Britain’s Bar Standards Board (BSB) has withdrawn controversial proposals to oblige barristers to “act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion” (EDI). Opposition from lawyers and the Free Speech Union (FSU) helped to defeat the plan.
The BSB is the regulator of barristers in England and Wales. It is responsible for both overseeing professional standards and maintaining the official BSB Handbook, outlining ethical obligations, informed by the ‘Core Duties’ for professional conduct. When an amended version of Core Duty 8 was proposed, it went well beyond the existing rule—where barristers are required to “not discriminate unlawfully against any person”—to push them into with a new, open-ended duty to promote EDI.
The new proposal would have replaced the earlier clear, legally grounded obligation with a recipe for mission creep. Critics warned of the risk of replacing neutrality with advocacy and impartiality with ideological conformity. An FSU opinion paper by Jason Coppel KC and Tom Cross KC concluded that the proposed duty would likely be:
unnecessary, unlawful, and unworkable in light of existing law and professional ethical standards required of barristers.
Specifically, it could restrict entry to the Bar on the grounds of an individual’s lawfully held views, which is illegal under employment law. FSU founder and director Lord Toby Young of Acton welcomed the decision:
I’m relieved the BSB has seen sense on this. We spent several thousand pounds obtaining advice from one of Britain’s leading public law KCs which we passed on to the BSB and, reading between the lines, we were threatening a judicial review if it pressed ahead. The FSU wasn’t the only body pushing back, but I think we deserve much of the credit.
