Link to the Full Speech HERE

Good evening, everyone, and welcome.

It is a real pleasure to join you here in Parliament for the launch of Freedom in the Arts’ new report, The New Boycott Crisis, and the accompanying Art Beyond Boycott Toolkit.

Thank you all for being here, and thank you in particular to Rosie Kay, Denise Fahmy and Professor Jo Phoenix, authors of The New Boycott Crisis.

This report is an important and timely contribution to a debate that has too often been conducted in fragments; through noisy rows and media headlines. The report brings evidence and structure to something many people in the sector have felt for some time: that pressure, fear and organised intimidation are beginning to shape the conditions in which art is made.

The New Boycott Crisis exposes how pressure and boycott movements are devastating the arts; we are seeing cancellation, professional exclusion, harassment and compelled political positioning.

And sadly this is not simply a matter of a few isolated controversies, or the occasional disagreement that inevitably comes with a lively artistic culture.

The report highlights what the authors call “boycott logic” has created an interconnected pattern of pressure, reshaping what artists, venues and organisations feel able to create, present and discuss. And that should concern us all.

The arts are not some optional extra in national life. The arts are where a society imagines, questions, remembers and argues with itself.

It is where freedom of thought becomes a living and public experience. Freedom of expression is not peripheral to democracy. It is part of its texture and one of its tests.

In any healthy democracy, the arts should be places of experimentation, disagreement, curiosity and risk. They should not become places where people are forced into silence by fear, reputational intimidation or organised campaigns.

And yet that is precisely the concern The New Boycott Crisis raises.

The report describes a climate in which many artists, particularly freelancers dependent on reputation and networks of goodwill, are finding opportunities disappearing not because of the quality of their work, but because of who they are, what they are assumed to believe, or the controversy others fear may follow.

Venues and festivals increasingly make decisions not in response to actual protest, but in anticipation of what might happen, often under internal staff pressure rather than audience demand.

This is the notion of anticipatory compliance.  Where the damage is often done before any public campaign even gets going. Where he possibility of backlash becomes enough to shape decisions. And each act of compliance makes the next one easier.

That matters not only for the arts, but for public life more broadly.

When freedom of expression in the arts is narrowed by fear, intimidation or organised pressure, that is not only a cultural concern. It is a democratic one.

The arts should challenge and question and push boundaries. But there is a world of difference between pushing boundaries, having a respectful and informed, robust debate; and intimidation or cancellation; or worse: promulgating hatred.

Pushing extreme views and cancelling out others is NOT NORMAL, it is EXTREMIST behaviour and is inconsistent with core British values. Core Conservative values, if I may, of freedom, democracy, tolerance, genuine inclusivity, responsibility, and respect – for each other and for law and order.

But it never ceases to amaze me how so many people who go around lecturing everyone else about diversity and preaching tolerance, lack the self-awareness to recognise that they themselves are the worst offenders, and amongst the least tolerant kind of people around.

Because they don’t actually believe in freedom and tolerance, they cannot accept anyone with a different opinion to them, and what they really want is for everyone else to think just like them.  And if you don’t, you are somehow malevolent.

And that brings me to one of the most serious findings of The New Boycott Crisis report.

The report is clear that antisemitism is not incidental — it is one of the most troubling features of this boycott logic.

The evidence gathered suggests that Jewish and Israeli artists are disproportionately affected by organised pressure, and that Jewish artists are too often subjected to exceptional scrutiny, exclusion or suspicion. Jewish artists and Jewish cultural life become treated as uniquely contentious, uniquely risky, or somehow inherently political. That should trouble all of us.

Where Jewish cultural life is treated as inherently problematic, or where Jewish identity itself becomes a trigger for pressure and distrust, that should concern anyone who values fairness, democracy and the integrity of our public culture.

Of course, this is not about endorsing every work or every point of view. None of us agree with every point, every view, every piece of art or expression performed by everyone in this room this evening.

But it is about whether our arts sector remains a place where disagreement can exist without coercion and intimidation, and where institutions have the confidence to act lawfully, proportionately and fairly.