It is with regret that I must inform you that, after just over 40 years of our Annual Conference taking place at the RAF Club, we will sadly not be able to return there in the future.
The reason for this is that the RAF Club have imposed a moratorium on any future FET bookings at their Clubhouse. Following this year’s conference in June, our sponsor was contacted by them with the claim that we had violated the event Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) of our Annual Conference, specifically in relation to potential harm to the reputation of the Club.
The basis of their claim centred on the talk by one of our guest speakers, Harry Miller (pictured above), the founder of ‘Fair Cop’ which campaigns for the freedoms of speech and expression against police actions which they believe ‘chill’ those two liberties. These actions have often been targeted towards those with ‘gender-critical’ / sex-realist views, and his talk centred on this presentation which is of interest to FET. The Club initially cited two things which they argued both could and had damaged the reputation of the Club as they had received some complaints concerning them:
- Social media posting by FET of images, which they argue included the RAF Club logo in shot, and of Miller’s talk in which they alleged that he questioned the impartiality of the police.
- A supposed ‘re-posting’ on the FET Twitter account of a controversial Fair Cop tweet containing the contrived tessellation of a ‘Progress Pride’ (‘LGBTQ+’) flag to resemble a swastika (in the context of challenging comments by the Chief Constable of Hampshire Police to the effect that posting such an image would be an arrestable offence), which the Club considered inappropriate and offensive, along with a promotion of our Annual Conference in the RAF Club.
Needless to say, we took these allegations very seriously and, through myself, refuted them comprehensively, involving as they did:
- A misrepresentation of Miller’s point: that he had not denied the impartiality of the police outright, but had pointed out that the actions of certain police services in supporting ‘Pride’ marches violated the political impartiality prescribed by the College of Policing’s Code of Ethics, as such marches are self-described political protests. This technical and evidenced point, whilst topically controversial, could not be morally or evidentially faulted by any reasonable person and therefore could not damage the Club’s reputation.
- A fabricated image of our supposed ‘re-post’ (we had never re-posted or otherwise used Fair Cop’s controversial tweet), which was therefore irrelevant.
The RAF Club responded to this refutation by changing the basis of its claim of risk of reputational harm to the occurrence of Miller’s talk per se, irrespective of its specific content or our social media concerning the same. They argued that Fair Cop’s controversial use of Twitter, particularly use of that aforementioned offensive image, meant that his talk at the Club associated it with Fair Cop’s previous contentious communications. The Club cited its T&Cs such that these allowed a violation to be found from any action that ‘could’ harm the Club’s reputation and that this was a ‘deliberately low bar’ from which they were unwilling to move.
We gave further rebuttal of these arguments, based on the Club’s failure to note the right intentions of Miller and Fair Cop in their tweets, and two further points we had also previously made: not only is it commonly accepted that event venues do not automatically endorse the events they host, still less the speakers therein, and even less so their previous actions external to the event, but there had been no evidence over the previous few months of social media usage of any negative comments at all concerning the RAF Club relating to our Annual Conference generally or Miller’s talk specifically.
Sadly, our response fell on deaf ears and, with no right of appeal under their rules, their moratorium on FET bookings will stand.
FET considers that this is an act of ‘cancel culture’ associated with activists who are hostile to the work we do and who complained about us to the RAF Club as a form of low-level harassment. It is to my mind especially ironic that we should be ‘cancelled’ from the Club for hosting a talk, the subject of which was the importance of defending freedoms of speech and expression.
The person who first sponsored us at the RAF Clubhouse was Denis Riches, the husband of one of our past Directors, Valerie Riches. He had served in the RAF in his National Service after the Second World War, and later became an RAF Club member. It would sadden and profoundly disappoint him, as it does us and indeed current FET members who are also members of the Club, to see this happen. Whilst each institution has the proprietary right to choose whom it hosts, this is conditioned both morally and (therefore) even legally. The choice to exclude has an ethical dimension, and we disagree with the Club that reasonable standards have been met in this case. The decision to ban FET from future bookings contradicts the spirit and values of the RAF itself, whose members have fought and died for the possibility of a free and open society.
We will be restricting future comment on this matter, to concentrate on our important primary work – we have much to do without letting this become a further distraction – and look forward to the opportunity that this presents us to find a new venue for the future. We felt however, given the nature of what had happened and the long tradition of our attendance at the RAF Club which has been much valued by FET supporters over the last four decades, that it was important to let you as members know what had happened.
If you have any comments or concerns about this matter after reading the above, then you can write to the RAF Club using the details on
the ‘Contact Us’ page of their website, and you can contact us using
the equivalent ‘Contact Us’ section on our website.
We will inform you about a replacement venue for our 2024 Annual Conference in due course, and look forward very much in advance to seeing you there.
Peter D. WilliamsThis Statement
has been placed on our website. FET’s cancellation from the RAF Club was featured
in the Telegraph over the weekend. The article garnered 326 comments with the vast majority supporting our position.
