Banning people for their ideas will backfire on Britain
On Friday (29 May), I agreed to chair a panel at SXSW London featuring the massively popular American streamer, Hasan Piker. We were meant to discuss how the American left built its internet media strategy. But by Monday morning, I’d found out that the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had cancelled Piker’s visa – along with that of his uncle, the left-wing journalist Cenk Uygur – preventing them from travelling to the UK for the event.
Though the Home Office hasn’t given specific examples of why Piker and Uygur’s presence “may not be conducive to the public good” – the official reason behind their cancelled visas – the quotes popping up in media coverage all concern their past statements made about Israel. Cenk has called Israel’s actions in Gaza “barbaric”; Hasan has argued that Hamas is a “lesser evil” than Israel and that the group “is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state”.
Cancelling or revoking the visas of controversial speakers has become a favoured tactic of this Labour government. Last month, the Home Office blocked 11 far-right speakers from coming to attend a Tommy Robinson march. Earlier this year, Kanye West had his visa withdrawn to stop him from performing at Wireless Festival. Never fear, though: at the time of writing, Azealia Banks is still on the bill to perform at the Spectator’s summer garden party.
The Starmerite journalist Paul Mason has described such bans as “militant democracy”. Substituting the word “militant” for “liberal” in a democracy gets you to some whacky places. How come the far-right French journalist and politician Éric Zemmour could come to London last September and tell thousands of British protestors that they were being “colonised by our former colonies”, but Piker can’t because he has said that Israel is an apartheid state?
I don’t consider these speech acts to be moral equivalents, either – racism, and opposition to it, are not two sides of the same coin. But the wider point is this: it is impossible to establish a coherent or “fair” system for cancelling or revoking visas of controversial speakers, without essentially banning ever more people bar the anodyne Pod Save America lads from coming to the UK.
This creates a problem much bigger than the programming of SXSW London. Keir Starmer’s government has set a precedent for intervening to prevent individuals, from both the left and the right, from being able to travel to the UK. But they can’t stop them all – meaning that you can always pick out examples from the opposing side, and claim that political, religious, or racial discrimination is the reason for being treated differently. (“Why this white nationalist, and not that Islamist preacher?”)
The result isn’t a muscular, confident democratic culture in which healthy political contestation can thrive. And it’s certainly not protecting the public good. We’ve become a boiling soup of resentments and antipathies. Perhaps this is the unity that Starmer’s Labour has been striving for: everyone gets to feel like a victim of two-tier justice.
But while the political weaponisation of visa bans has been against both the right and the left, there is a specific crisis of free expression regarding criticism of Israel, and support for Palestine.
At times, it has felt like living in the world beyond the looking glass. Palestine Action became the first UK protest group to be designated a terrorist organisation, with hundreds of peaceful protestors arrested simply for holding placards in support of them. Labour MP Andy McDonald had the whip suspended when he articulated the wish for “Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, [to] live in peaceful liberty”. At the time, a Labour spokesperson said that McDonald’s comments “were deeply offensive, particularly at a time of rising anti-Semitism which has left Jewish people fearful for their safety”. Placing Israel’s interests at the heart of our national politics, and policy-making on free expression, doesn’t make any of us safer: rather, it fosters a culture in which resentment, blame and mistrust can thrive.
There’s a common-sense threshold for letting contentious speakers into the country: as long as you don’t incite violence, and you abide by domestic law while you’re here, it’s for individuals and protestors – what we used to call civil society – to tell you to piss off, not the state. While you might disagree with the politics espoused by Uygur and Piker, no serious person believes that they’re a risk to public safety. British democracy is not as fragile, insecure and unable to contest substantive issues as the government believes.
[Further reading: Lawless in Gaza]
