Northumbria University - Sarah Phillimore and Harry Miller 'seen as a 'safety and wellbeing' risk to an entire university.'

Because academic life is often very precarious at the lower levels - even at the higher levels internationally well regarded academics have been hounded out of their jobs for stating the bleeding obvious to eighteen year olds with no life experience who still think the world revolves around them and are scared of listening to opposing views because they don’t understand the principle and purpose of debate. Oh and we have had successive governments who see further education as a cash cow to pull in overseas money and who have crammed students into courses, reduced contact time and encouraged the dumbing down of knowledge to the extent that every student and their parent expects a first for their money and is prepared to argue the toss if their idle child doesn’t get one .

So the academics daren’t speak out, the students are shouting so loudly they can’t hear what reasonable people are trying patiently to tell them, and to add insult to injury a lot of manipulative organisations are raking in the cash and keeping themselves and their woke employees going by spreading misinformation and lies. It’s a perfect storm, and I hope it is blowing over now.

In any event it appears she attended the seminar - her complaint is about her email being intercepted, not about being prevented from attending.

The employee is a representative of their organisation, carrying out work in line with the goals and values of the organisation. It would have been accessed by another employee for purposes in line with the original intentions of the email communication exchange - to establish suitability of content for delivery at the university. The right to a platform is not at the personal discretion of one university employee.

Slightly off-topic, but the Fair Cop and The Women's Rights Network review of the reports by the ICSR and Craig McLean is excellent and the ICSR and McLean should be ashamed of publishing such shoddy and one-sided nonsense. No wonder McLean didn't get back to Sarah with a response to the criticism levelled at him in the review.

Why do these ideologues have such significant sway over previously reputable institutions

I’ve often wondered this.

Having said that IANAL and SP is so presumably she'd know better than me.

I think Unis doing this are on very, very dodgy ground. I hope she sues them to the moon and back.

I've had to deal with a confirmed GDPR breach at work and it was something way more minor and inconsequential than this.

So in brief, if universities are forwarding emails for reasons totally unrelated to the email without the senders explicit consent then I think that's a pretty clear case of breaking the law.

As I understand it, under GDPR then if you send an email to an intended recipient it would be fine for someone else to read it - at that address - if they were covering for the intended recipient in terms of their normal duties. However, I do think it's a GDPR breach if it's forwarded on to someone else for reasons entirely unrelated to the email.

It's about what the purpose of the email was. SP did not send the email in order to allow someone else to thought police her. She was replying directly to a specific person about a specific subject. Anything outside that is breaching her GDPR.

You can't just take people's data and do something totally unrelated with it - if I send emails relating to my bank account, employees can deal with those emails in relation to that query - they can't forward those emails on to an entirely different department / company who can then start spamming me with advertising. Or worse, looking for evidence of insults or wrong think.

Can you imagine if it was a wedding? The B&G (or B and her parents if you're a traditionalist) invite you, you say yes and book a hotel and buy an outfit. Then a random guest tells you you're no longer invited and they will be intercepting your emails so you can't ask the person who issued the invitation what's going on!

Now that would be a thread!

Why do the mussel farmers think they have a right to speak at your university?

When they've had an invite I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume the invite was genuine and if a third person cancels said invite, the mussel farmer who has spent time and money as a result of said invite can ask for an explanation.

You seem to think we are saying all random mussel farmers have a right to rock up and speak at all random unis without invite? Maybe you've misunderstood.

Got it in one.

Why do the mussel farmers think they have a right to speak at your university?

#SayYesToHate on the Transgender Day of Remembrance

oh gosh!! Maybe some extreme trans activists will lay off abusing women and lesbians who disagree with them on IWD and on Lesbian awareness days!

There's a difference between your 1. entitlement to the feeling of hate (and yes, your entitlement to express hate -to the degree that the laws provide for, anyway), and 2. your entitlement to a platform at a University to express vile views, is there not?

I think mussels are vile, is it OK to deplatform mussels farmers?

Wasn’t ‘say yes to hate’ a hashtag to reject the attempt to frame saying women are adult human females and other facts about the material realities of life as hate speech?

To reject the totalitarian demands of extreme trans rights activists?

To reject the very deplatforming seemingly attempted here?

Isn’t it funny how a group insist we be nice and not demand ‘truth’ in using words such as ‘women’ mantras like ‘transwomen are women’ (ie . To pry open the meaning of woman to mean what they want) yet, then want to enforce the literal meaning of the word ‘hate’ when it suits them (and not allow use of the word in the ironic way it is used in that hashtag).

