of State urging her to reconsider the sale of Channel 4 and in doing so protect the jobs of thousands of freelancers and the livelihoods of at least 60 production companies. It is here I have to declare a significant personal interest, as my partner is a freelance documentary maker who, as well as working for the big streamers, such as Netflix, is currently directing a project for Channel 4. That gives me some insight into exactly what is at stake and the projects that might never have been made without the existence of this hugely important British institution.”
“Let us help our local authorities and big bus companies to work together, in consultation with national Government, and adequately fund the active travel scheme, so that we can achieve a more ambitious, greener vision for local transport throughout the country.”
“Canterbury City Council has committed to building far too many new homes without the basic infrastructure that is needed. Will the Government help the county to update our outlook and aims so that we do not simply choke our children as a result of outdated car dependency? We need help with a cleaner, greener, more people-focused overview of transport. We need to keep our rural communities moving and maintain east Kent as an inviting and buzzing tourist destination. Let us perhaps model ourselves a bit more on our European neighbours and have more pedestrian-friendly town centres and cheaper and more environmentally friendly and reliable transport.”
“The fact that the 27 bus route through Rough Common, one of my local villages, is about to be cut is causing so many problems. My constituents depend on it. There are also cuts to routes 922, 925 and 7. Despite being one of the largest local authorities, Kent County Council does not have an endless supply of money. Our county has to deal with the horrors of Operation Brock—one of the many so-called benefits of Brexit—and the recent collapse of P&O Ferries, which was a disaster for our area and about which I am sure we will hear more later from the hon. Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke). The pause of Eurostar services from Ashford and Ebbsfleet has also had a catastrophic effect. Our local authorities urgently need direct financial assistance and help to tackle such huge issues.”
“How is it more efficient for Kent County Council to have to source other modes of transport, particularly for otherwise stranded children with special educational needs and additional needs? The cost of a school travel pass is now almost £400. There is no way that a single parent, possibly with two or more children, can magic up money like that. Several years ago, I had to borrow the money to pay for my two children’s bus passes when they cost half that amount. It is easy to forget how dependent people are on public transport while we in this place go around Westminster. Everywhere we look we see affordable buses on every corner. When my constituents visit London, they can jump on a bus and go anywhere for £1.65, but they have to pay more than £7 to travel for around 20 minutes from Canterbury to Whitstable and back.”
“We are building more and more houses, thereby inviting in more and more cars, and we are even building more roads to accommodate those cars and threatening much-loved and historical green spaces, such as the Old Park area in Canterbury. Does this sound like a recognition of the climate emergency? It is hardly progressive. People in Canterbury, Whitstable and our villages simply want to be able to move from A to B and to get to school without damaging the planet and everyone’s lungs, but we will not achieve that if local bus services constantly disappear. What about cuts to school bus services, such as the one serving Spires Academy in Herne Bay, which is attended by many pupils who live around Canterbury?”
“For example, if a single parent’s routine involves setting off for work knowing that their teenage child will leave for the bus 20 minutes later and arrive safely in time for registration, what exactly are they supposed to do if they are told one day that the bus route will no longer exist? What exactly is anyone who regularly uses a route for medical appointments or social reasons, or to go to college or work, supposed to do if the route is gone overnight? School and work are essential activities, so the buses are essential, too. Far too many cars already clog up the few main routes into and out of my constituency, contributing to increasingly dangerous levels of air pollution and growing rates of childhood asthma, but what choice do people have when their buses simply disappear?”
“The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, on which I serve, is currently considering the evidence for its report on rural mental health. Time and again, the expert witnesses mentioned isolation, loneliness and the problems of basic connectivity as factors leading to poor mental health in rural communities. Combined with the many current financial pressures, plus Brexit uncertainty and added bureaucracy, this is sadly all part of a deeply worrying pattern. Rural communities are especially dependent on reliable, regular and affordable transport links. When local bus services are cut, the effect is immediate and has catastrophic consequences.”
“I welcome the Secretary of State’s confirmation that he will act on abortion services in Northern Ireland after the elections in May, but does he understand that it is hard for women to take his word at face value after so many missed deadlines on this important issue, which will have had real health impacts? Will he please put on record that he intends to lay the regulations that he has prepared before Parliament within a month of the Queen’s Speech?”
