Earlier this year Parliaments Joint Committee on Human Rights invited people from various Universities including Sussex to come and explain why the Universities as a whole and the Students Unions in particular appeared to be limiting the speech from some of the extremist members of groups such as UKIP. The rationale behind free speech as expected by the Government on University Campuses is based on the idea that some funds come from Government to support Universities and they believe that such places should live up to their vague and distant memory of what was happening in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s. The complaints by UKIP were listened to very carefully by Brexiteers such as Jo Johnson and his older Brother during their shared campaign to vote to leave the EU. The reality is that this freedom of speech is something that Parliament is very unwilling to demonstrate itself by example, getting very irritated when people from certain backgrounds such as Palestine and the IRA are invited into parts of the Parliamentary campus to speak. True leadership is clearly something that demands setting positive examples, not telling people to act in a way that the ‘leader’ is unwilling to tolerate personally.

Based on the hearings to the committee and supported by their initial responses, the reason why the students unions act in a manner to ensure that extreme views are not promoted and that where they are introduced that balancing views from other speakers are available is based entirely on the Charity rulings over politics. The strongest of these and the most recent was introduced by the coalition Government as part of the lobbying bill and also builds on previous rules that charities will not promote party political views. Ironically it is the same Tory Government that is now upset that freedom of certain views as they see it are being withheld from campuses. I have written on this issue in the past on this blog site. Several weeks after the response to the hearings by the committee members, the CEO of the Charity Commission has responded. She has failed to say very much in her press release so it remains to be seen how much the two elements she refers to will be changed. The press release which is available here states the following:

Helen Stephenson, chief executive of the Charity Commission said:

I am absolutely clear that charitable students’ unions, universities and other higher education providers can challenge traditional boundaries, encourage the free exchange of views and host speakers with a range of opinions, including those who might be controversial or divide opinion.

These activities are entirely in line with their aims to promote education. Our role as regulator is to provide guidance that enables trustees of all charities carry out their activities while complying with their legal duties and responsibilities as charities and where necessary hold trustees to account against that guidance.

The response sets out the Commission’s role as regulator of students’ unions and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It stresses that students’ unions and HEIs play an important role in providing discussion and debate, encouraging students to develop political awareness, to debate, to challenge their own views and perceptions and to form views on political issues.

The Commission says it agrees that freedom of speech should form part of students’ unions’ and HEIs’ activities in carrying out their educational charitable purposes. The regulator says that, as the Joint Committee has acknowledged, freedom of speech is not absolute and must be within the limits of the law.

The Commission says its guidance is an important tool for explaining its regulatory approach to all charities, and is written to enable and support all charities to recognise and manage the risks that arise from some activities that may present higher risks in order to support them to go ahead.

Ahead of the JCHR’s report, the regulator had already committed to reviewing two of its publications:

• chapter 5 of its guidance ‘Protecting your charity from harm’ to make sure it sufficiently stresses what charities can do, to support trustees to recognise, and then to manage and mitigate, risks to their charities.
• its internal staff guidance on students’ unions (OG48) to ensure it sufficiently reflects relevant aspects of freedom of speech when students’ unions carry out activities, and ensure a clearer distinction is made between the responsibilities of the trustees, students’ union bodies, student societies and the broader membership.

Of course Helen Stephenson is limited in what she can do and say by the same people who are complaining about a lack of freedom of speech on University Campuses, whilst simultaneously getting very angry about Charities which they have wrongly accused of supporting political parties. Their accusations towards charities arose primarily when charities challenged the coalition and now the Tory Government over policies which fail to deal with needs in our communities. These same criticisms would come about if Labour was in power. Nevertheless perhaps the changes to the two documents mentioned above will go some way to appeasing the views of people like Jo Johnson who started this off, and lead to a modest change to Campuses without wrecking the Lobbying Bill rules that the poor Charity Commission has to explain to such charities.