By Jacob Mchangama
In 1977, the Danish film director Jens Jørgen Thorsen was turned away at Heathrow on the orders of Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, after a campaign by the Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Thorsen was carrying the script for a long-planned film about the sex life of Jesus — a project that had already drawn condemnations from the Pope, the British Parliament and the Queen.
That episode is worth recalling now that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has barred seven “far-Right agitators” from attending Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally this weekend, on the grounds that their presence is “not conducive to the public good.” Keir Starmer cast the ban as necessary to stop people coming to Britain to “spread hate on our streets”, framing it as part of a “battle for the soul of our nation”.
The phrase “not conducive to the public good” is doing a great deal of work here. It is the same elastic standard that successive British governments have used to “protect” the public against an almost ecumenical range of controversial speakers — from the pioneering American comedian Lenny Bruce, to the American “shock jock” Michael Savage, to the rapper Kanye West.
This standard expands and contracts with whoever holds the Home Office. Today, it is wielded by a Labour government against figures on the Right. Tomorrow, a Reform UK-led government could deploy it against climate activists or Palestinian solidarity campaigners. Should the British electorate turn to the Greens, “Zionists” and “Terfs” may find themselves next on the index of prohibited visitors. In each case, the test shrinks to a single criterion: any voice a minister finds inconvenient. A power available to every government is, by definition, a power available to the worst one.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).