“Does the Minister acknowledge that my constituency of Canterbury, and east Kent as a whole, will be particularly affected by today’s shocking news? What urgent support will the Government give to all those affected locally, including the hundreds of P&O workers who have been treated disgracefully, as we have just heard, and who are now facing no pay packet at all in the face of the soaring cost of living? They do not want a work coach; they just want their jobs back. That is not to mention the beleaguered residents of east Kent, who will yet again have to bear the brunt of serious disruption to our daily lives. I am glad to hear that the Minister will meet MPs across east Kent; that needs to be done urgently. Thank you.”
“This violence affects 51% of the population—women who work, women who vote, women watching as we fail to do anything at all to reduce these horrific statistics.”
“Wilma says of her work, made in conjunction with the Femicide Census, that it is designed to remember the women who have needlessly lost their lives and to highlight the institutionalised and systemic acceptance of this human rights abuse, which is often regarded as an inevitable part of men and women co-existing. The Femicide Census states that “there is little suggestion that any intervention over the past ten years has had a significant impact or even any impact at all on the number of women being killed by men.” This, then, is surely now an absolute emergency. In the last couple of weeks alone, we have talked about this crisis of violence against women and girls—violence, rape, murder, whether at home or in a war zone.”
“They clearly did not hear as women around the world said, “Enough.” They did not see or hear those women at the vigils for Sarah and were not listening as we debated in this place and spoke about women’s rage and pain and what it is like to live in fear. We can add those men to the many whose victims were included in the work of artist Wilma Woolf, who visited Parliament this week. Her decorated dinner plates show women killed by men, listed by year and with a symbol to indicate how they met their deaths. Those symbols show a grim range of causes, from strangulation to being burnt, poisoned, drowned, shot, pushed from a balcony, decapitated and so on.”
“This is the fifth International Women’s Day debate since I was elected in 2017, the fifth time that I have sat here to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) read out the names of women killed in the last year, and the seventh time that she has read that horrific list compiled by our friend Karen Ingala Smith as part of her Counting Dead Women project. This year’s list is even longer than the last, but with several cases yet unsolved and many yet to go through court, that vile list and those grim statistics will sadly only increase. It seems that those 125 men clearly have not been listening.”
“I pray that next International Women’s Day, we do not have to be as angry, that we are celebrating change, hope and, above all, freedom for the incredibly brave women of Ukraine.”
“Their pain at the loss of their loved ones has been made worse by layers of injustice, keeping those wounds as raw as when they first heard that devastating news. These injustices would shock most people, such as the killer of their daughter, sister or mother still having control of her money or access to her children; or the fact that he raped her not being included in the charge sheet or factored into the sentencing decision. We have to do better, and this all has to change urgently through drastic action, changes to our courts, police and legal systems—whatever it takes. We should demand this on behalf of women in the UK, and I am demanding this as someone whose name could once have been read out by my hon. Friend. Let us show that we are listening and making these lists shorter every year.”
“I thank the hon. Member for that point; I absolutely agree. What do women have to do? Should we collectively go on strike, stand still, lay down, leave our workplaces and homes or stand in the road or the motorway, silently disengaging with the systems and society that refuse to see or hear our rage? This is not a political hot potato; it is about society. Our representatives here have to lead, demand change and show change. It is our duty. Men need to know that without question or exception, this will not be tolerated and that nothing at all awaits them if they hurt or kill women apart from a prison cell. Families of victims visited us here this week, again, thanks to my heroic hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley.”
“Dame Vera Baird reacted to today’s grim figures by saying: “Much as we hope each year to finally witness the green shoots of a recovery, we are once again faced with the crushing reality that the criminal justice system is continuing to fail rape victims in ever-increasing numbers.” Let us treat that as an emergency, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, and fix this broken system once and for all.”
