An employment incident last week from Lancashire was both entirely predictable and at the same time deeply disturbing. Simon Pearson, an English teacher at FE institution Preston College, posted on Facebook about Lucy Connolly, the wife and mother jailed last year for 31 months for an inflammatory tweet after the Southport riots. He didn’t defend her (indeed, he said she had been wrong). But he commented on the contrast between her case and the authorities’ foot-dragging over the Manchester Airport attackers and the makers of incendiary antisemitic comments, and made reference to two-tier justice.
Reaction came quickly. He was reported to management for racism and Islamophobia by a Muslim representative of the teachers’ union, the NEU. The College investigated. It then summarily fired him for violating its policies and bringing it into disrepute. He has since sued for unfair dismissal, saying that he was sacked on the impermissible ground of philosophical belief. We shall have to see what happens. But whatever takes place in the employment tribunal, this is a case that should set alarm bells ringing.
For one thing there is an obvious, and very serious, freedom of speech angle here. Simon Pearson was not sacked for agreeing with Lucy Connolly’s ill-advised rant: all he said was that even if she had acted badly her imprisonment for it was arguably unfair. But that availed him nothing: he still lost his job. This is getting very close to saying that support for free speech is itself impermissible speech. If it is, then Heaven help us.
But it gets worse. The initiative for this firing did not come from the employers. It came from (essentially) an Islamist pressure group which, acting through a union representative, leant heavily on it to punish someone they disagreed with. This is doubly bad. It is one thing for activists to lobby governments to promote their interests at the expense of their opponents’. It is something completely different for them to do what was done here, which is to engage in do-it-yourself silencing of a dissenter by getting at his employer and persuading that employer to deprive him of his livelihood. This is, put simply, an outrage.
Of course, all this was done through a union, a body one might have thought would instinctively protect workers’ right to speak their mind outside the workplace without recriminations from the boss. But no. Like the UCU with its disgraceful surrender to mob opinion in the case of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University in 2021, the NEU has it seems turned its back on any such idea, and instead decided to side with the lanyard class in helping to make sure that people who upset the identity politics apple-cart are made to shut up. (Freddie Attenborough has written about this issue at length.)
What is worrying is that in Britain conduct like this is all too permissible. Under our law, unless a worker can show that their sacking referred to a protected characteristic such as religion or philosophical belief, his employer’s right to control what he says off the job is essentially a matter of private contract. If his terms of employment forbid public disagreement with the employer’s values, or the making of controversial remarks in public, that’s it: it’s simply a question of construing those terms and seeing whether he has broken them.
The worker should be guaranteed freedom to speak his mind
It doesn’t need to be this way. French lawyers, for example, regard it as axiomatic not only that we have freedom of speech, but also that we don’t have to hang up that right when crossing our employer’s threshold. In Britain we desperately need similar protection. We need a legal provision which says, in effect, that whatever a worker’s contract of employment says it is impermissible to discipline him for the expression of views off the job. Obviously there have to be exceptions. You’d have to exclude direct denigration of the employer or other workers, or statements directly affecting the employee’s ability to do his job (think a clergyman promoting devil-worship, or a paid Labour Party publicist pushing the virtues of the Tories): but beyond that the worker should be guaranteed freedom to speak his mind.
The advantages are there for all to see. Workers will gain. Employers will know to think twice about caving to demands to sack workers for their views, and indeed have a useful excuse to present to pressure groups who seek to lean on them to do so.
What chance for this idea? Labour won’t like it, its top brass and most of its MPs being instinctively spooked at the idea of individual free speech. Furthermore, it is enormously convenient for Labour to be able to say, when a worker is sacked for expressing awkward views, that it’s simply a matter of the civil law taking its course and avoiding the political flak that might come their way if the state were in some way involved (for example, in a prosecution).
But that’s Labour. A great deal of discomfort could be caused to them on this matter by the Tories — or what is left of them — and more importantly by Reform. If he has any sound political instinct, Nigel Farage should right now be adding to his platform a promise to give the just-about-managing worker the right to say what he really believes whatever his employer thinks. It’s costless, it’s populist, it promotes workers’ rights and it’s an almost guaranteed vote-gatherer. Over to you, Nigel.
