We have tabled amendments proposing how universities and student unions should find their way through that, and we will come to some of them later.

To finish, I want to raise the much-cited case of David Irving, who was uninvited from speaking to the Oxford union as long ago as 2001 because of pressure from academics and members of the student union, who were furious that he was being given a platform for his views on the holocaust. A High Court judge had previously described him as “racist” and “antisemitic” during a libel trial. During the evidence sessions, one of the witnesses hypothesised:

“If I am disinvited because I am David Irving—I have published a book and then I was disinvited because people read the High Court judgment—what is the material loss to David Irving? I suspect that it is quite small, but we do not know. That is the level of detail that the legislation does not take us to.”––[Official Report, Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Public Bill Committee, 13 September 2021; c. 102, Q211.]