Banned, Therefore Advertised

Two American political commentators, Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, were due to come to Britain. One was expected at SXSW London, the other also had an Oxford Union appearance in the diary. Then the Home Office cancelled their travel authorisations on the grounds that their presence here might not be conducive to the public good.

That phrase always has a certain charm, doesn’t it? Not conducive to the public good. It sounds as though the nation might catch damp if the wrong person stands too near a microphone.

And now, having barred them from speaking in rooms in Britain, the Government has helped turn them into an international free speech story.

Splendid.

Since when has banning someone with an internet following ever achieved its aim?

I can see the Home Office theory. Stop them getting on a plane, stop them standing on a stage, stop the awkward clips, job done. Very tidy. Very official. Possibly there was even a meeting with lanyards and mineral water. But in the real world, where people have phones, livestreams, podcasts and the attention span required to click on a scandal, it does the exact opposite.

It doesn’t silence them. It advertises them.

Before this, plenty of people in Britain had probably never heard of Hasan Piker or Cenk Uygur. Now they have. They’ve been given the one thing no political commentator can buy quite so cheaply: a story in which they’re not merely arguing a point, they’re the banned men. The men the British state apparently couldn’t risk allowing into a room with microphones, bottled water and the usual earnest questions from the floor.

That is not suppression. That is marketing.

And of course their platforms aren’t banned. Their channels are still there. Their clips are still there. Their audiences can still watch them. In fact, rather more people will now watch them, because nothing improves a speaker’s pull quite like the suggestion that someone in government is frightened of what they might say. It gives them mystery, grievance and martyrdom, all wrapped up in a Home Office letter.

This is the uncomfortable bit. Banning hasn’t become entirely useless, but it has become much less useful at suppressing speech. It can still stop a person entering the country, attending a rally, meeting organisers, or creating a flashpoint in a particular place. That’s not nothing. But the internet has no borders, and ministers sometimes seem oddly slow to remember that.

It cannot stop the message travelling. It cannot stop the clips. It cannot stop the livestream. It cannot stop the instant conversion of a fairly niche event into a global grievance with a handy screenshot attached.

And if the person is genuinely objectionable, the problem doesn’t disappear. It may get worse. If they’re obscure, a ban can make them famous. If they’re already famous, it confirms their martyr narrative. If they’re extremist, it lets them say the system fears the truth. If they’re dishonest, it saves them from being challenged in public and lets them perform victimhood from a nice safe distance.

So the state may win the border-control point and lose the propaganda point. That’s quite a feat. Like stopping a man coming through the front door while broadcasting his speech through every window in the street.

Which is why this looks less like a thought-out strategy than a knee-jerk reaction by people staring into headlights. Something happens, someone shouts risk, someone invokes antisemitism, a minister sees an awkward headline coming, and the machinery lurches into motion. There may even have been coercion from somewhere else. We don’t know that, and shouldn’t pretend we do, but the speed and vagueness of the public explanation do rather invite the question. It has the feel of a decision made to stop a row, not a decision made after working out what would actually reduce harm.

There may, of course, be evidence the public hasn’t seen. If someone is inciting violence, glorifying terrorism, coordinating with a banned group, raising funds for violence, or deliberately stirring up hatred against Jews as Jews, then that’s a different matter. The state is entitled to protect the public, and antisemitism is real, serious and dangerous. Nobody sensible should shrug at it.

But the practical test cannot simply be: are they objectionable? Plenty of people are objectionable. Some of them have columns, peerages and lunch bookings. The real test should be: does their physical presence create a specific risk materially greater than their online presence?

If the answer is yes, exclusion may be justified. If someone is coming here to organise, recruit, intimidate, fundraise, or inflame a volatile situation on the ground, then physical presence matters. But if the problem is merely that they say controversial, offensive or inflammatory things online, banning them from Britain is often just state-sponsored publicity.

We also need to be precise about antisemitism. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Criticism of Zionism is not automatically antisemitism. Criticism of Gaza policy, occupation, settlement, lobbying influence or the conduct of the Israeli state is not hatred of Jews. The line matters especially because some defenders of Israel too often blur it, treating criticism of a state as hostility to a people.

That doesn’t mean every pro-Palestinian commentator is wise, fair or careful. Some are plainly reckless. Some treat words like fireworks in a shed. But the test for exclusion cannot be that someone is abrasive, provocative, left-wing, anti-Israel, or makes ministers uncomfortable. If that becomes the test, we aren’t defending democracy. We’re just giving the Home Secretary a remote control for political inconvenience.

And what a precedent. Today it’s two American commentators accused of inflammatory views on Israel. Tomorrow it could be anti-immigration speakers, gender-critical feminists, Irish republicans, climate activists, Zionist hardliners, anti-Zionists, or anyone else whose presence might cause a minister to receive a difficult briefing before lunch.

This is the problem with vague powers. They always look sensible when they’re used against someone you dislike. They look rather less charming when the other lot get hold of the same lever.

So unless the Home Office has a much stronger case than it has made public, this looks censorious, brittle and self-defeating. It doesn’t protect debate. It infantilises it. It tells the public that the way to handle controversial arguments is not to expose them, challenge them, mock them, or beat them in open discussion, but to keep them out of the country and hope nobody notices.

Unfortunately, people did notice.

And now two commentators who were due to speak to relatively limited audiences in Britain have been handed international publicity, a ready-made free speech grievance, and a larger audience than they started with.

Somewhere in the Home Office, there’s probably a strategy document explaining why the chip-pan fire needed a leaf blower.