Contemporary Cultural Boycotts

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Fox of Buckley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Freedom in the Arts report The New Boycott Crisis, published in February 2026, and of the impact on artistic freedom of contemporary cultural boycotts.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to bring to the attention of the Government and the Committee the themes in this recent report, The New Boycott Crisis. If we value art as a crucial mirror on society, the corruption of art reflects social trends right back at us and we should look back closely, so I say many thanks go to those noble Lords who are doing that today.

The report was launched here in Westminster at the end of April, alongside the Art Beyond Boycott Toolkit. It was a packed room with lots of cross-party attendance. The authors are co-founders of Freedom in the Arts, Rosie Kay, an award-winning choreographer, and Denise Fahmy, a senior arts professional, who teamed up with Reading University’s Professor Jo Phoenix. All three have experienced the vicious consequence of cancel culture. They combine their personal insights with oodles of professional knowledge to provide a multilayered investigation into how boycotts operate against different art forms, looking not just at individual artists but at gatekeepers such as venues, agents, managers and producers.

Using survey data and qualitative interviews, the report shows how even the threat of cultural boycotts is leading to anticipatory cancellation, institutional anxiety, silent boycotts and self-censorship. The report is so on the money that it got extensive media coverage even in the same crowded week as the local elections. Significantly, it was picked up by specialist publications such as Arts Professional, Museums Journal, Chortle and Mixmag, no doubt because it cut through due to its insights into the genuinely heartbreaking stories of individual artists brought to financial and reputational personal ruin by boycotts—you cannot get more personal than being cancelled because of your identity. As the report documents, that is the fate of so many Jewish artists today.

Perhaps this is nothing new. As we head into August and Edinburgh Festival season, I recall years of participating in that wonderful, artistically rich atmosphere, when the Academy of Ideas put on arts debates and live reviewing at the Fringe and at the book and international festivals. It was a joy, but it started to turn sour when, 20 years ago, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign demanded boycotts of any art form involving Israelis. Whether it was an ugly disruption of a performance of the Jerusalem Quartet in 2008, with activists yelling, “Israeli-armed musicians”, or a decade later, getting an Israeli hip-hop opera evicted from its venue. These were shocking but marginal, isolated incidents. What is shocking today is that such occurrences are so regular they are barely noticed. The campaign against antisemitism notes:

“Discrimination against Jewish people has become normalised in the arts: it’s now simply part of doing business as a Jewish creative in modern Britain”.


The report notes something else that has changed. If boycotts were historically public, involving external bodies bullying arts organisations, today they have evolved into an internal, systemic dynamic within arts organisations. Sometimes, it is a leadership team more driven by ideological agendas than artistic excellence, but more often it is insidious, with weak management capitulating to staff complaints demanding that their well-being is protected from allegedly dangerous performers. Last year, comics Philip Simon’s show “Jew-O-Rama” and Rachel Creeger’s “Ultimate Jewish Mother” had their acts pulled at the last minute by a fringe venue. The reason? Staff at the venue complained of “feeling unsafe”. Apparently, a fictional comedic Jewish mother was a threat to employee safety.

The report is full of similar evidence of employees activating internal HR procedures to reframe political demands. There is an additional institutional vehicle used similarly, especially in publicly funded arts organisations, and that is values frameworks and equality, diversity and inclusion policies. I know that the Government can be a little defensive about the virtues of EDI, but I hope the Minister will examine the documentation of how EDI is being weaponised to demand the boycotting of certain artists. I note that in February, DCMS Minister Ian Murray MP, while stating the Government’s commitment to free speech, caveated it. He quoted the Secretary of State’s ambition not to stoke the culture wars, and stressed the need to protect people from hate speech. But does the Minister acknowledge that, in many institutions, the culture wars are stoked by EDI enthusiasts and that hate speech is often a euphemism for speech someone disagrees with? Arts organisations often state that their value statements are anti-hate to justify cancelling Zionist and gender-critical artists, for example.

In her moving and passionate speech at the report’s launch, acclaimed singer-songwriter Róisín Murphy, herself a victim of a high-profile vicious boycott after speaking her mind on puberty blockers, made an important, relevant point. She said:

“Public funding, meant to support excellence regardless of politics, has become an ideological points system …This isn’t patronage. It’s patronage with strings attached so tight they strangle the critical thinking it takes to invent anything”.


What can politicians and government do to help the arts escape this censorious stranglehold? While the Arts Council declined an invitation to attend the parliamentary launch of the report, it was notable that a couple of days later, after two Jewish men were murdered in Golders Green, the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, used the opportunity to put pressure on the Arts Council. He said:

“Where public funding is being used to promote or platform antisemitism, the Arts Council must act, using its powers to suspend, withdraw and claw back funding”.


That is a positive sentiment, but I worry about cancelling the cancellers as a tactic. It perhaps also misses more subtle, silent boycotts, rather than the overt anti-Jewish abuse. Also, it does not note that a wider range of artists with dissenting views are now targeted.

For example, Scottish performance poet Jenny Lindsay, author of the aptly titled book Hounded, explains that after a tweet criticising a trans activist threatening violence against lesbians, she had seven months of private, quiet, bewildering cancellation, losing work without knowing why, unanswered emails, complaints to her publishers, messages saying we are frightened to book you. She notes, “It was clear people had got a memo: Jenny Lindsay’s a TERF”. But with no paper trails, no proof, just commissions swerved in case they cause grief, it can be especially isolating. The real loss is, “artwork that was never made and never seen”.

I therefore hope that the Minister will meet the authors of this report to discuss how the Government can help the sector adopt the report’s proposals to improve institutional capacity to resist this politicisation of programming and employment decisions that is discriminatory in terms of who gets to create, perform, exhibit and publish. Artistic judgments must be centre stage. Leadership from Ministers could include public support for boycotted artists, encouraging publicly funded arts organisations—indeed, the Arts Council—to adopt the Freedom in the Arts free speech charter.

To conclude, artistic creation needs freedom to challenge, explore, surprise and push boundaries. Otherwise, art created and programmed will be risk-averse, narrower, safer, samey, carefully calculated and curated not to offend. What a dreary tragedy. To quote Róisín Murphy again:

“Without that freedom, we don’t get better art, we simply put artists into a chokehold and suffocate the life out of our culture”.


The arts must breathe freely again. How can the Minister help them breathe freely again?.