The Knight's Tale

It’s been 100 days since Sir Keir Starmer formed his new government and it’s fair to say that they have not been great for freedom in the UK. From the resurrection of Non-Crime Hate Incidents through to the establishment of a new unit commissioned with delivering a Bill to ban trans-inclusive conversion therapy, it’s quite the shopping list of free expression issues. Sadly – though perhaps not surprisingly – the July halting of the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act is now having real life consequences. On 10th October, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman was due to speak about her career and life in politics to the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA), which she led 20 years ago as a student. But the event was cancelled due to safety concerns after “Cambridge for Palestine”, a campaign group, called on supporters to “no platform” the “far Right”, claiming her “hyper-authoritarian populist policies on migration, policing and protest” represented “everything we stand against”. The FSU has since reached out to Ms Braverman and CUCA offering to pay the security costs to allow the talk to go ahead at a later date. An editorial piece in The Times  lays out that paper’s own concerns for students and free thinking. Meanwhile, Nottingham university has slapped a trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, apparently because they contain ‘expressions of Christian faith’. Yet writing a collection of stories about characters on a pilgrimage from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket without mentioning the Church, Jesus or the Bible would be quite the achievement! We end on an upbeat note with a mention of the upcoming Battle of Ideas. The event takes place in London this weekend, 19-20 October and tickets are available here, but FSU members can get a discounted price using the link provided in the Weekly News Round-Up. ‘That's Debatable!’  is edited by Jason Clift.