That’s Debatable!

That’s Debatable!’ is the weekly podcast of the Free Speech Union. Hosts Tom Harris and Jan MacVarish – both staffers at the FSU – talk about the free speech controversies that have erupted in the past week. Please like, subscribe and share.

This week, the Free Speech Union’s Education and Events Director Jan Macvarish takes the steering wheel as Tom Harris is away. She is joined by the Free Speech Union’s Case Management Officer L...

With the FSU’s backing, Lucy Connolly, jailed for a tweet about migrants that she posted following the Southport murders, has been fighting her 31-month sentence in the Court of Appeal. Although a verdict was expected on Thursday when the hearing concluded, the Court will now be providing a written judgement, somewhat vaguely scheduled for “as soon as possible”. Allison Pearson has written a powerful pi...

Julian Foulkes, a retired Special Constable, was arrested and held in a cell for eight hours over a tweet warning about the threat to British Jews posed by the pro-Palestinian marches. In October of 2023, he responded to another tweet criticising Suella Braverman for describing the pro-Palestinian protests that were sweeping the country in the aftermath of the massacre in Southern Israel as ‘hate marches’. As reported in the Telegr...

According to College of Policing guidance, Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs) help forces build an intelligence picture of community tensions and understand where they need to allocate resources for prevention. Indeed, during a House of Lords debate in November 2024, Lord Hanson, the Home Office minister, told peers: “It is vital that the police monitor non-crime hate incidents when proportionate and necessary to do so to help preven...

We have just completed our quarterly analysis of FSU casework and dive into the results of that during today’s episode. The first quarter of 2025 was our busiest ever with 411 new incidents received in the FSU inbox. This growth in caseload is directly related to the continuing increase in FSU active membership, which is now running at over 4,000 new members per quarter. ‘State Intervention’, which rang...

Both The Times and Sky News have reported on a landmark ruling from the Office for Students (OfS), which has fined the University of Sussex a record £585,000 for “serious and significant” free speech failings in the case of Professor Kathleen Stock, accused of ‘transphobia’ for her gender-critical views. Professor Stock was forced out of the university in 2021 after a three-year campaign of bullying and...

With the FSU’s support, the Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation – Rick Prior – is suing his own union after he was ‘cancelled’ for suggesting frontline officers are increasingly nervous about challenging people from ethnic minorities whom they suspect of breaking the law, given the spate of internal investigations into officers accused of being ‘racist’. Following an interview on GB News in O...

In a major win for workplace free speech, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) have abandoned plans to impose new diversity and inclusion rules on financial firms after strong pushback, including from the FSU. Had the proposals gone ahead, they would have placed sweeping new obligations on a significant portion of the UK’s financial sector. In January 2024,...

A man arrested for burning a copy of the Koran in Bradford will not face charges, following intervention by the Free Speech Union. The man arrived in Britain as an asylum-seeker and, ironically, he was fleeing religious persecution in a Muslim majority country. After he uploaded a video of himself burning a Koran in a symbolic stand for freedom of speech and against Islamic extremism, West Yorkshire Pol...

In a remarkably frank speech at the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President JD Vance warned that the greatest threat to Western democracies is not external aggression, but the erosion of free speech within them. Britain, he argued, was leading the charge in policing thought, with other European nations close behind. Invoking the Cold War, Mr Vance said that the West once defined itself in oppositi...

With the help of the FSU, a former Royal Marine who served in Iraq has been cleared of publishing threatening material with intent to stir up racial hatred – in reality, a 12-minute Facebook video urging people to stage peaceful protests about illegal immigration. Jamie Michael, an FSU member, was unanimously acquitted by a jury at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court in just 17 minutes. The story was reported th...

We briefly discuss last Saturday’s Manchester event on free expression in football, before moving on to a recent victory for workplace free speech that was reported in The Telegraph. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) has scrapped controversial plans to force its 32,000 members — including 15,000 student members and 46 partner universities — to "encourage diversity, equity and inclusion" in all aspects of their professio...

We were delighted to welcome the distinguished composer, musician and educator Martin Speake onto‘That's Debatable!’ this week. Back in February 2024, Martin questioned new ‘anti-racist’ policies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (TL), his employer for 22 years. As reported in The Times earlier this month, the woke mob then came for him with full force. While TL publicly distanced itself from him, Martin faced wides...

Bridget Phillipson has updated the House of Commons on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (HEFSA), which secured cross-party support in the last Parliament and received Royal Assent in May 2023. She will now implement some – but not all – of the remaining clauses. Clause 4, a cornerstone of the original law, will not be commenced, according to Phillipson. This would have introduce...

On Tuesday 7th January, Jan joined many others in Trafalgar Square to stand in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo and honour the victims from ten years ago. The commemoration took on an added poignancy when a group of French students, visiting the square by chance, spontaneously joined the gathering. Together, they reaffirmed the enduring importance of protecting free expression from those who would seek to destroy it. You can watch a c...

Happy New Year to all our listeners and viewers! We were immensely proud to see both Toby Young and our Chair, Professor Nigel Biggar, in the New Year honours list – an achievement that’s in no small part thanks to the sustained support of all the members and supporters of the FSU over our nearly five years of operation. Tuesday 7thJanuary is the tenth anniversary of the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ massacre in Paris during which 12 people were...

The former Conservative and UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell, writes in The Telegraph this week, “England is no longer a free society. The old country is descending into authoritarianism.” We begin by pondering whether this is true. As Jan points out, the very fact there is a fight on for free expression is a positive and we should eschew a paralysing fatalism. We move on to discuss The Spectator ...

We start with some good news. As reported in The Telegraph, Cambridge Constabulary have announced that they will be taking no further action against the FSU member who used the word “pikey” on the phone to the police while reporting two men who were threatening her and her family. Meanwhile, “Rainbow Refuseniks” is the name given to a growing group of footballers who have either refused to ...

We were delighted to welcome Dr James Kierstead onto ‘That's Debatable!’ to discuss his latest report, “Unpopular Opinions: Academic Freedom in New Zealand”. James is a Senior Fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, where his work focuses on universities, free speech, and democracy. We begin with a recap of a story that hit the UK press back in 2021 about academics who were threatened with expulsion from the Royal Society of New Zeal...