Workers must defend their right to private opinions

Britain is stumbling into a free-speech disaster. Three months ago, the Adam Smith Institute gatecrashed the news with a carefully-drafted Free Speech Bill which would have put into our law something like the American First Amendment, aimed at stopping the government limiting your right to speak your mind except in very limited cases. No political party has taken this up yet, but there is hope – are you listening, Kemi and Nigel, since you could be on to a winner?

The problem hasn’t gone away. Last week, an important private members’ bill on a related subject slid quietly into the House of Lords, courtesy of Tory peer Lord Moynihan. The Regulated Professions (Freedom of Speech) Bill aims to protect professionals from attempts by any professional regulator to penalise them for ‘off-duty expressive conduct’ – that is, anything they say outside the actual practice of their profession.

The bill is uncompromising. The only exceptions to protected speech are threats of violence, threats of harm relating to professional duties, serious sexual offences or actual conviction for an offence which directly affects the ability to practise the profession, or carries imprisonment. That’s it. Offensiveness, inconsistency with policies of a professional governing body, and allegedly bringing a profession into disrepute are specifically made inadmissible grounds. Where protections apply, regulators are barred from imposing penalties, disadvantages, compulsory training, or any other coercive measures.

This matters big-time. It’s all very well to say that the general law allows you to speak your mind, but that doesn’t mean very much if an employer can sack you for expressing a view they happen to disagree with. And it’s easy to forget that it isn’t a matter of just a few people. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, financial professionals, architects, chartered surveyors, chemists, physiotherapists, nurses, teachers, social workers – the list of those who have to watch carefully what they say because the regulator might come down on them if they step out of line is a long one.

Furthermore, regulators can use these powers fairly drastically. Alleged Islamophobia, racism and sexism expressed online, or simply matters seen as offensive or contrary to a profession’s ‘values’, are common grounds for people being hit with severe professional penalties or being drummed out entirely. The basis varies, but it’s often a fairly open-ended rule that they must not bring their profession into disrepute, or affect the respect the public has for members of it.

This should worry us. It is obviously bad for the professionals themselves. With professional sanctions, it’s not merely a matter of losing a job, but livelihood: even if you find someone somewhere else who knows your views and is happy to give you a job, they’re not allowed to employ you.

Take the Manchester teacher who, in a series of social media posts in 2023 and 2024, suggested using the Royal Navy to prevent illegal immigration. ‘Just get rid of the lot of them, if they hate this country so much they should fuck off’, he said in a separate post. This is a perfectly lawful view to hold. Yet three months ago, he was barred from every classroom in the country, for the rest of his life.

It’s also bad for the professions. It is perverse to assume that respect for a profession increases in proportion to its suppression of opinions that the great and the good don’t like. The inexorable effect of the present regime is that with the legally backed weeding out of the shocking, the eccentric and the maverick, we will end up with monochrome, boring people whose chief skill is not offending anyone.

That’s why we need to support Lord Moynihan’s bill. Unlike many private members’ bills, it is principled, well-drafted, and entirely practical. Indeed, there is history behind it. Three years ago, lawyers in the socially conservative Canadian province of Alberta objected to their regulator’s imposition of compulsory training in so-called indigenous cultural competency. Sensing the public mood, the provincial parliament last December passed the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act. The terms of this entirely wholesome law, which seems to have been successful, inspired the present bill – in many cases, its wording is the same.

As a private member’s bill, we have to admit that the chances of it getting anywhere are almost nil. Not only would it need either overwhelming support from peers or government support (which it doesn’t have), the Blob and its Labour allies will see it as poisonous.

But that’s not the point. The more people know about it, and the more publicity it gets, the bigger the marker it will put down. Brexit and scepticism over international law were once supposedly cranks’ ideas, but one is now reality and the other official policy of two opposition parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK. It’s time we did the same for a muscular approach to the right of free speech. The Regulated Professions (Freedom of Speech) Bill is an ideal start. The more noise people make about it now, the better.

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.