In addition, the amendment should impose a 12-month statute of limitations on the sin of bringing the company into disrepute so you can’t be investigated for saying something un-PC more than a year ago, even if you said it in front of colleagues. That’s why the FSU is campaigning for an amendment to the Employment Rights Act 1996 to make it impossible for companies to discipline workers for saying something non-woke outside their place of work. But we need comparable legislation to safeguard the rights of people like Maureen in the workplace. The proposed Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill will strengthen protections for free speech at English universities – not Scottish ones, unfortunately, where they’re badly needed. A whopping 40 per cent further said they’d concealed their opinions on ethical or religious matters for fear of being judged. According to a 2020 poll by Survation, 27 per cent of students said they’d ‘hidden’ their real views because they were worried about damaging their careers. The real purpose of these ‘punishment beatings’, of course, is to send a message to everyone else: if you breathe a word against our progressive ideology, you’ll be next up against the wall.Īnd it works. Meanwhile, the organisation Christian Concern is helping Maureen take legal action against L&Q.īut for every victim of cancel culture who is able to seek justice, there are thousands who suffer in silence – kicked out of their jobs and consigned to the dole queue just because they’ve said something that ‘triggered’ the woke witchfinder generals. With our help, Jeremy fought back in court and got a judgement of ‘unfair dismissal’. (In case you’re puzzled, his use of the word ‘caliphate’ was considered to be anti-Muslim.) Like Maureen, he was dismissed for breaching social-media policy and bringing the company into disrepute. It didn’t matter that he’d said it outside the workplace on a personal account. Last year, we helped a man called Jeremy Sleath who’d been fired by West Midlands Trains for celebrating the reopening of the pubs on ‘Freedom Day’ by saying on Facebook that he didn’t want to live in a ‘Muslim alcohol-free caliphate’ for the rest of his life. Notwithstanding the fact that she’d worked for them for 13 years and had an unblemished record, Maureen was sacked for breaching the company’s social-media policy and bringing L&Q into disrepute.Īt the FSU, we encounter this excuse over and over again. They deluged her employer – L&Q – with demands that she be dismissed, calling her a ‘bigoted moron’. They reproduced an image of her leaflet on Twitter and accused her of ‘hate speech’ and breaking the law. ‘Natural marriage between a man and a woman is the fundamental building block for a successful society, and the safest environment for raising children,’ she wrote in an election leaflet when she was running to become Mayor of Lewisham.Īnd that simple expression of Maureen’s orthodox Christian beliefs was enough – seized on by local LGBT activists as an opportunity to cancel her. Yet she was fired from her job at a South London housing association because she said things about marriage that some people judged politically incorrect.Īs it happens, she was expressing her views as part of a public, democratic debate – which you might have hoped would bring her additional protection. Well, try telling all that to Maureen Martin. We’re just disappointed that male, pale and stale Conservatives aren’t on the telly as often as we used to be. People like me aren’t really concerned about free speech, they say. According to them, it’s only a figment of the imagination of Right-wing culture warriors. AS THE head of the Free Speech Union (FSU), I’m often told by members of the woke Left that cancel culture isn’t real.
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