Afraid to speak freely? Join the club! This week, Freedom in the Arts (FITA) published Afraid to Speak Freely, our report co-authored by Prof Jo Phoenix, surveying the state of freedom of expression in the arts.
As the title suggests, “fear”, a word used 31 times in the report, is the defining experience of the 483 people responding to our survey online last Autumn. Our research evidences that there is a deeply held perception amongst UK arts workers and artists that political orthodoxy now “governs the arts”; those “questioning it, adding nuance or rejecting it risk grave career and personal consequences”.
Our report compares freedom of expression in the sector today against that of the pre-Covid, pre-BLM arts scene in February 2020. We adopted the 18 open text and closed response questions of Arts Professional’s (AP) 2020 pulse survey. Back in 2020, AP’s survey evidenced disturbing trends of self-censorship and what then AP editor, Liz Hill termed, “deeply damaging behavioural norms”. Despite the warnings of AP’s report, it was largely over-shadowed by the Covid outbreak and the sector’s existential moment on 16th March when then PM, Boris Johnson advised the nation to “avoid … theatres”.
5 years later the trends of intolerance AP highlighted in 2020 are even more accentuated. Whilst in 2020 53 per cent of 505 respondents had themselves experienced intimidation or harassment for speaking out about issues affecting the arts, by 2025 this figure had grown to 80 per cent of 479 respondents. And where’s the pressure coming from? Overwhelmingly from colleagues. As our report indicates, “collegial relations are deteriorating”. In 2020, few respondents (only 30 per cent) stated where pressure was coming from in their professional lives. By 2025 75 per cent of respondents were clear; colleagues and indeed friends were the source. This indicates “that artists and art professionals are experiencing intimidation …. ostracism and harassment by those most closely connected with them and their practice.”
This is the state of the paranoid arts world, in which the vast majority of people believe in the sector’s responsibility to protect freedom of expression — in our survey 75 per cent said as much — whilst bearing witness to the breakdown of that very principle. Our survey indicates that over half of our respondents never or rarely speak freely, compared with a fifth 5 years earlier. As one respondent wryly noted — back in 2020, when things were not as bad — the sector “believes it is owed artistic freedom but doesn’t tolerate freedom of speech within its own ranks.”
Here we are in 2025, and there is no getting around the hot topic of women’s rights and gender identity. Call it what you will, this issue has torn the sector apart. Over 60 per cent of our respondents referred to this topic and many noted that any divergence from the view that “trans women are women” would be “career-ending”. In a liberal sector, like the arts, in which the number of “non-binary” workers, whilst tiny, is growing, it’s not surprising this debate has become so ferocious.
With the Supreme Court ruling last month that the term sex in the 2010 Equality Act means and has always meant biological sex, it’s fair to say full scale war has broken out in the sector. On 2nd May British Council trustee and CEO of Bristol arts centre, Watershed, Clare Reddington, initiated an open letter to the Equality and Human Rights Commission declaring “people should be free to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity” and that they would not be “policing” the toilets people use in arts venues.
Reddington’s letter is part of a wave of virtue signalling “open letters” from the cultural sector currently doing the rounds, obtusely declaring their signatories’ objection to UK law, and indeed the long-standing social contract, of providing and respecting staff and audiences single sex facilities.
I say virtue signalling because in Watershed’s case, Reddington led an extended consultation in 2022 to ensure her arts centre is equipped with an impressive smorgasbord of facilities, including for that rare breed of arts audiences, “males and females”.
So it is odd she now publicly writes that the EHRC’s interim guidance is “profoundly unfair” and is a form of “segregation”, when her very organisation best meets the Commission’s edict to ensure services and workplaces do not be put trans people in “a position where there are no facilities for them to use”.
In light of the judgement, equality solicitor Audrey Ludwig has warned signatories to open letters such as Reddington’s that they may well be exposing their organisations’ trustees and indeed themselves to litigation. Trustees of Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisations, and indeed all charities, should also be mindful of their duties to comply with UK law under their public funding agreements and their insurances.
That said, for many on the other side of this debate, the true purpose of such open letters is to act as a warning to dissenters in the industry. Whilst Laura Pye, CEO of National Museums Liverpool — a group of seven museums directly funded by Government to the value of nearly £22million a year — naively exclaimed in Museums Journal last week “Can’t we all just be nicer to each other?”, respondents to our survey, many of whom are gender critical, reported being subject to “psychological torment, social ostracisation, [and] attempts at economic sabotage” by colleagues.
Fear, self-censorship and the hectoring of colleagues is now profoundly shaping artistic practice
Sex and gender is not the only topic in which UK artists and arts workers can find themselves in hot water. The Israel-Palestine conflict sees, unsurprisingly, strong opinions, with many arts organisations actively taking a stance on the subject, and others caving to boycott campaigns. This weekend, music venue Bristol Beacon cancelled a performance by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Israeli singer Dudu Tassa due to planned protests threatening the venue’s safety against Tassa’s presence, proving the “hecklers’ veto” is having an all too real impact on arts programming.
Fear, self-censorship and the hectoring of colleagues is now profoundly shaping artistic practice and not simply through politicised programming. One of the most troubling comments made in Afraid to Speak Freely is that of a poet who reflected on how his artistic process has changed over 15 years in the field. When interviewed he described a time, early in his career, when he wrote a provocative poem from the perspective of a problematic character. In today’s moralistic arts scene he felt he “might struggle to write that now … there is this nagging voice that tells me I wouldn’t access that stuff [in my unconscious] now.” The popularity of historical fiction amongst writers, the chance to write without fear of contemporary fury, is no accident.
“Afraid to Speak Freely” must be a wake up call to the arts. Too many practitioners and arts workers feel intimidated — fearful of their own peers. Strategies to guard against group-think and promote and protect diversity of opinion are long overdue in our sector, arguments we will be presenting to Baroness Hodge as part of her review of Arts Council England this summer. Now, when arts people seem to be openly declaring they will not abide by UK equality legislation, we need to see strong leadership publicly committing to protect freedom of expression and support the rule of law. These are basic tenets of our democracy.
Afraid to Speak Freely is free to download here and here.
