An employment tribunal case which hinges on whether an academic suffered detriment and harassment due to his anti-tobacco beliefs has been allowed to proceed to a full hearing.
The University of York failed in its attempt to have the case struck out after the judge ruled that Jim McCambridge, professor of addiction and health behaviour, had “more than little reasonable prospects of showing that his stated belief amounts to a protected philosophical belief”.
McCambridge’s belief that “public health needs to be protected from policy interference and associated interventions within science by the alcohol and tobacco industries so that the integrity of science is preserved” will now be tested by the employment tribunal.
As well as showing that his anti-tobacco belief qualifies as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act, he will also need to show that his treatment by the university was related to this belief, and that he made one or more protected disclosures.
The claimant believes that he did when he asserted that another academic’s reputation and credibility would be improved by their relationship with the university, and this would allegedly assist the tobacco industry in their efforts to promote smoking or minimise the harmful effects of smoking and thereby cause harm members of the public.
Philosophical belief
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McCambridge said that an investigation into his conduct following student complaints was procedurally unfair.
Counsel for the university said that under “no sensible reading” could the claimant’s asserted disclosures satisfy the test of a protected disclosure.
However, in the tribunal decision, employment judge Miller could not say that the claimant has no reasonable prospects of success in either establishing that he made a protected disclosure, establishing that he has a protected philosophical belief or in establishing causation between either of those matters and the alleged detriments.
“The factual matters underlying each of those three arguments are complex. It is not fair or proportionate to dispose of the claimant’s claims without giving him an opportunity to produce evidence which may prove them,” explained the judge.
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