On 7 May 2026, voters in Scotland will go to the polls to elect members of the Scottish Parliament. Holyrood, the devolved legislature, has responsibility for areas including education, justice and aspects of civil and criminal law. These elections are distinct from those to the UK Parliament at Westminster and will shape the policy environment governing Scottish universities over the coming parliamentary term.
At the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), we have examined the manifestos of four of the major parties contesting the election to identify any policies or proposals that bear on academic freedom and free speech in higher education. Few engage with these issues directly. Nevertheless, a number of proposals – relating to hate crime law, non-disclosure agreements, a ban on conversion practices, university funding, and SLAPPs – raise questions closely connected to the conditions under which academics teach, research and speak.
Our analysis of those proposals is set out below.
Scottish Conservatives
The manifesto says it would “issue public-sector-wide guidance to forbid the use of non-disclosure agreements when it comes to matters of employment or conduct”. One important question is whether this would apply to universities. While formally autonomous, they are publicly funded and embedded within the wider public sector framework, including under equality law and related regulatory duties.
In universities, NDAs are often used in cases involving harassment or discrimination, where those categories can operate as proxies for disputes about speech and expression. Their use can obscure how institutions interpret and apply those concepts, particularly where lawful but controversial views are concerned. While NDAs may serve legitimate purposes in individual cases, their routine use can limit transparency and prevent patterns from emerging, including where expression of protected beliefs is treated as misconduct.
The Conservatives also say they would “repeal Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act that forces officers to spend time policing people’s speech rather than fighting real crime”.
Commenced in 2024, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new offence of stirring up hatred in relation to “transgender identity”, extending such offences to cover this characteristic, for which no equivalent stirring-up offence exists in England and Wales. Section 4(2) applies where a person behaves in a way a reasonable person would consider “threatening or abusive”, or communicates material of that kind, and does so with intent to stir up hatred against a group defined by a listed characteristic, including “transgender identity”.
The concern for academic freedom is that the offence is framed broadly enough to cover “behaviour of any kind”, including things said or otherwise communicated, and that “material” may be displayed, published, distributed, sent or shown. In an academic context, this extends to lectures, slides, emails, recordings, online teaching materials, public events and published commentary. Even where prosecution is unlikely, the Act creates a legal vocabulary through which controversial speech may be framed as potentially criminal, increasing the likelihood of complaints, referrals, and precautionary institutional responses.
Scottish Labour
Labour says it would support “research capacity in Scotland’s universities”, encourage “collaboration between universities and business”, and establish “targets” for “R&D and spin-outs”. This is the manifesto’s only point that comes close to engaging with universities directly, but it frames them primarily as engines of innovation and growth, suggesting an instrumental view that prioritises commercial outcomes over curiosity-driven inquiry and academic autonomy.
The manifesto also says it would “work to deliver a conversion practices ban on a four nation basis to prevent the creation of any possible loopholes across the UK and protect LGBT+ people from harmful conversion practices”.
The difficulty is that modern conversion-practices proposals often do more than prohibit coercive or abusive conduct. A loosely drafted ban risks catching the expression of views critical of gender identity theory and, more specifically, the idea that vulnerable children and young adults may have an inner “gender identity” distinct from the sex of their body.
Take Canada’s Bill C-4 (“An act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy)”), which illustrates how such provisions can be framed in practice. The legislation makes it a crime to “repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity” or to “repress… a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth”.
“Repress” does a great deal of work there, materialising in law a discrepancy between “gender” and “sex”. The fact that a person’s true “gender identity” is not always visible is no longer contestable on the grounds that this notion may be little more than a theoretical abstraction. If it is not always visible, then in law that is simply – and only – because it is being “repressed”. In this way, “gender identity” and “gender expression” are transformed from contestable theoretical postulates into unquestionable facts. Once that move is made, anything other than affirmation is liable to be recast as a form of “conversion practice”, or at least as a suspect attempt to repress an identity the law has already chosen to treat as real.
Drafting of this kind places pressure on academics, teachers, therapists and clinicians who question that underlying theory, or who adopt a “watchful waiting” approach while exploring the varied reasons why a child or young person may be experiencing gender distress. Rather than engaging in legitimate inquiry or professional judgment, they are liable to be characterised as causing harm by refusing affirmation.
