This week, Parliament News held two well attended events in the House of Lords.
The first talk, in the beautiful Committee Room Four overlooking the river, sponsored by Lord Jackson of Peterborough, pulled together an expert panel, Marco Forgione, Lord Graham Evans, and Dr Christopher Snowdon to discuss the issue of free trade.
Mr Forgione drew on his work at the Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade, to advocate for what he described as “fair trade”, a form of free trade that tries to balance free trade with other country specific factors.
Former MP and businessman Lord Evans, who had a two-decade long career at companies including BAE and Hewlett Packard, while supportive of freer trade, talked about the need to safeguard sovereign capabilities, and how the loss of manufacturing in certain areas had adversely impacted whole communities.
Dr Snowdon, who works at IEA and has published multiple books and academic papers, went further, taking a much more purest approach to the issue, referencing the benefits of free trade and its role driving economic growth and raising nearly a billion people out of absolute poverty.
Challenged about the impact of Brexit, Mr Forgione, said that five years of uncertainty had damaged the economy, but trade deals with India, the CTTP and US had the potential to boost growth. A view echoed by the rest of the Panel.
Lord Evans, raised concerns that barriers to trade along with “eye watering” levels of taxation and over regulation had slashed growth and posed a significant threat to economy and jobs, drawing on the crisis in the manufacturing and hospitality sectors.
Dr Snowdon, also took aim at the historic preoccupation of policy makers to worry about the balance of trade, citing a catalogue of tariffs that had been introduced to safeguard inefficient EU industries and producers, covering everything from whale meat to mangos. Astonishingly many of these remain in place despite Brexit.
The event even went over time as those attending asked a series of questions on topics as diverse as President Trump to how some tariffs and taxes were increasingly yielding lower returns.
Just 24 hours later and we held our second event of the week. Also well attended, with more parliamentarians and members of the public filling Committee 3a the venue, the expert panel we assembled, included Lord Young of Acton, journalist and campaigner Sam Armstrong, Michael Robinson, Executive Director of the SPUC, the UK leading pro-life campaign group and the hugely respected and experienced journalist David Maddox, the political editor of the Independent, to talk try and answer the question, “Is free speech really under threat in the UK?”.
Kicking off with Lord Young, who unequivocally said free speech was under threat, he cited more than dozen laws passed from the 1980s which impinged on an individual’s freedom of expression, while the ECHR, increasingly failed to uphold our rights.
Mr Armstrong, then proceeded to talk about a slew of Free Speech Union cases, that highlighted the diverse range of activities that had now come within the scope of those laws, suggesting that legislators acting out of moral panic had rushed the legislation and this had created much of the problem. He also criticised the use of Non Crime Hate Incidents which were widely used by the police and recorded on state databases.
Mr Robinson slammed the silencing of those with pro-life views from universities, private homes to the workplace. He was very critical of so-called buffer zones, (exclusion zones around abortion clinics) which had been used to arrest people for “silent prayer” calling this Orwellian and a major threat to free speech.
Mr Maddox, talked passionately about the freedom of the press and how the clear abuses by some papers who engaged in phone hacking and other criminal activities had been used to significantly weaken the media. He also said that free speech was always under threat and had to be constantly fought fore, saying that in recent years we have seen criminal sanctions imposed on protestors and individuals who had been put unsavoury or stupid comments on social media, that seemed disproportionate to the offence.
The panel were challenged about whether a US style 1st amendment would safeguard free speech in the UK, whether the whole of political discourse had become angrier and more polarised and this was driving the clampdown and if as a society we just needed to be more tolerant.
The latter point being brought sharply into focus, when one of the audience described his personal experiences living as a transgender man, who agreed with the comments made by that great parliamentarian, Sir Winston Churchill: “Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage” and this has to change.
Parliament News will be hosting more event over the coming months, including a discussion on “Christians in the Holy Land”, Qatar and Egypt’s role in the middle east peace process” and “Can the EU/UK secure peace in Ukraine without US troop on the ground”. More details to follow…