Labour’s ‘pub banter’ crackdown brutally torn aside by free speech champion | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Free speech champion Lord Toby Young has slammed Labour’s plans to introduce a “banter ban” inside their Employment Rights Bill. Speaking in his maiden speech within the House of Lords, Lord Young expressed his concern for the way forward for pubs if the legislation comes into power.

Within Labour’s Employment invoice is a clause that expands employer legal responsibility for third-party (non-sexual) oblique harassment of workers. This, in impact, places publicans in danger if the liberty of speech of consumers is deemed to infringe upon the rights of workers to not really feel “harassed” by feedback stated not directly. Lord Young went so far as to recommend that some pubs might need to rent “banter bouncers” to police the coverage and take away these deemed to have fallen foul.

He stated: “How will publicans be expected to protect their employees from overhearing conversations in pubs by customers that they may find offensive or upsetting in virtue of their protected characteristics?

“When it was suggested in the other place that pubs might have to employ banter bouncers to police the conversations of customers as one of the reasonable steps that publicans are expected to take to protect their employees from indirect harassment, it was met by derisive, dismissive laughter by the government benches as a ludicrous straw man.

“But I don’t think that it is a straw man. Before you dismiss that concern as unduly alarmist, I draw your attention to the briefing published earlier this week by the equality and human rights commission which pointed out that ‘employers will have to balance the rights of third parties to express their legally protected beliefs with the rights of their employees not to be harassed.’”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has acknowledged that most of the reforms have “the potential to reduce workplace inequalities”.

The watchdog believes that it helps plans to guard employees from sexual harassment, one thing it says is a “significant issue”, particularly for younger individuals and people in customer-facing roles.

However, it has raised considerations about different types of discrimination, citing considerations that “it could disproportionately curtail the right to freedom of expression”.

Ministers have admitted that this could possibly be the case, particularly in situations the place there are “areas of legitimate debate which are carried out in a contentious manner”.

The Government believes that the brink of what constitutes harassment is excessive, that means that mere dialogue of a contentious topic wouldn’t be sufficient to cross the road and represent harassment.

Currently, its definition states that harassment is: “Unwanted conduct that has the purpose or effect of violating the recipient’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.”

The EHRC has urged ministers to proceed working to strike a stability to make sure safety for employees doesn’t come on the expense of freedom of expression.