“Every decision and thought will now carry weight like never before. A new way of living will be hers, her life interrupted and broken because a man decided to use his body to hurt, control and violate her. Some of those women are able to speak up—they attack the useless system we have in the hope that that might bring about change—yet the majority will carry on being daughters, mothers and workers, changed for ever, mostly unnoticed by others who will not know their story. But we are here to make things better. Women should not simply have to accept that violence is a real and daily threat to bear in mind constantly. Male violence against women and girls should be seen as being as socially unacceptable and shocking as kicking an animal. The pursuit of justice must be a priority, reflecting the punishment lived by victims.”
“The men who commit those crimes need to know that they will be caught, stopped and locked up. If they ruin a life, they should live with that action every single day, as their victims are forced to. Instead—what? They just go home after work, rape a woman, go to bed, catch a train the next morning, plan a bit of DIY at the weekend, knowing they will not be caught or prosecuted. Meanwhile, the person that they have brutalised slowly opens her eyes, tries to move her limbs in order to stand, walks slowly in a state of shock, checks her injured body, and then sits motionless, her brain attempting to make any sense of what happened to her and reliving the bits she remembers over and over. Stuck, paralysed and alone, she will have to piece together her sense of herself and the world anew.”
“I welcome the Minister’s launching the Enough initiative as part of her Department’s strategic changes and Operation Soteria, but we in this place are all on notice. We cannot just allow the scale of male violence against women and girls to keep growing. It is our problem, it is society’s problem, it is everybody’s problem, but it is largely our responsibility. In the meantime, the Office for National Statistics data released at the end of January showed that police forces recorded the highest-ever number of rapes and sexual offences last year—more than 63,000 rapes, 13% up on the previous period. Perhaps we need another lockdown so that women and girls can just live out our daily lives without the risk of being brutally hurt? Should women all stay quietly at home after dark, or maybe carry weapons?”
“Author Julie Bindel, a lifelong feminist campaigner, wrote this morning: “If conviction rates for rape fall any lower in the UK, it might as well be decriminalised.” That has also been said many times in this place by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). Why is that still the case? Whatever the reasons are, they cannot be used as excuses. They must be fixed urgently. We need to see changes immediately. If every person who has been raped lay down in the street as though they had been murdered, we would be tripping over the bodies. If the bodies of women who had been killed by their former or current partners were there too, we would run out of space to walk.”
“It is a year since the nation held its breath, prayed in hope, and then received the terrible news. It was a body blow felt by women everywhere. Those grim headlines alerted us to the enormity of the problem, the sheer scale of male violence against women and girls. Women shared stories, organised and collectively shouted “No!” Every one of us had had, and has had, enough. In a country such as ours, there is no acceptable excuse or reasonable explanation on earth for the rise in violent crime against women and no excuse or explanation for the abysmally low prosecution rates. Most women never receive justice for rape; most do not even get to try.”
“Is simply signing a bigger cheque the solution? We need to look at the systemic problems and the solutions we can get from health professionals. We have some brilliant professionals in Canterbury, but they are desperate and they need help. Surely we need to look urgently at the structure and provision and the lack of uniformity across the UK. We must restore preventive mental health services in schools, hubs and communities, with professionals available to offer proper support to the currently more than 100 complex long-term cases I have. Many other MPs are desperate for help as well. I do not want to see any more parents crying in my surgery. Please let us get them some support before it is too late.”
“In some cases the young person has missed school for months, had problems for years, is self-harming or feeling suicidal. Parents have to leave their work and become full-time carers and campaigners just to secure an appointment for an initial assessment. The Labour party has announced today that we want all children to be seen within four weeks, but that would be a miracle for most of the children and families that contact my office. When we first started taking on those cases, we were frustrated and upset to meet people who had been waiting for, on average, around 18 months. It then grew to two years. A few weeks ago, I met a desperate mother who had been waiting for help for her child for four years. This is a huge crisis. The nation’s children and young people are being failed. What can we do?”
“The ones that we received today say that three quarters of children are not seen within four weeks of being referred to children’s mental health services. As bad as that sounds, the reality is so much worse. In the almost five years that I have been holding regular surgeries I have seen case after case where parents are beyond desperate. They arrive, often a mum and a grandma, sometimes with the child in tow, with that all-too-familiar huge black folder rammed full of copies of emails, statements or education and health care plan paperwork, and report after report that makes it blatantly obvious that urgent help is needed immediately. I see parents crying in my office or over Zoom every single week without fail. Their health is affected as well. The stress and anxiety that those parents experience is off the scale.”
