The debate surrounding the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which begins its journey through parliament on Monday, poses a challenge to radicals—one that has been a recurring feature of British and American politics since the victory of Donald Trump in 2016.
For decades, the student left has been inclined to deny speaking opportunities (“no platforming”) to the far right, above all to fascists. Such students and their allies have argued that such views are not just hateful, but that fascists ultimately threaten to derail democracy and silence all opinions other than their own. The left’s long-term survival requires, as the philosopher of free speech and radical poet John Milton once argued, that we “suppress the suppressors themselves.”
Ever since 2015, however, whenever this argument has been heard, the right has used it to its advantage. The left, they argue, have ambitions to ban a much wider set of people than fascists. The radicals are the real threat to free speech. If you want a politics of free thought and transgression, that territory now belongs to the right. It was the airing of such an argument —through such proxies as Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart—that delivered a certain young right-wing vote to Trump.
In the UK, we suffer this politics at second-hand. Government ministers warn of the threat of Critical Race Theory, a body of thought whose actual content they appear to be blissfully unaware of. We get new rules for heritage bodies insisting that statues stay up. Boris Johnson takes time off the first wave of the pandemic to write a long Twitter thread about the (supposed) risk to the Churchill monument, and the maximum prison sentence for damaging memorials is being increased to 10 years, far longer than terms meted out for many crimes involving damaging a living person. We now have, most importantly of all, a Bill which promises to entrench free speech by the expedient of allowing anyone in the country—lecturer, students, or officious bystander—to sue a university should it fail to provide free speech to outside speakers.
Radicals make a mistake in letting the right claim the slogan of free speech. If you go back to the student generation who first adopted “no platforming” in the early 1970s, there were many prominent figures who wanted both no platform and general free speech. One was the student doctor David Widgery who acted as a Mackenzie friend (a non-lawyer giving legal advice) in the 1970 trial of the countercultural magazine, Oz. Oz’s editors were threatened with life imprisonment for conspiracy to corrupt public morals. Fighting the state for the right to speak remained core to Widgery’s aims in 1976 when he became the unofficial chief publicist for Rock Against Racism. The reason this generation could go on from supporting free speech to implementing no platform was because when they spoke of no platform, they were serious about taking free speech away only from fascists who would otherwise, potentially, extinguish it one day.
Part of the reason why the right has so much success in pushing its ideological version of “free speech” is that the left has in more recent times taken to applying no platform too widely. Bring it back to a narrow, exceptional group of fascists, and it might make sense again.
Moreover, the “no platform” slogan initially emerged amid a form of do-it-yourself politics. Faced with the prospect of fascist speakers on campus, student radicals rejected the common-sense consumerist tactic of simply voting with their feet and not attending. This was a time when students had power: the colleges and universities were meant to be their institutions, and they had a right to decide which guest speakers were invited. Too often since then, the desire to restrict hate speech has taken the form of approaching vice-chancellors and asking them to ban a speaker, relying on the goodwill of university administrators or social media platforms.
In Britain today, conservatives argue that the platforms provided to right-wing causes are sacrosanct—that it is a shameful thing when a speaker is invited to talk, and then subsequently deprived of the opportunity to speak. The left wants to challenge that approach. We argue that there are some forms of politics so destructive that they should not be normalised.
What we need is a generation capable of filling the broad space between these two perspectives. It is the easiest thing in the world to come up with tactics which simultaneously permit an unpleasant speaker a platform, and challenge and humble them. You can slow-handclap such a speaker; you can turn your backs on them. You can book the tickets for their event in such large numbers that none of the speaker’s actual supporters get a place, then leave the missing seats empty. You can heckle them, mock them, provoke them. You can lead a walkout from their event. You can publicly allow them to speak while at the same time hosting a speech event of your own—a protest—outside. You can book better-known speakers with a larger public profile to talk at the same time as theirs. You can embarrass a speaker and challenge their authority, without removing a platform from them.
Behind all these tactics is the same idea. The way for student radicals to win the culture wars is by allowing their enemies the platform they demand; by keeping the group of those who are no platformed to a tiny exception; and by relying on their own wit and humour rather than the banning instincts of university managers or social media platforms.
