Britain's Marketplace of Ideas Now Has Border Guards

For decades, if not centuries, the United Kingdom liked to think of itself as one of the world's great marketplaces of ideas. Revolutionaries, dissidents and controversial thinkers were expected to argue their case in public, not be kept out at the border. The answer to bad ideas, the liberal tradition insisted, was better ideas.

That assumption appears to be shifting.

Over the space of just a few months, and particularly in the run-up to this week's Conservative Political Action Conference Great Britain (CPAC Britain), the Home Office has excluded or reportedly refused entry to a growing number of foreign political activists and commentators, overwhelmingly from the populist or nationalist right. Polish MEP Dominik Tarczynski, invited to speak at CPAC Britain, was denied entry under the familiar formula that his presence was deemed "not conducive to the public good". Earlier this year, several figures associated with Tommy Robinson demonstrations were excluded on similar grounds.

A Pattern of Refusal

What is striking is not merely the individual decisions, but the cumulative pattern.

Every state has the sovereign right to control its borders. Britain has long exercised powers allowing the home secretary to exclude foreign nationals whose presence is judged contrary to the public good. Those powers are broad, discretionary and entirely lawful, even if they seem to be used far more frequently against right-wing speakers than against economic migrants.

But lawfulness, in any case, is not the same thing as wisdom.

The purpose of these powers was traditionally understood to be exceptional: terrorists, organized criminals, extremists directly inciting violence. Increasingly, however, they appear to be drifting towards something different: a mechanism by which the government of the day decides which strands of democratic political opinion deserve a hearing.

Yesterday's Extremism, Tomorrow's Policy

The obvious response, which deserves a hearing, is that at least some of those banned from entry are not respectable conservatives but extremists. Some, of course, are. Yet that answer merely shifts the question one stage backwards: who decides where legitimate politics ends and extremism begins? Tarczynski, for example, is an elected representative. So too is Sebastian Tynkkynen, the Finnish MEP banned last week. So too was former Finnish Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen.

https://twitter.com/SebastianMEP/status/2077361187784630410

Further, the line between moderation and extremism is an increasingly difficult one to draw in an era where yesterday's far-right talking point often becomes tomorrow's mainstream government policy.

Only a few years ago, advocacy of mass deportations, strict border enforcement or "remigration" was regarded in much of polite society as beyond the pale. Today, governments across Europe openly discuss variations of precisely those ideas. The political center moves. The state's blacklist, however, has a habit of lagging behind, or worse, trying to prevent the movement altogether.

There is another irony.

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Successive governments have justified online censorship, hate-speech laws and platform regulation by insisting that dangerous ideas spread rapidly across borders via the internet. If that is true, banning a speaker from physically entering Heathrow accomplishes remarkably little. Dominik Tarczynski can address British audiences via livestream just as easily as from a podium. Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, left-wing commentators who were themselves excluded earlier this year, did exactly that after being refused entry.

State-Approved Opinion

The practical effect is therefore not to prevent speech, but to draw a symbolic line between opinions the government approves of and opinions it considers too dangerous even to be spoken in person.

That amounts to a subtle but significant constitutional shift.

Britain has historically prided itself on trusting its citizens to hear controversial arguments and reject them if they are unpersuasive. Increasingly, the instinct appears to be that citizens require prior protection from hearing those arguments at all.

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Perhaps this points to a wider loss of confidence, not merely in the public, but in liberal democracy itself.

A Recipe for Embarrassment

There is a final point here, although it is subtly related to what has come before: governments are entirely useless at predicting which of today's fringe movements will become tomorrow's mainstream. Just a few years ago, for example, Donald Trump of the United States and his newfound frenemy, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, would have been dismissed in the UK as fringe figures unworthy of serious consideration. Today, they lead major democracies.

At this rate, it is not hard to foresee a situation where one of the UK's close diplomatic partners ends up being led by a leader the UK itself once banned from its shores, leaving the country to the embarrassment of watching Charles III shake hands with and welcome somebody once considered too undesirable to be admitted to his kingdom. Give it enough time, and this vista is a certainty.

The whole thing speaks ill of Britain. First, it is more interested in enforcing border rules against political opponents than against illegal migrants. Second, it appears increasingly to lack the confidence to allow public debate, even from people it considers too fringe to represent mainstream opinion. Third, the country is pursuing a policy that may one day have very embarrassing diplomatic repercussions.

The denials of entry should be rethought. In any case, in the modern political environment, "banned from Britain by the establishment" is exactly the kind of publicity that many of these rejected dissidents could never hope to buy on their own.