“Here on the Opposition Benches we often refer to a crisis—the cost of living crisis, the fuel crisis and the poverty crisis—but the dire lack of children’s mental health services is exactly that. I need a stronger word to describe the absolute gaping void where even the most basic help, support and accessible services should be. As mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), I learned last week of a constituent whose 13-year-old daughter was sent from Whitstable to Manchester. Surely there can be nothing on earth more stressful or soul-destroying than being unable to get urgent help for your child when they are suffering. In debates such as this, our respective parties will send around statistics.”
“The people of east Kent are horrified and deeply upset by what the Chief Rabbi this morning called an “unspeakable tragedy” happening on our shores. We should be ashamed, too, that among the dead was a soldier who had served alongside British armed forces personnel and who reportedly felt unable to wait any longer for help to come here. I think the Home Secretary would agree that he was not an illegal migrant. Will the Government please act not simply to repel those human beings desperate enough to risk this incredibly dangerous crossing but to immediately open the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme and safe family reunion routes to prevent more deaths?”
“Instead of swimming with sharks in the Cayman Islands, we need to enable my constituents to swim in clean waters. Following the summer public meeting, I have continued to meet with Southern Water, as the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) has done. Individually, their representatives are good people who are willing to engage with groups such as the great Save Our Seas in Whitstable, and other Whitstable activist groups. It is the wider corporate attitude that urgently needs to change. We want to be able to swim, eat our shellfish and breathe healthy air. That should be something that we take for granted, instead of having to protest about it on a weekly basis.”
“Could it be that a profit-driven private company such as Southern Water would rather pay fines than invest in expensive but completely necessary upgrades to the sewerage infrastructure that would stop these incidents happening altogether? The damage to my community’s health, wellbeing and way of life is of far greater cost than that paid out by a private company. No wonder some of my constituents are now refusing to pay their water bills; they understandably feel that they have paid more than enough already. I echo my hon. Friends the Members for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), and others, in their view that companies responsible for providing these services should be publicly owned and controlled—not primarily driven by making money for shareholders.”
“In the summer I held a public meeting so that residents could demand answers and action from Southern Water, the company that is responsible for our waterworks and paid by us, for us, for the safe removal and treatment of waste. In July this year, Mr Justice Johnson handed down a record £90 million fine to Southern Water for thousands of illegal dumping incidents. That was just the latest in a list of fines dating back to 2007. One has to ask why, despite these frequent and increasingly huge fines, essentially nothing has changed. This is the greatest sewage scandal in this country since the great stink of 1858, which forced our predecessors in this place to take action and build the first public sewers.”
“Not only are we unable to swim or sail, but basic everyday things such as hanging our washing, opening our windows—including in my office—and walking the dog are impossible on the worst days. One of the loveliest aspects of living in such a beautiful part of the country is that, during the pandemic, our daily exercise was a walk around Whitstable harbour, taking the dog up to our local coastal nature reserve or just jogging along the seafront, and maybe picking up some locally caught seafood on the way home. Instead, we are now often avoiding a dip in the sea or a visit to the beach hut in case bits of human waste float past us. Instead of good, fresh, healthy sea air, our children have been gulping down lungfuls of foul-smelling polluted stuff that contains plenty of potentially toxic bacteria. No wonder my constituents have had enough.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for securing this debate. For several years, Whitstable, in my constituency, has suffered from the effects of sewage leaking—or, in actual fact, being dumped—into our seas along a beautiful stretch of the east Kent coast. More than 111,000 people clearly feel as angry about this as the nearly 900 constituents in my area who have signed this petition do. In a seaside town, it should go without saying that so much of our everyday way of life revolves around the sea. We have a fishing industry, swimming groups, sailing and paddleboard schools, and, of course, tourism—the heart of our economy. We should not just have to get used to these increasingly frequent incidents that keep us away from our beaches.”
“Would my hon. Friend agree with me and my beleaguered constituents in Whitstable that this is not an unusual occurrence, and that it is happening more and more frequently? On the Whitstable coast, for example, it is ruining the lives of kayakers, sailors and swimmers and ruining the tourist industry. The removal of the lines in the amendment that have teeth would be a real disappointment.”
