Jon Holbrook’s essay on The Rise and Fall of the Rule of Law is published in From Self To Selfie, available from Amazon here.
Free speech for professionals?
In a boost for free speech the barristers’ regulator has redrafted its social media guidance to recognise that free speech must prevail over the urge of the easily offended to cancel.
Maya Forstater triumphs over cancel culture
Maya Forstater’s workplace victory shows how the law can defend free speech against the wokesters who practise cancel culture.
Speaking freely just got a bit easier
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
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
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’.
Shamima Begum may return to Britain
Human rights laws may come to Begum’s aid in her appeal against loss of British citizenship. The Surpeme Court in February did not rule on the issue of her deprivation of citizenship. When the courts rule on this issue ‘me’ may well trump ‘us’.
No place at the bar for challenging woke politics
Jon Holbrook’s cancellation as a barrister in January 2020 shows that the bar has become an unwelcoming place for those who believe in free speech.
Is the Bar a left-wing club?
Barrister Jon Holbrook criticised the equality law that empowers schoolchildren to use race and culture to undermine school uniform policies. A few days earlier he tweeted: ‘The Equality Act undermines school discipline by empowering the stroppy teenager of colour.’ He was subsequently expelled by his Chambers. Here he writes an open letter to the chairman of the Bar Council, which represents barristers in England and Wales.
Cancelled by my barristers’ chambers over a tweet
Cancel culture is a straitjacket on the free expression of ideas, and democracy cannot hope to function when the woke are free to proselytise and their challengers are muzzled.
Should school uniform policy have to accommodate cultural sensitivities?
School uniform policies should be left to the good sense of headteachers and governors who know how to run their schools for the good of society. But equality law requires these policies to yield to diversity. This is bad for social cohesion and cultural integration.
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Jon Holbrook 