Freedom of expression: what’s acceptable? Pt 2

• In a follow-up to his 2023 article on Higgs v Farmor’s School, ‘Freedom of expression: what’s acceptable?’, the author analyses the recent Court of Appeal judgment.
• The court found that the claimant’s dismissal for re-posting ‘inflammatory’ material on same-sex marriage and gender choice could not proportionately justify her dismissal, which therefore constituted unlawful direct discrimination.

Older people, despite having always lived in England, will nevertheless for many years have inhabited a foreign country—at least in terms of the famous opening of LP Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ For what were mainstream views on sex, marriage and gender in the 1950s were, in employment terms, considered dismissible conduct when expressed in 2018.

This was once again apparent when the Court of Appeal revisited on appeal a decision made by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in Higgs