“Jo talked about what we have in common, and that is something that inspires me every single day of my life. One thing I have in common with Jo is our friendship with my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), who has always been a great support—an encourager, a joker and a fantastic ally. Thanks to him for securing this debate today so that we can remember Jo and thank her for the real difference she brought to so many lives.”
“I wish I could read the names of all those women—not just some in the first cohort of the scheme with me, but the outstanding women I have met who continue to inspire and change lives for the better in their communities and the wider world. All of us owe our thanks to Jo not just for the incredible opportunity her legacy has given us, but for the lead she took and the work she did for humanitarian causes around the world and for the women who undoubtedly would be worse off if she had not shone a light on their needs. I was inspired by Jo’s passionate commitment to stop Brexit and by her humanity and compassion for displaced people seeking asylum. I am certain that she would stand here today and make her views heard on the idea of sending people in boats back to direct harm.”
“They are women such as Michelle Langan, who leads the Paper Cup Project in Liverpool to help to change the lives of rough sleepers in her region; Dr Kindy Sandhu, Coventry City councillor, academic extraordinaire and activist; Caroline Penn, formidable former Brighton councillor; Dr Allison Gardner, AI ceiling breaker as a leading woman in a traditionally male strand of academia; Denise Christie, firefighter and a regional secretary of the Fire Brigades Union; Anna Smith, deputy leader of Cambridge City Council; Salma Arif, the first female British Asian health lead on Leeds City Council; and our much-missed sister Assia Shah, who we sadly lost at the end of last year while she was working as a hospital chaplain and caring for those with covid.”
“Those other women have all kept making a difference, too, in continuing to stand for Parliament and in becoming councillors, community leaders, leaders of non-governmental organisations, activists, union pioneers and women on the frontline of the public sector and the fight against the covid pandemic.”
“We had had just two of our training sessions when the snap election was announced in 2017. I had sat with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) in a hotel bar and told her I was thinking I might practise standing as an MP in 2020 in an area that she knew well. We joked that it was never, ever in a million years possible for Canterbury to be anything other than the safest Conservative seat in England. So, with absolutely nothing to lose, I practised standing in 2017, with that brilliant group of women on my phone 24/7. Ten of those women stood for Parliament in 2017, and two of us got here: the first woman ever to represent Canterbury and the first Sikh woman ever to be elected, my hon. Friend—my great friend—the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill).”
“So my poor mum was on the verge of calling an ambulance when she got a snotty, sobbing and totally incoherent phone call from her daughter, who had found an email from Labour Women’s Network in her spam folder with an offer of a place in the scheme. Women like me—a nobody struggling to raise my boys while working part-time as a teaching assistant and filling every other minute with running my local branch of the Labour party—do not often get breaks like that. It was my Charlie Bucket moment; I had found my golden ticket. Jo’s gift to me was a group of women from across the UK: 55 sisters, all with different strengths, backgrounds and experiences, and all with different reasons for applying to the scheme. I have made lifelong friendships with some incredibly special women, all of whom have made an impact.”
“A few months later, there was an announcement at the Labour party conference that one of Jo’s legacies would be to help women like me—members of the party who wanted to progress as councillors or activists, or maybe even one day follow in her footsteps and stand to be an MP. The Jo Cox Women in Leadership Scheme was launched. I applied—at midnight on deadline day, as always—and did not expect to hear anything back, but at least I had tried. Fast-forward a couple more months and there was a little bit of a buzz on social media: women I knew of had started to talk about checking their inboxes. It emerged that a couple of thousand women had applied for about 50 places. There was no way on earth that I was going to get one of them.”
“It is a real pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) and her incredibly moving maiden speech. That she won her seat on my birthday was a great birthday present. I was not lucky enough to know Jo or to be able to call her a friend. However, she had a direct effect on my life that I would love to be able to thank her for in person. We all remember where we were when we heard the terrible news that day, the shock and disbelief, and watching the news over and over, hoping that the headline would somehow change, and desperately willing for it not to be true.”