Almost like they get litoral and literal mixed up. Or … they just have an agenda and don’t like their hypocrisy pointed out.

Do you think we ought to be ordering stickers saying something contentious like transwomen are men , sorry, I meant stickers saying Please Stop Reading My Emails, or would that be too upsetting.

So here's the context, @suggestionsplease1 from a very easy google search:

www.faircop.org.uk/on-hatred/

Yes - Sarah Phillimore is a co-founder of Fair Cop

No - Fair Cop is not a hate organisation, and does not support or encourage hate of anyone

Yes - Fair Cop is campaigning against the use of 'non-crime hate incidents' as a form of mob justice against people who are acting lawfully but in ways that some popular people don't like.

The police argue that it’s important to record hate incidents — where no crime has been committed, but where someone has perceived that an action or statement is motivated by hate — because this hatred could escalate to a crime. That sounds reasonable, but we founded Fair Cop because ordinary people are having hate incidents recorded against their name for making statements such as “I think my cat might be a Methodist” or, simply, “Huh?”.

What’s more, the police’s claim that they are preventing escalation, while plausible on paper, is on closer inspection completely bogus. Fair Cop will soon be publishing the findings of our latest Freedom of Information campaign to discover whether the police monitor how many hate incidents escalate into actual hate crimes. Spoiler alert: they don’t, because they can’t.

...

It gets worse. The College of Policing’s latest hate crime guidance defines “hatred” to include dislike, resentment and unfriendliness. It also retains the ‘victim’ perception element which enables anyone to cry “hate” to the police whenever they read or hear something that offends them. If you’ve been involved in the Great Trans Debate, there’s a chance you might have a hate incident recorded against you. And you won’t know about it unless you file a Subject Access Request to whichever force the complainant (or, as the Guidance insists, the “victim”) reported the incident. Or, when you are rejected for dream job or volunteering role that requires an enhanced DBS search.

Sorry, quoted wrong post in my response, meant to refer to this one of course.

There's a difference between your 1. entitlement to the feeling of hate (and yes, your entitlement to express hate -to the degree that the laws provide for, anyway), and 2. your entitlement to a platform at a University to express vile views, is there not?

I don't see how any reasonable person can fail to see this distinction, but it appears that Sarah Phillimore and many other GC feminists regard 1 & 2 as rights that are synonymous with each other.

Weird. Especially with the emphasis on logic and reason that is usually bandied about.

There is nothing criminal in hating - we all do. I hate eating mussels. I also hate the erosion of women's rights, being referred to as 'cis' or a 'mentruator', I hate the sterilisation of children, I hate pollution, I hate corruption, I hate slugs, I hate drink drivers, I hate rapists and paedophiles, I hate Pepsi, I hate the colour of my bathroom. Do you think I should be criminalised because I hate slugs? If not then why is 'hate' itself being pushed as though it was itself a crime rather than a natural feeling?

It also seems someone at the university has decided to 'say yes to hate' except they took it a step further and used their hate as an excuse damage Sarah professionally. Ironic really that they then complained about that slogan.

Just as a general piece of advice, to anyone on MN or any other website: you can tell what people are telling you by reading what they've written, not what you have made up and decided they've said.

Are you telling me that Sarah Phillimore is not a co-founder of Fair Cop? As that is what it says on their website. There appears to be a photo of her on it?

Is it someone else purporting to be her that has written that open letter saying that Fair Cop communications like #SayYesToHate on the Transgender Day of Remembrance are protected political speech?

She should really get on to that. It could be harmful for her reputation.

@spongedog A similiar thing happened at Harvard in April. Either a low level staff or grad student revoked a Harvard invitation to a Keats scholar, Dr. Devin Buckley, a feminist philosopher and Women's Liberation Front (WOLF) Board Member. The difference was that Dr Buckley was only going to be speaking about Romanticism but her GC views were enough for the cancellation.

"She was scheduled to speak at Harvard University on her cutting-edge work on British Romanticism and philosophy but on April 18th she was notified that she had been disinvited, citing her board membership with "an organization that takes a public stance regarding trans people as dangerous and deceptive.""

I highly recommend watching WOLF's interview with her (at the link)as she is an American version of Sarah Phillimore, so very calm,laser-focused and articulate.

Based on your assumption I went and read the open letter. She is saying that a third person says fair cop is stating that hashtag, not her, not fair cop. You are reading it incorrectly.

If someone emails a university in a general manner I expect anyone in the university administration to answer that email, however if I name a person at said university I expect the email to go to/be read by that person.