Maureen Martin and the case for amendments to the Employment Rights Act 1996

The Free Speech Union is campaigning for an amendment to the?Employment Rights Act 1996 ?to make it impossible for companies to discipline staff for saying non-woke things outside of the workplace. The case of Maureen Martin – first reported by the Mail and Reclaim the Net – demonstrates exactly why that change is needed.

As the Free Speech Union’s General Secretary, Toby Young, explained on?GB News ?recently (and also for the?Mail ), Maureen was fired from her job at housing association L&Q because she said things about marriage that some people judged politically incorrect.

Ms Martin was campaigning to become mayor of Lewisham in South-East London when she published a ‘six-point plan’ of action that was posted to the borough’s 205,000 registered voters. One of those six points expressed the orthodox Christian belief that “natural marriage between a man and a woman is the fundamental building block for a successful society, and the safest environment for raising children”. Sensing an opportunity, local LGBT activists eagerly moved in for the cancel, reproducing an image of her leaflet on Twitter, accusing her of ‘hate speech’ and then demanding she be dismissed.

Despite an unblemished 13-year-record of employment, her employer duly obliged, sacking Maureen for breaching the company’s social-media policy and bringing L&Q into disrepute. Needless to say, L&Q is a member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme. The dismissal has left Ms Martin, who lives with and financially supports her 87-year-old father, without an income.

The underlying scenario here, in which an employer claims the right to police the lawful speech of an employee outside the workplace, is one the Free Speech Union encounters on a surprisingly regular basis. As Deputy Director Ben Jones pointed out – also on?GB News ?– our casework team “currently has more than 80 live cases where we are helping people in situations like Maureen’s, where they’ve lost their job, or they’ve lost work, or they’re facing an investigation for expressing often very mild views; views that are shared by a great many people and which they should absolutely be entitled to hold.”

Last year, for instance, we helped Jeremy Sleath, who had been fired by West Midlands Trains for celebrating the reopening of the pubs on ‘Freedom Day’ (i.e., the day the UK Government ended all Covid-19 'lockdown' restrictions) by saying on Facebook that he didn’t want to live in a ‘Muslim alcohol-free caliphate’ for the rest of his life. (Times ). It didn’t matter that he’d said it outside the workplace on a personal account. Like Maureen, he was dismissed for breaching social-media policy and bringing the company into disrepute. With our help, Jeremy fought back in court and got a judgement of ‘unfair dismissal’.

The organisation Christian Concern is currently helping Maureen take legal action against L&Q, and it’s likely that they’ll be equally successful, not least because under the Equality Act 2010 expressions of religion or belief are protected, meaning you cannot be fired for expressing an orthodox religious view, however distasteful some might find it.

That said, however, taking your employer to an Employment Tribunal is a lengthy and often ruinously costly process. (Allison Bailey had to raise more than ￡500,000 to fund her recent legal case , for example.) That’s why we believe the Employment Rights Act needs amending to make it impossible for employers to sack employees who say something lawful outside the workplace.

Something else we’d like to see is a statute of limitations on what people can be investigated for. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of what the author Freddie deBoer has called?“offence archaeology”, where people go back many years to try and find things people have said that are supposedly offensive in order to get them disciplined, sacked or cancelled - as happened, for example, in the recent, high profile cases of the then leader of Northern Ireland's UUP Party, Doug Beattie (Telegraph ), schoolteacher Christian Webb (Spiked ) and American comedian Kevin Hart (Spectator ). Like libel and slander, we’re campaigning for a 12-month statute of limitations on what you can be investigated for.