Reform UK
Reform’s manifesto states: “We will abolish the SNP’s intrusive, ideologically motivated Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, restoring freedom of speech and allowing police to focus on real crime.” As with the similar pledge in the Scottish Conservatives’ manifesto (see above), this has potential implications for the speech climate in Scottish universities.
Reform also says it would “undertake a comprehensive review of our University funding to ensure degrees are meaningful, value-for-money and grounded in genuine academic merit rather than EDI or sustainability metrics”.
The reference to “sustainability” is likely a reference to the Scottish Funding Council’s Net Zero and Sustainability Framework for Action, which has helped create an institutional environment in which sustainability is treated not merely as an estates or operational concern, but increasingly as something to be embedded across teaching and governance. A recent CAF investigation found one major Scottish university treating the contested concept of “sustainable development” as a curricular “enhancement” to be embedded across degree programmes, shifting the emphasis from critical scholarly inquiry towards evidencing affirmative engagement with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
More generally, the formulation gestures at a real concern – the distortion of academic life by managerial ideologies – but the proposed cure is framed in terms vague enough to invite a different form of external control. Once funding is tied to “genuine academic merit”, the central question becomes who defines that merit. The danger, in other words, is that one mode of bureaucratic or ideological supervision is replaced by another, with ministers or funding bodies exerting more direct influence over the internal life of universities, on pain of financial penalty.
Even the phrase “academic merit” calls to mind the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence, which ties access to federal grants to compliance with government priorities, freezing research funds over EDI policies and the continuation of institutional units that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”. Whether one agrees with some or all of these conditions or not, the broader point is that such a scheme inserts the government-of-the-day’s agenda into areas historically regarded as the preserve of individual universities, raising concerns about academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
That comparison with the US might sound far-fetched, but Reform has itself previously pledged to “cut funding to universities that undermine free speech”, suggesting that the use of financial leverage is not wholly alien to its thinking.
SNP
The manifesto describes Scotland’s universities as “anchors of economic and social progress and vital partners in our mission to create a robust, resilient wellbeing economy” and proposes “empower[ing] strategic regional economic partnerships to boost productivity and innovation by linking research, universities and businesses”. In that context, it promises a sector review: the “Shape of Future Funding Framework for universities”. As with Labour’s approach (see above), this suggests an instrumental view of universities as engines of innovation and growth, in which provision for curiosity-driven inquiry and academic autonomy – equally vital but not readily auditable in economic terms – may be displaced.
Unlike any other party at this election, the SNP has something to say about SLAPPs. Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation – or SLAPPs – are legal actions or threats of litigation intended less to succeed in court than to silence critics by imposing the financial and psychological burden of defending a claim.
The SNP says it will introduce anti-SLAPP legislation, explaining that such actions “threaten freedom of speech, expression and participation in public life, including for journalists and campaigners”. It says it wants to stop that “so we uphold human rights and allow legitimate expression.”
While such tactics are indeed most commonly associated with attempts to intimidate journalists and campaigners, academic researchers have increasingly found themselves on the receiving end of similar threats from companies and wealthy individuals unhappy with critical scholarship. The effect is not only the immediate strain on individual academics, with the threat of costly-litigation encouraging self-censorship, increasing the cost of undertaking sensitive research through the need for legal advice, or simply deterring scholars from investigating powerful interests in the first place.
There is also a more institutional effect, since litigation threats can foster risk-aversion among universities. In practice, an academic’s ability to pursue critical research often depends on whether their institution is willing to stand behind them. Yet many universities offer limited insurance, legal support, or other safeguards, leaving scholars to shoulder the risk themselves.
The legal design of anti-SLAPP regimes, however, raises a procedural difficulty. Most proposals rely on some form of early strike-out or summary dismissal mechanism, allowing courts to terminate claims that appear abusive at a preliminary stage. This gives rise to a “motive problem”: determining whether litigation has been initiated for an improper purpose before the factual record has been fully developed through disclosure and evidential testing. In other words, a regime that is too permissive leaves critics exposed to strategic litigation, while one that is too aggressive risks curtailing the legitimate right of claimants to seek redress before the courts.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.