The government demands a crackdown on the SWP – having adorned it with new campus rights

It says that the latest escalation in campaigning on campuses involves far-left groups of students occupying university buildings around the country by a group that has expressed “unconditional” support for Hamas:

Hard Left inciting chilling anti-Semitism on campuses as students occupy university buildings in pro-Palestine protests organised by the “extremist” Socialist Workers Party.

An investigation (which, going by my DMs, has been on for at least 6 weeks) by the Mail has “discovered” that the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has set up student societies at 26 universities – 17 of which are officially affiliated with SUs.

For anyone of a certain age you’re either amazed the Mail didn’t know that the SWP have been organising on campus for decades, or if you’re of another generation amazed they’re still going.

It says undercover reporters who attended talks on campus organised by the Manchester SWSS and the London SWSS last month “heard speakers praise the October 7 terror attacks” and “demand students take more radical action to support Palestine.”

It goes on to suggest that politicians and Jewish charities have condemned SUs for allowing the SWP to form official societies. So it quotes universities minister Robert Halfon as saying:

I have contacted all vice chancellors – reaching out to many personally – to ask them to step up and crack down on anti-Semitism on university campuses.

A spokesperson for the Union of Jewish Students said:

It is high time universities disaffiliate any society found guilty of spreading such racist extremism.

And a spokesperson for the Community Security Trust said:

The SWP is an extremist organisation with a history of anti-Semitism and students’ unions should not have anything to do with them.

The piece doesn’t make clear what the undercover reporters heard that amounts to “praise” for the October 7 terror attacks – and demanding students take more radical action to support Palestine doesn’t sound unlawful, particularly if anti-Zionist beliefs are protected under the Equality Act.

The piece does discuss student protesters at Leeds that it says are “linked” to the Leeds SWSS – who apparently swarmed the university’s landmark Parkinson Building this week chanting “Israel is a terror state” and “ceasefire now”.

Again, I wasn’t there and context matters – but while the disruption and occupation are almost certainly against the law, it’s not clear that the messaging is.

The targeting of the university’s Jewish chaplain in their list of demands may well be more clear cut, although he’s not a member of university staff (he is employed by UJC and works at a handful of universities across the north) – the issue for protestors is that he has served as a reservist in the Israel Defence Forces.

But even if the university or SU was to regard that as harassment, the Equality Act protection from harassment duty doesn’t apply to SUs, and anyway – Leeds SWSS is not officially affiliated to the university’s SU.

Even if it was, when we’ve had Arif Ahmed on a Free Speech duty consultation call asserting that OfS’ regulation doesn’t cover clubs and societies, and no clarification from OfS on whether its (seemingly indefinitely delayed) harassment duties for universities would cover students engaged in such activity, we might forgive some confusion and inaction.

The Mail neglects to mention that the Free Speech act now requires that affiliation to the students’ union is not denied to any student society on the grounds of its policy or objectives or the ideas or opinions of any of its members.

And it’s all very well for the CST to give a quote saying that the SWSS and/or SWP are “extremist”, but not only has Michael Gove’s new evidence-based unit not said as such, even if it did the definition wouldn’t apply inside the Prevent duty on universities.

And even if that did, the Prevent duty doesn’t apply directly to SUs – who will remain directly subject to the Free Speech Act duty to book rooms and fund security costs for speakers for the group – even if that room isn’t Leeds’ Parkinson Building.

Another specific case mentioned is that in Bristol, it says students affiliated to the SWP occupied the university’s Victoria Rooms last Friday, and have refused to leave until the university stops being “complicit” in the “Gaza genocide”. Again, the occupation sounds unlawful – but the messaging highlighted sounds protected by the Equality Act and, in terms of group affiliation, the Free Speech Act.

Similarly, at University College London (UCL), the piece says that “some linked to” the London SWSS stormed the Jeremy Bentham Room on Thursday, “adorning the wall” with a banner that reads “apartheid-free zone”. The piece also notes that at an SWSS meeting in London last month, organisers distributed a revised version of a booklet entitled “Palestine: Resistance, Revolution and the Struggle for Freedom” – revised because it has now removed explicit references to Hamas but still states that Palestinians “have the right to take up arms”.

Years ago when both UJS and the SWP were “factions” organising within NUS, I used to spend hours advising steering committees on whether the latter’s leaflets and actions amounted to a breach of NUS’ own rules. But throughout the discussion on the legislation, government thought that universities and SUs applying their “own rules” wasa trick and that those rules were excessively “woke” – so the legislation only allows interference if the speech is unlawful. And now we are where we are.

At some stage someone is going to clock that the government’s free speech legislation has pretty much tied the hands of universities and SUs to go beyond any legal minimums on free speech within the law when attempting to set standards of behaviour. Until then we’re trapped in a never-ending cycle of finger wagging on both ends of the see-saw.