Organisations including the National Union of Students have made silencing 'controversial' voices a priority
Last week saw yet more attempts to silence dissenting voices among the Left – from the Chambers of the House of Commons to a lecture hall at a London university. While they were unsuccessful, questions need to be asked about the far-Left’s aversion to allowing those who disagree with them the same freedoms as those who do not.
Despite threats of deselection from Left wing activists, 66 Labour MPs voted against leader Jeremy Corbyn in favour of extending airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. Among the ‘traitor list’ drawn up by hard-Left party Left Unity were Hillary Benn and Neil Coyle, both of whom have since received death threats via Twitter.
Stella Creasy was sent pictures of dead babies, had 500 people march on her Walthamstow constituency office and has received abuse on Twitter comparing her to ISIS.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of London, yet another university student society was trying to silence a dissenting voice through fear and intimidation. Goldsmiths Islamic Society (ISOC) attempted to stop Left-wing Iranian-born Maryam Namazie from giving a talk on blasphemy and apostasy to the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (ASH).
The ISOC President wrote to ASH claiming Namazie’s presence would violate their ‘safe space’. This so-called ‘polite request’ warned ‘we advise you to reconsider your event tomorrow’. When the event went ahead regardless, the ISOC members did everything they could to disrupt Namazie’s speech.
According to Namazie: “After my talk began, ISOC ‘brothers’ started coming into the room, repeatedly banging the door, falling on the floor, heckling me, playing on their phones, shouting out, and creating a climate of intimidation in order to try and prevent me from speaking.”
The national confederation of these unions, the National Union of Students (NUS), claims to be the ‘national voice of students”, but has made silencing ‘controversial’ voices a priority. Back in May, numerous delegates who attended the NUS annual conference reported an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ at the event.
An open letter signed by 43 of the event’s attendees claimed that many students ‘felt too scared to speak on stage out of fear of the response they would get’ and that there was an ‘atmosphere of intimidation, fear and inaccessibility that perpetuated during the entirety of conference’.
According to the letter, ‘there seemed to be a general lack of tolerance for opinions which aren’t the mainstream view’, and ‘we frequently saw the same faces speaking on stage, time after time, creating an atmosphere that this was a conference for the few, not the many’.
Student unions’ decisions to ban speakers are often due to pressure from a student society on campus, who will more often than not claim their own ‘safe space’ is at risk. The Goldsmiths ISOC, for example, claimed that ‘the university should be a safe space for all our students’. Claims like this are often taken seriously enough to ban someone from coming onto campus and sharing their ideas with students, despite the fact that students are free not to attend such an event.
The decisions taken by a few from within student unions to ban speakers have however crumbled under external pressure in the past. In September, when Warwick University’s student union banned Namazie from speaking on campus, the decision was quickly overturned by widespread criticism in the national press and on social media. Suddenly the union’s big talk about having ‘a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus’ went out of the window.
A month ago, University College London Union reversed its decision to ban former YPG fighter Macer Gifford after facing online criticism. Last year, the University of Derby’s students’ union overturned its ban on UKIP members speaking at events.
The far-Left’s attempts to shut down debate among its ranks are resulting in a stream of embarrassing own-goals. MPs are threatened with de-selection if they vote against the worldview of their leader. MPs exercise their right to vote however they like, and Corbyn’s sinister tactics make the headlines.
University student unions and societies attempt to silence speakers who deviate from their worldview, making those who threaten their supposed ‘safe space’ feel as unsafe as possible. But, almost every time, they are exposed for the fascists they really are.
Emily Dyer is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society
46 Responses to “Comment: Silencing dissenters is key to the survival of the far-Left”
Intolerant_Liberal
Agree with all the above. Ordinary people have been gently but firmly eased out of politics in the last 30 years or so, because the democracy we live in is more illusion than reality. Political correctness is a kind of surface respectability, ironically lionised by both Left and Right now, very akin now to the same kind of ‘respectability’ wealthy Victorian gentlemen clamoured for when they owned plantations and factories and so on, ruthlessly exploiting people and then pretending to be good and kind and Christian in intent, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s always said that the Tories love the Victorian era, and when you read about the injustices and hypocrisy and virulent double standards of that period, accompanied by the idea that wealthy middle and upper middle class men should by some kind of unexplained divine right own and control everything and everyone, and that this should be unquestioned, you can see why! On the surface the Victorian era seemed respectable, but scratch that surface and the faux respectability covered a manifest multitude of sins. Hmmm. Nothing new under the sun, hey?
And as the equality brigade and the PC brigade have become more virulent, have you noticed that particularly economic divisions have got much wider?? It’s obvious that much of the Left, even the Hard Left, has been infiltrated by Fabian socialists, or that the Hard Left is now just as fascist as the Right they virulently condemn. But then that is what happens when cliques appear. Perhaps instead of championing equal rights and anti racism and so on, and I hope I don’t offend you here, we should begin to ask why politics, business, religion and most other institutions in the UK tend to largely be run by white, affluent, privately educated middle and upper middle class men, no doubt going on about equality and how non racist they are!!!???
Intolerant_Liberal
Yeah, it’s a shame because as someone centre left myself and who believes that politics and society only work when there is healthy opposition to the dominant mainstream and the accepted ‘norm’ now of right wing laissez faire policies and economics, it means that there is a concerted effort from Left and Right to marginalise genuine debate, especially when it comes from the marginalised and disenfranchised, those at the bottom of the economic pile, whatever their creed, religion or colour. Labour was a party for and supposed to be of the broad mass of basically working class people throughout the country. Under Blair, and probably before that, it fell to the London metropolitan elites and then abandoned the working class, in favour the ‘middle England’ demographic, which I think in some cases is just an excuse to pander to the already affluent. What is the point of that? And did they expect that working class people would keep voting for a party that had very little interest in them anymore??? Most people who voted UKIP amongst the white working did so as a protest vote, as I know of numbers of people myself who did vote for them for that reason. So, the so called Left was part responsible for the rise of UKIP simply by abandoning those they purported to represent.
Tristram Hunt said recently that we should have a debate on class, because the very fact that most of the Left and Hard Left groups rarely, if ever, mention the rise, once again, of pernicious class discrimination against white working class people as the ‘enemy within’ by both right and left liberals, tells you that most political parties are chock full of white middle class people who are embarrassed to talk about class prejudices, because that is the elephant in the room at the moment.
Guy
The ‘hard left’ like the SWP and it’s fronts have always been male chauvinist authoritarians who professed progressive views but were actually as aggressive as any fascist in trying to suppress criticism or dissent within their ranks. I’ve linked arms against them with veteran Labour people, communists, other liberals, even christians in CND, Grosvenor Square and elsewhere.
Intolerant_Liberal
Controversial is just another word for, anything someone in a group doesn’t agree with…
Marie Gebhard
This is the reason for thiss petition. We must unite, and oppose the tories not each other. Divide and conquer! Pls share and sign this !!! https://www.change.org/p/labour-national-executive-commission-stop-bullying-in-the-labour-party