Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Lord Biggar Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Biggar (Con)]

My Lords, I speak as a former professor of Christian ethics at the University of Leeds, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Oxford. I declare an interest as the chairman of the Free Speech Union. I simply want to underscore the plea from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, for our universities to become more muscular in the defence and promotion of liberal culture.

Britain’s universities are culturally strategic because they educate the elites who run our institutions, be they economic, social or political. Let us be clear: elites are a social necessity, even if elitism is something we should avoid. Because they educate our elites, universities are important not just for economic success, as they are, but for the kind of society we want to be. Do we want to be a society whose leaders have been educated to reason, to proportion claims to evidence and to yield to justified criticism? Do we want our leaders to be the kind of people who are capable of honest reasoning because they have been formed in the virtues of self-restraint, humility and courage, which are necessary for it, or do we want to be led by graduates indoctrinated by dogmatic, ideological professors who penalise dissidents? Do we want to be led by graduates who have witnessed university authorities let aggressively ideological students abuse and intimidate them? Do we want graduate leaders who have learned that the only way to advance in the world is to keep their thoughts to themselves and their mouths shut, and to run with the prevailing wind?

I take it that we do not want that; if that is so, our universities must become much more assertive in defending and promoting a liberal culture, by which I mean a culture where everyone is free under the law, without fear of penalty, to say what they believe the truth to be and then to test it in the critical give and take of reasons. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, wrote in her preface to the excellent Policy Exchange report mentioned several times already this afternoon,

“too many universities have repeatedly failed in their duties to … foster civil debate”.

Indeed, too many universities have tolerated highly uncivil aggression.

Let me give two examples. Five years ago, the admirably temperate and reasonable feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock came under attack for her gender critical views at the University of Sussex. After a sustained campaign of vilification led by students, and even supported by some of her academic colleagues, she became so depressed and demoralised that she resigned from the post that she had held for 18 years and, in effect, terminated her own academic career. To this day, as far as I can tell—trust me, I have hunted high and low—the authorities at Sussex have offered no public explanation of why they failed to support Kathleen Stock or of what they have done since to ensure that what happened to her will not happen again. To the outside eye, the aggressive illiberal ideologues at Sussex triumphed and nothing has changed.

Then, less than a month ago, in Oxford, Professor Michael Foran abandoned his lecture series on law and gender because pro-trans protesters had stormed the stage and intimidated his student audience, all the while passively observed by one the university’s disciplinary officers. I have been told that the university is unrepentant about its conduct, has offered no apology and thereby has granted aggressively illiberal hecklers an effective veto.

The problem is not just these individual cases; the larger problem is their generally chilling effect. As the late Sir Tom Stoppard said five years ago,

“It’s not so much cancellation as self-cancellation. People tread warily—they’re careful of what they say”.


In other words, a single successful cancellation causes a thousand horrified observers to beware of trouble and bite their tongues. On the eve of civil war in 1920s Ireland, WB Yeats famously wrote:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity”.

If, instead of civil war, we want a civil society led by virtuous, reasonable elites, not repressively illiberal ones, university leaders are going to have to muster greater liberal conviction and visibly face down the intensely passionate ideologues running wild before their eyes.