Banning speakers from university campuses is the wrong way to achieve change, says the broadcaster and peer

Joan Bakewell, former broadcaster and Labour peer, has said that attempts to ban controversial speakers at universities are an assault on free speech and a dangerous step towards “taking out the books and burning them”.

Her comments came after a spate of student bodies decided to “no-platform” speakers. Late last year an online petition was launched seeking to prevent Germaine Greer from giving a lecture at Cardiff University on the grounds that she has expressed transphobic views, and Brunel University students turned their backs and walked out on controversial Mail Online columnist Katie Hopkins.

Is free speech in British universities under threat? Read more

“It is a crisis of ideas,” said Bakewell, who is president of Birkbeck College in London. “I am against [things like] hate speech, but banning things is dangerous, a step towards taking out the books and burning them.”

The 82-year-old writer and broadcaster, whose latest book Stop the Clocks: Thoughts on What I Leave Behind comes out next month, says that in her lifetime the biggest change she has seen is the economic empowerment of women.

“I’ve seen huge political and social changes,” she said, in an interview with the Radio Times. “The most important of which is the changing role of women, which has also changed the role of men. My mother’s generation regarded it as a badge of honour not to work, to marry someone who had enough of an income to keep them.”

Bakewell spent much of her career working in TV and radio at the BBC and continues to co-host Sky Arts’s Portrait Artist of the Year, write a column for the Telegraph, and was made a Labour peer in 2011.

She declined to comment much about the current Labour party beyond making a joke about leader Jeremy Corbyn, who will be 70 at the time of the next election in 2020.

“[He’s] a child,” she said. “I didn’t vote for him, but I don’t have space in my head for nitty-gritty [party political] stuff.”