Happy New Year from the FSU's staff!

With 2023 just around the corner, we've been looking back at what the FSU has achieved in the past 12 months. It's an impressive list of accomplishments.

In terms of our case-work, we now have two case officers and two lawyers on staff, dealing with up to 50 requests for help every week from people who have been bullied, harassed, disciplined, investigated, suspended or sacked simply for expressing their perfectly lawful views.

We can't always publicise our successes, either due to privacy and security concerns, or because the other side insists on confidentiality as a condition of agreeing a generous settlement. But here’s a selection of some of our highest-profile cases from the past 12 months.

With our help, Simon Isherwood won his Employment Tribunal case against his employer this year. The rail conductor was dismissed after asking whether indigenous populations enjoy 'black privilege' in African countries during a diversity training course (GB News, Telegraph). In addition to paying Simon’s legal fees, the FSU drafted in leading civil rights barrister Paul Diamond to represent him. In a landmark victory for worker's speech rights, Judge Wyeth decided that Mr Isherwood had been unfairly dismissed (HR Grapevine, Mail, Reclaim the Net, Mail+).

We also won a key legal victory over Essex University. Having threatened Essex with a Judicial Review if it didn’t amend its harassment policies to ensure they weren’t in breach of its free speech duties, it agreed to do almost everything we’d asked. The Times Higher Education noted at the time that Essex University had "revised its policy on harassment under legal pressure from the FSU", and that the result "spotlighted the FSU's influence and the prospect of it mounting bigger legal actions against institutions...".

In June, we helped our member Hatun Tash, an evangelical street preacher, secure £10,000 in damages from the Metropolitan Police, as well as an apology, after she was wrongly arrested at Speakers’ Corner. The police told Hatun that someone had complained that her T-shirt—which depicted one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed—was 'offensive'. She was strip searched, interviewed, kept overnight in a cell and then released without charge (Daily Sceptic, Times).

Back in April, we forced the Home Office to back down after one of its senior managers insisted that all employees had to include their preferred gender pronouns in their email signatures (Guido).

When a London college told staff to declare their pronouns on email in solidarity with trans people, the FSU wrote to the college principal, reminding him that these aren't politically neutral acts. Following receipt of our letter the college backed down (Mail). (We also wrote about that case here).

We are also currently helping author and FSU member Gillian Philip bring an Employment Tribunal claim against her former publishers on the grounds that they terminated her contract to write children’s books because she stood up for JK Rowling on Twitter (Express, Mail, Sky News). This appeal could be of ground-breaking importance for the publishing industry, determining not only the freedom of speech of contract writers, but also pay and conditions. (You can read about that case here).

We also helped raise £20,000 to fund an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Joseph Kelly, a Scotsman convicted of being ‘grossly offensive’ for a tasteless tweet he posted about Captain Tom (National, Spiked, Times). Mr Kelly was convicted and sentenced in Scotland for contravening the Communications Act 2003, section 127(1)(b), which makes it a criminal offence to make an electronic post which is “grossly offensive”. This case is about more than Joe’s own fight for justice — the right to offend is a crucial element of free speech, as Lord Justice Sedley said in Redmond-Bate v DPP: “Freedom of speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

Earlier in the year, Oxford University’s Dr Abhijit Sarkar was subjected to rape and murder threats online after being accused of 'Hindu-phobia'. The FSU defended Dr Sarkar following Oxford’s failure to protect his academic freedom from the threats he received. (You can read about that case here). Sir John Hayes MP even cited Dr Sarkar's "sad, but by no means exceptional" case in Parliament back in June, while calling for a review of UK university free speech policies prior to the Government's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill reaching the statute book. (You can watch a clip of that intervention here).

Two years ago, one of our members—Kevin Mills—was handed an NCHI by the police after refusing to work with a customer who he feared wouldn’t pay the bill. The FSU intervened and, earlier this year, Kent Police deleted his record (Telegraph).

We hope you’ll agree this is an impressive list of achievements. If you’re not yet a member of the FSU, please join – membership fees start at £2.49 a month – and if you’re already a member please consider making a donation, either to the FSU in general, or to our legal fund. Every little helps.

Here’s hoping that 2023 is an even more successful year for us than 2022 – which, with your help, it will be.

Happy New Year!