Dear Mike Buchanan,

Welcome to the FSU’s weekly newsletter, our round-up of the free speech news of the week. As with all our work, this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign up today or encourage a friend to join and help turn the tide against cancel culture. You can share our newsletters on social media with the buttons at the bottom of this email (although not if you’re reading this on a desktop). If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

How to stand up for freedom of speech and thought – tickets now available

On Saturday 3rd February we’ll be at the Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for a night of discussion followed by some live music. FSU General Secretary Toby Young will be joined by Sean Corby and Denise Fahmy, co-founder of Freedom in the Arts, two courageous FSU members who’ve fought important legal battles to defend free speech in the workplace.

There will also be some live music. Sean is a professional musician and he’ll be playing from his extensive jazz repertoire with fellow musician Jonathan Enright. Tickets are available here.

Sign CitizenGO’s petition to reject UN-led global censorship plan

UNESCO, a major UN agency, has just launched an alarming censorship plan. The plan, titled Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms, outlines a “set of duties, responsibilities, and roles for States, digital platforms, intergovernmental organisations, civil society, media [etc]” to deal with “dis- and misinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories”.

At the FSU we see cases all the time in which these buzzwords are weaponised by progressive elites to go after anyone whose perfectly lawful views they disapprove of, so it’s not difficult to see why CitizenGO describes UNESCO’s plan as “a direct attack on free speech”.

Click here to sign the group’s petition opposing the forthcoming ‘Guidelines’ and help them reach their target of 500,000 signatures!

ICO demands gender critical employees police their thoughts in the workplace

The FSU has recently launched an FOI investigation into the transgender policies of various public sector bodies. For anyone concerned to protect freedom of speech in the workplace, they make for grim reading. But the document released by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is arguably the most egregious we’ve found to date – so egregious, in fact, that we gave the story to the Mail.

As Connor Stringer reports, civil servants at the UK’s privacy watchdog have been told to “think” of transgender colleagues as women in new staff guidance.

The ICO’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategy states that the organisation has an “overarching focus on intersectionality” [i.e., the idea that you can have more than one bite of the woke victimhood cherry] and tells staff that they will “be held accountable for this”.

This overarching strategy is then operationalised in the taxpayer funded body’s Trans Policy and Guidance, which tells staff they should “be guided by your trans colleague and their preferences” and “must call a person by their chosen or preferred name”.

The diktat goes on to suggest that it is not enough simply to call employees by their chosen gender pronouns, and that staff must show their support for trans colleagues by “thinking of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as” [our emphasis].

It sounds ridiculous – and of course it is ridiculous. But it’s also perplexing from a legal point of view.

Gender critical feminists of the kind that make up the vast majority of the UK’s population believe that sex is a material entity, not a social construct, and that it cannot be changed. They believe that, sexually, trans women are male, and trans men are female, and gender identity (i.e., who you feel yourself to be) plays only a very minor role in determining a person’s identity.

It follows, therefore, that many of the ICO’s employees who hold gender critical beliefs will necessarily be committed to not “thinking” about transgender women colleagues as if they are in fact ‘women’.

Importantly, that’s something they are legally entitled not to think.

As per the landmark Forstater vs GCD Europe and others case, the Employment Appeal Tribunal found that the belief that biological sex is real and immutable is a protected belief under the Equality Act 2010.

Contrary to much conjecture and abstruse theorising by trans activists and their ‘allies’ in the media, the judgment didn’t ‘just’, or ‘merely’, grant protection to those who hold gender critical beliefs but don’t express them. It also ruled that acts of “manifesting” those beliefs through lawful speech and action are similarly protected.

In other words, even the most diehard of placard-wielding, safe-space huddling, Pink News reading, venue barricading, academic cancelling, JK Rowling trolling, workplace snitching trans activists grudgingly appear to concede that gender critical feminists must (for now…) be allowed to continue wallowing in their ‘transphobic’ thoughts.

The ICO, on the other hand, seem to feel that that’s exactly the sort of bleeding-heart liberal appeasement that only ever delays an organisation’s arrival on the banks of The Right Side of History, and that its employees must from now on empty their heads of all gender critical thoughts before entering the workplace.

Speaking to the Mail about the ICO’s policy diktat, FSU General Secretary Toby Young said: “The ICO is supposed to be responsible for protecting people’s privacy. How can it be taken seriously in that role if it’s dictating to its employees what they can and can’t think?

“Talk about invasion of privacy!” he added. “This is like something out of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Indeed it is. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces, and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” the character of Party member O’Brien explains with exquisite exactness to Winston Smith during the latter’s political re-education.

The state of free speech in Northern Ireland – book your tickets here

We will be kicking off 2024 with a visit to Belfast on Friday 26th January. We have an incredible panel of speakers lined up – Toby Young, Stella O’Malley, David Quinn, Ella Whelan and Jeffrey Dudgeon. They’ll be discussing ‘The State of Free Speech in Northern Ireland’ at the Titanic Hotel.

Tickets are open to all, so do spread the word and book your ticket here.

Latest episode of ‘That’s Debatable!’, the FSU’s weekly podcast, is out now

In the latest episode of That’s Debatable, our weekly podcast, hosts Ben Jones and Tom Harris discuss the proliferation of gender identity ideology in the public sector, particularly the NHS. Click here to download the episode in full!