“As the Prime Minister knows, non-governmental organisations such as the excellent Kent Refugee Action Network provide vital support to those fleeing conflict—and, as he mentioned, that is via fundraising—but does he also acknowledge that the state has a duty of care regarding the mental health of traumatised refugees, including children? If he does, how can he assure the House that this will be possible given that the current average waiting time for young people to access a basic mental health assessment is two to three years?”
“Will local authorities, especially those in Kent, receive sufficient financial support to house asylum seekers in suitable accommodation? I make one final plea to the Government: listen to our constituents, to our NGOs, to feminist activists such as Sophie Walker and her change.org petition, which has now reached 200,000 people signing—”
“Many women here are angry, extremely worried and determined to fight for the rights of our Afghan sisters. I have been inundated with messages and emails from people who want to help. The Government must listen and assure all of them and all of us that they are carrying out the will of the majority of the British people. In my constituency, our excellent Kent Refugee Action Network, as part of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, has laid out what is needed. They are asking questions to which they need urgent answers relating to family reunion and the mental health of young people from Afghanistan, which has already been severely impacted. What happens to those who are in the UK and who have been previously refused asylum because Kabul was considered safe? Can their cases now be considered urgently?”
“What are the people of Britain, as well as those experienced NGOs and current and former service personnel, telling us to do? The message is loud and clear: we must offer safe routes out, and we must offer asylum—no ifs or buts. It is deeply disturbing that the rights and fundamental freedoms of women and girls are under serious threat. Just over a quarter of the democratically elected MPs in Afghanistan’s House of the People were women, but it appears that no women at all are now represented by the new all-male regime. Men with guns promising that women may still be allowed to work and access education, with many caveats, will undoubtedly set off alarm bells for the women journalists, teachers, business owners, NGO workers, doctors, artists, politicians and judges who all face much uncertainty in the coming months.”
“We have all seen the footage—the shocking images of Afghan cities that now look like the wild west, with huge guns slung casually over every shoulder, shots ringing out in warning and an unmistakable exploding threat. As we look on in disbelief, our sense of helplessness and impotence grows by the hour. The situation in Afghanistan is one that very few in this House can really imagine, but the few among us who have served there have told us exactly what is going on in several incredibly moving speeches. It is fundamentally our duty to exhaust every possible avenue, make every possible effort and do all in our power to help those in need. We are all they have. We are safe and free, and we must offer that safety and freedom to those at risk of losing theirs. So what should we do?”
“How do we ensure that the balance between freedom of speech and hateful prejudice is maintained? Is a set of rules and a threat of financial penalties the best way to protect freedom of speech? Why are the proposals framed around freedom of speech, not academic freedom? As the academic Shereen Benjamin writes: “Academic freedom specifically refers to the freedom of all members of universities…to pursue whatever lines of enquiry they decide, in research, teaching and public engagement, without fear or favour.” While I broadly support the aims of this Bill and think that it raises some really important points for debate, I do not believe legislation right now is entirely necessary; it seems a little like a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”
“Perhaps those who think so have missed the testimony of survivors or the very real evidence that still exists on the sites of those atrocious acts of evil. So, too, must we be allowed to dissect our past role in the repulsive histories of slavery and colonialism. Those facts must be taught in an honest and unfiltered way in order for us to view them from where we are now and in the context of our society today. There has to be a balanced approach, and we have to be able to entrust universities and their staff and unions with this issue, but I am not convinced that legislation is the way to go. Universities are under increasing commercial pressure, and in a more competitive market, threatening legal action over their decisions is not going to help when they have been under considerable financial strain.”
“Crucially, in such cases, the women and some men themselves are then considered to be banned as people and become the subject of targeted harassment, both in their places of work and across social media. It is vital that women are allowed to speak, vital that we are allowed to question, and vital that we are able to keep pushing open doors that have previously been closed to us. Of course, academic freedom and freedom of speech must also be balanced. Students and staff have to feel safe from hate and prejudice. Recently, the all-party group against antisemitism, of which I am a vice-chair, has written several letters to the vice-chancellor of Bristol University to condemn the views expressed by one of their staff. Holocaust denial is not a legitimate opinion or a valid point of view.”