Author: jonholb

Reversing Britain’s Free Speech Recession

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In his foreward to this publication Lord Frost claims that “Reversing Britain’s free speech recession is the subject of this excellent and timely Prosperity Institute paper by the barrister Jon Holbrook.” Click here for my five key policy proposals:

  • Repeal hate speech laws.
  • Repeal s5 of the Public Order Act 1986 and laws that criminalise speech that falls short of being likely to cause violence.
  • Replace several communications offences with one that outlaws messages that are menacing and targeted.
  • Protect speech in the workplace and beyond with a tort that outlaws the unlawful of free speech.
  • Give claimants in free speech cases costs protection.

Bar none – the fraud behind the BSB’s “equality and diversity” drive

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The one characteristic that the Bar actually does lack is a diversity of political opinion. And this really does matter since without it the Bar will lose public respect, a problem already apparent with the vernacular of “lefty lawyers”. Yet by seeking to require barristers to promote “equality, diversity and inclusion” the Bar Standards Board will ensure that the Bar becomes even more politically monotone.

Bar’s regulator requires barristers to be woke?

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The Bar Standards Board (BSB) is taking sides in a politically controversial issue by proposing to require barristers to advance EDI. In fact, the Bar is already a place where ethnic minorities and women can thrive. So why the push for more ‘diversity’? Because EDI is the beast that needs constant feeding – even when it does untold harm to a profession and the public.

Speaking freely just got a bit easier

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In August my professional regulator, the Bar Standards Board, sanctioned me for a tweet.  An appeal panel has now overturned the BSB’s decision and confirmed the importance of political speech under human rights law.  The panel concluded that a tweet that may cause offence, or which could promote hostility towards others as a group, provides no basis for interfering with the right of a barrister, or any other member of a regulated profession, to speak politically.

Cancelled, cleared, then fined

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For expressing my political opinions, in circumstances entirely unrelated to my professional work, I was expelled from my chambers; and though now exonerated, I have been fined £500 by the bar’s regulator on a newly minted charge. I reflect on the latest decision of the Bar Standards Board, which has at least exonerated me for the tweet that brought about my expulsion from Chambers.

Professional denouncement for private opinions

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Jon Holbrook is being formally investigated by his professional regulator, the Bar Standards Board, on a charge of bringing the profession into disrepute. His alleged crime? Eighteen tweets in which he has expressed views ‘not infrequently seen in the Mail or the Telegraph’. Law professor Andrew Tettenborn criticises the Board’s actions which will have a chilling effect on free speech and which show how ‘tolerance has now become vice and intolerance a sign of virtue’.