Met Police confirm FSU member Hatun Tash alive and well following disappearance

Everyone at the FSU was relieved to hear that evangelical street preacher and FSU member Hatun Tash is alive and well, following reports that she had been missing for five weeks in the lead-up to Christmas (Christian Today). Having launched an investigation, the Met Police subsequently confirmed that Hatun, who regularly reads from the Bible and debates Islam and the Qur’an at Speakers’ Corner, is “no longer being treated as a missing person”.

There was good reason to be worried about Hatun, not least because concerns for her welfare first arose just days after an Islamic terrorist was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years in prison (recently increased to a minimum of 24 years) for plotting to kill her (Sky News).

Sadly, there are many others not currently at His Majesty’s pleasure who would happily do her harm if they could.

Over the past few years, Hatun, an ex-Muslim convert to Christianity, has regularly been targeted at Speakers’ Corner, having been repeatedly punched, stabbed, slashed, spat at and knocked unconscious by Islamists, apparently for the ‘crime’ of refusing to be cowed and continuing to profess her faith.

In a shameful miscarriage of justice back in 2022, Hatun was arrested in Hyde Park by the Met Police after being robbed – yes, you read that correctly – and taken into custody for 24 hours where, among other things, she was strip searched.

She was later told by the police that the reason she had been arrested was because of her “offensive” t-shirt – it reproduced one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The FSU wrote to the Met to complain about this arrest and demanded an apology, which she eventually received – thanks to top-drawer legal representation from the Christian Legal Centre she also received £10,000 in damages (Times).

That was of course the right outcome.

But it’s difficult to imagine the Islamist ‘class of 2022’ weren’t emboldened by the experience of seeing a diminutive apostate whom they’d just robbed getting arrested and forcibly detained by a large number of police officers while they themselves remained free to chant “Allahu Akbar” and engage in further attempts to assault her as she was being led away.

In an interview with the Spectator’s Tom Goodenough this week, Hatun said that although she plans to return to Speakers’ Corner in the future, she will stay away for the time being, mostly out of concern for the safety of others. “If someone turns up with chemicals, they might harm someone else,” she explained, quietly exposing the de facto blasphemy code now in operation across large swathes of the country as she did so.

“Why continue to speak out and place yourself at risk?” Tom asks at one point. “I’m not brave,” she responds. “But you’ve got to make a choice. Do you want to deal with it or just keep quiet, and shut down? Once they know they have (silenced you), they can stop you.”

An extraordinarily brave woman. Everyone at the FSU stands in solidarity with Hatun.

‘Is DEI education or indoctrination?’ event – book your tickets here

FSU member Rob Keller’s ‘Cancelling Cancel Culture’ (CCC) group will be hosting an event entitled ‘Is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) Education or Indoctrination?’ with a special guest speaker at The Briton’s Protection in Manchester this Saturday (20th January). Join the CCC for a lively, open and honest chat about the issues. All good faith opinions will be welcomed and respected. Admission is free, but CCC asks for a small donation on arrival. You can snaffle the last few tickets for this event by clicking here.

Show your support for the Signature Four!

Thank you to all the members and supporters who already donated to our ‘Signature Four’ crowdfunder. There are now just 16 days to go to meet our target of £5,000, and we need to build some momentum to take this case to the next stage and help our four members – Jade, Karen, Kate and Mohammed – secure access to justice. You can find out more about the case and pledge your support by clicking here.

The Signature Four are being sued for defamation and malicious falsehood after posting honest but critical reviews following a bad experience with Signature Clinic, a cosmetic surgery company.

They acted without malice, wishing merely to record their personal experiences on a site designed to allow them to do so and feel they have done nothing wrong but now face potential financial ruin.

The FSU is concerned at the use of these tactics against consumers who, unlike journalists and authors, do not have the legal and financial backing of a publisher.

Giving online feedback is, and needs to remain, a normal, day-to-day activity in our society. We all benefit from making informed choices as consumers, and that means reading the honest reviews of other consumers.

But if the tactics we believe Signature Clinic are adopting are left unchecked they will spread to other companies, meaning that what happened to Kate, Mohammed, Karen and Jade could one day happen to any of us.

That’s why this case isn’t really about cosmetic surgery – it’s about defending the right to speak up honestly.

Kate, Mohammed, Karen and Jade have secured excellent representation from leading media firm RPC, who are doing everything they can to keep costs down while ensuring the four get the representation they deserve.

The FSU is also assisting the group, working to further drive down costs.

But this kind of litigation is expensive.

If you can, please consider making a donation to help the Signature Four continue their brave fight and stand against the use of legal force to silence honest voices – the link is here.

Ban the Irish Hate Crime Bill – sign Free Speech Ireland’s petition

The Irish government is continuing to push ahead with its draconian Hate Speech Bill, which will outlaw the “communication” of material or speech that might “incite hatred” against people with certain protected characteristics punishable by up to five years in prison, and creates a maximum tariff of two years for the “possession” or “preparation” of such material, including memes.

Given that the Bill includes no actual definition of ‘hate’, it follows that if it’s passed it will effectively be the Garda, and the courts, that determine what constitutes hatred based on the country’s current, capacious definition of a ‘hate crime’ as “perceived by the victim, or any other person, to have been motivated by prejudice”. It’s obvious that this will leave the legislation wide open to abuse by woke NGOs linked to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (we’ve written about the Bill’s implications for free speech here).

Our friends at Free Speech Ireland continue their campaign to persuade legislators to reject the Bill in its current form, and you can support them by signing their petition and helping them reach their target of 10,000 signatures by clicking here.

Kind regards,

Freddie Attenborough

Communications Officer.