Lords
Proceedings
8 July 2026
Police Leadership Commission Report
My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. I welcome this report, which contains many sensible suggestions.
Gavin Stephens, the chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, announced a review last month of guidance contained in the NPCC and College of Policing’s r…
Lords
Proceedings
29 June 2026
Media Green Paper
My Lords, the Green Paper does not simply propose that the prominence regime be confined to public service media, including public broadcasters; it suggests that it should also be extended to news publishers. Therefore, if some news publishers are going to be included in the prominence regime and gi…
Lords
Proceedings
17 June 2026
State of Extremism Report
My Lords, I declare an interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. The issue of how to tackle extremism while preserving the right to freedom of expression falls squarely within the terms of reference of the review carried out at the request of the Home Secretary by the noble Lord, Lord Macdo…
Lords
Proceedings
16 June 2026
Social Media Ban for Under-16s
My Lords, I declare an interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. I have read through the DSIT document published yesterday, Growing Up in the Online World: Progress Statement, but I could not find a single reference to Sections 15 or 16 of the Online Safety Act: namely, the duty not to remo…
Lords
Proceedings
10 June 2026
Concealed Surveillance Equipment in Government Offices and Vehicles
I declare my interest as director of the Free Speech Union. Can the Minister give some indication of when Section 9 of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act is likely to commence? I understand that the Government are keeping it under review. This is the section that requires English universit…
Lords
Proceedings
9 June 2026
Digital Safety: Children
My Lords, I declare an interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. Can the Minister tell us how the Government intend to safeguard against the obvious risks of requiring technology companies such as Apple to scan private messages before they are sent or received—also known, I believe, as clie…
Lords
Proceedings
8 June 2026
School Admissions: Selective Inclusion
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Knowledge Schools Trust. In light of this Sutton Trust report, does the Minister share my misgivings about the Government’s decision to impose VAT on independent school fees? The 30,000 pupils who have now left the independent sector will be beating…
Lords
Committee Stage
4 June 2026
AI Regulation Bill
My thanks go to my noble friend Lord Holmes for securing this debate.
The last thing that one of the few sectors in the British economy that is growing needs is more regulation. The example of Anthropic referring Mythos to the AI Security Institute in order to do a safety evaluation shows that AI c…
Lords
Debate
16 April 2026
5 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, we return to the extremely important subject of the regulation of chatbots, and I am grateful to all those who have engaged constructively on this issue throughout the Bill’s passage. We all share a determination to keep people, especially children, safe in what is a fast-changing online w…
My Lords, the supporters of Motion V1 have decided, in the interest of time, not to speak, but they are very keen to indicate that there is passionate support across the House for what I will say now. Also, I have cut my speech very short, so that we can get to the vote.
I am grateful to the Minist…
+3 more contributions in this session
Lords
Oral Questions
25 March 2026
Media Freedom Coalition
I am very happy to take that up with my right honourable friend the Secretary of State at DSIT. I am sure she would be fascinated and interested in the points that the noble Lord raises and will wish to provide a response as soon as she can.
Lords
Debate
18 March 2026
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I oppose government Amendment 429B in this group. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. Like my noble friends, I will try to be brief.
As several noble Lords have already pointed out, this amendment would grant the Secretary of State at the Department for Science…
Lords
Proceedings
16 March 2026
Social Cohesion Action Plan
My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. It is not particularly helpful to accuse those who have expressed concern that this definition will operate like a Muslim blasphemy law by the backdoor of spreading dangerous disinformation, not least because knowingly spreadi…
Lords
Debate
11 March 2026
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Strasburger, for co-sponsoring this amendment. I was disappointed to learn that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has apparently changed his mind. In Committee, he said:
“I support this amendment as a necessary check on the expansion of …
Lords
Debate
9 March 2026
5 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I support Amendment 387B. I declare my interest as a director of the Free Speech Union.
I am grateful to the Minister for summarising the final report of the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council on non-crime hate incidents, for the courtesy he has shown me and the c…
Perhaps I could briefly add something to what the noble Baroness has just said. Just to clarify, I think that the kinds of remarks that she is talking about that were made about her son would be recorded and would meet the new criteria under the anti-social behaviour incident regime, which, as I und…
+3 more contributions in this session
Lords
Debate
9 March 2026
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I declare my interest as director of the Free Speech Union. I too share the reservations of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, about the Government’s decision today to publish an official definition of anti-Muslim hostility and to appoint a tsar to ensure that it is observed. There are alread…
Lords
Debate
4 March 2026
2 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
That is the second or third time that the 2021 report of the Law Commission of England and Wales has been referred to in this debate. To clarify, that report clearly and strongly recommended not including sex as a protected, aggravated characteristic in the charging or sentencing regime. It set out …
I thank the Minister for his response and, on the basis that I have understood him correctly that none of these amendments or the Government’s intention of commencing the new Clause 4B of the Public Order Act is intended to encourage the police to investigate misgendering on social media—I can see t…
Lords
Proceedings
4 March 2026
Security Update
My Lords, I declare an interest as a director of the Free Speech Union. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said that, because our universities are so financially dependent on China, there may be a risk of interference at the behest of the Chinese in academic freedom and free speech. The noble Lord recomm…
Lords
Debate
4 March 2026
2 contributions
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. Between them, my three amendments address a single, straightforward question: should misgendering a trans person be treated as a criminal offence, still less an aggravated one? The answer is clearly no, and I hope the Minister…
The court can already take all the aggravating factors into account, save for hostility to sex. If a crime is aggravated by one of three of the four aggravators that the Bill would introduce into the charging regime, the CPS can flag those as aggravating factors and they can be taken into account at…
Lords
Proceedings
26 February 2026
Transnational Repression in the UK (JCHR Report)
My Lords, it was a privilege to be present to listen to my noble friend’s wonderful maiden speech.
This is a brilliant and long overdue report. The committee said it had received
“credible evidence that a number of states have engaged in acts of transnational repression on UK soil”.
The report al…
Lords
Proceedings
24 February 2026
Labour Together and APCO Worldwide: Cabinet Office Review
My Lords, I declare an interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. To answer the point made earlier, when our website was subject to a cyber attack and the names of our, for the most part, small donors—who had donated to campaigns such as defending Hamit Coskun, on trial for burning the Koran…
Lords
Oral Questions
23 February 2026
Free Speech Complaints Scheme
Students can already express complaints through the Office of the Independent Adjudicator. The plan for the complaints scheme was that it should focus on staff, visiting speakers and members. The noble Lord has talked to me about his alternative proposal. It is one that, along with other options, we…
Lords
Oral Questions
9 February 2026
Jimmy Lai: Prison Sentence
We have recently introduced many measures around higher education that would be relevant to that which the noble Lord outlined to us. I do not know whether we need to activate that particular section in the Act, but we are alive to the concerns that he raises and the Department for Education is work…
Lords
Debate
3 February 2026
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, in speaking to my Amendment 243A, I declare my interests as the director of the Free Speech Union and a member of the Knowledge Schools Trust.
The amendment would stop safeguarding policies and procedures in schools being misused for political purposes, a prime example being the recent ca…