I agree, although I feel private organisations have a right to choose who to offer platform to. It is good to see such a strong defence of freedom of expression on this blog and not just where we could rely on seeing such views: http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/oxford-union-debate-disrupted-by-peoples-censors-so-whats-new/

The Oxford Union has a long and checkered history of providing a flashpoint for controversy, so we shouldn’t be surprised at it’s attention-grabbing antics.

A comparison between the conduct of the debaters inside and the demonstrators outside provides the clearest illustration of exactly who and exactly what is and what isn’t defensible and/or justifiable. But, has anyone reported on the content of the debate? Do we know if reason or emotion prevailed?

Someone should commend Oxford Police for their tempered lack-of-response to this annual rigmarole. Students, eh, they’ll learn eventually how not to act in unwitting collusion with those they oppose!

Well written.

“This is a guest post. Antony blogs here.”

oops – my admiration now slightly tempered by the fact that your own blog suggests you might be a 9/11 “inside job” nutter!!

Great post; heartily endorse it.

Agreed – this was little more than crashingly obvious stunt politics at its worst.

Television news should feel utterly ashamed at giving so much airtime to last night’s ‘debate’ when far more worrying gatherings take place every week in disadvantaged parts of the Midlands, Yorkshire and North West.

As ever, it is what Nick Griffin and David Irving have to say that deserves scrutiny – not where they said it and who acted as this week’s rent-a-mob.

But TV needs pictures, the rent-a-mob served them up…and the viewers were no more enlightened at the end of the reports than they had been at the start.

The problem is Oxford has had it good for too long, and is full of nancy boy liberals. In Watford we’ve got our hard nuts, yes but we also have the marvelous West Herts College with a full range of evening classes. I have prepared a short introduction to the academic merits of Watford just here:

http://lobsterblogster.blogspot.com/2007/11/welcome-to-watford.html

I also agree with this post.

It is a private club and should be free to invite whomsoever they wish. Mobs and illiberal sanctimoaners should not be permitted to set the agenda and decide who “has the right to be invited”, i.e. they want final say and what is worse, talk as if they have some kind of right to that say and those they do not like scrape around at the fringes.

Yes, protest about those speaking, yell and scream outside and wave banners and make all manner of lawful protest – yes please – but to use force to stop debate is disgraceful, for that denies freedom of association.

Chrisc – I’m generally sceptically minded, and by no means a knee-jerk conspiracy theorist – but I’m increasingly convinced that the jury is still out on 9/11 – or should be. It has a whiff of the Reichstag Fire about it, and if you peruse Yankee Doodle’s painstaking posts on his blog [link via my Arena], you will find some food for thought, as I am doing. Let’s wait and see.

Anticant

Excellent post.

Shame Harry’s Place went all wobbly on free speech when a true test arrived.

If the British National Party’s views are wrong-headed, obnoxious, and fuelled by hate, the proper way to combat them is not by denying them platforms and rioting which lets them pose – with a smidgeon of justification – as aggrieved martyrs; it is to out-debate them.

No, the way to express one’s urgent disapproval of the BNP and Irving is to out-debate them and to deny them a platform. Why should they be given a platform? They’ve already been ‘out-debated’, yet they continue to spread their filth whenever someone is prepared to give them a venue in which to do it.

Btw, a ‘martyr’ is one who suffers or is killed for their witness to the truth. There is, therefore, not a ’smidgeon of justification’ for their absurd martyr complex. Save some rage for the people that caused this in the first place, why don’t you? These would be the fucking liars who were invited to speak and those stupid enough to invite them in the first place.

Nothing to disagree with in this post with just one exception. Anthony says: “The disgraceful scenes at the Oxford Union last night are a salutary reminder of the decay of free speech in this country”. It may well be that freedom of speech has decayed rather more rapidly over the last few years but the sort of antics we saw last night have been commonplace for decades. (Eysenck, anyone?)

It is, seemingly, an important part of a student’s university education, at some point during his/her stay, to wave a placard, sit down in protest, shout the word ‘fascist’ several times (it used to be ‘pig’ but that’s gone out of fashion) and, if they are really lucky, to get a tiny scalp wound which is completely superficial but produces enough blood dribbling down the face to look spectacular in a close up photograph. Bless!

Shuggy – I agree

Antony and others. This is where the liberal left is going wrong imho – what, have we turned into a cosy debating society now just like the OU?

25 trots invading the hallowed sanctum of the Oxford Union Debating Society is not mob rule. Pushing a couple of people aside in your haste to get in is not gratuitous violence. And I don’t recall seeing any blazing cars or molotov cocktails being hurled, so I’m intrigued to hear your definition of a riot.

I refuse to condemn and villify people who are prepared to move away from their keyboards and actually participate in direct political action. Free speech works both ways – if Griffin and Irving have the right to voice their odious opinions, then those who oppose them have an equal right to let them know what they think of them.

The right to protest is one of the fundamentals of a democracy, it is those who want to see that right curtailed and who want to see state forces being employed in the suppression of such protests who “are among the worst betrayers of our hard-won democratic freedoms”

We all know who the real fascists were in Oxford last night. Get some perspective, and calm down with the hysterical tabloidese

Of course free speech should be protected. But the more interesting question, surely, is whether the Oxford Union should have decided to put the event on.

There is a moral difference between defending their right to put the debate on and defending their decision to put the debate on. I have the right to follow you down the street swearing at you if i want to, but that doesn’t mean that i should do so by any measure of acceptable behaviour.

So we can have a go at a few misguided people who want debates like this banned, or we can discuss the real questions for the Liberal Left – like whether the Oxford Union made the right decision or not.

Hi Duncan, I’m not a fan of the decision to invite either of those two cretins, but discussing whether the university made the right decision, in my mind, is rather irrelevant. They have the right to invite who they want.

I don’t approve of the East London mosque inviting over bigots from Bangladesh, or Al-Qaradawi, but they should have the right to do so providing they are not actively hate-mongering.
[My annoyance with them is based on the premise that these people then claim to be building social cohesion - but that is a different debate]

Restrictions on who can/should be invited usually hurts minority groups first. Let’s have an equal policy for all to hear all sorts of disliked views.

@ Sunny – the Union is not part of the University.

As usual when this topic crops up, there’s a very misguided idealism at work. To frame the debate in terms of whether or not some equal entitlement to free speech has been infringed or not is to entirely miss the point, as Shuggy points out above.

Situations such as the Oxford debate are not ideal speech situations in which one group of private individuals invites other private individuals to bring along a little parcel of ideas which can then be forensically and disinterestedly dissected until only the truth is left behind. To imagine otherwise is to commit what Marx saw as the archetypal liberal’s error, i.e. assuming that a situation of equal right aready exists in reality, when in fact it is nothing but an ideal.

To the people who see Irving and Griffin as figureheads, an event such as this is a political opportunity to establish their presence. Just suppose you live in a town where such an event is to take place, and belong to one or more of the groups that the far-right abominate. What might you conclude from the decision of one privileged and insulated group of people to invite to town another group (including some with a record of violence) who would prefer you didn’t exist?

Cath Elliott and those who think like you: It is you who are illiberal. Free speech ends where violence and force begin. No-one has ‘vilified’ the protestors – only their unruly behaviour in trespassing on private property and kicking up a rumpus for the benefit of the television cameras. They would have been perfectly within their democratic rights if they had remained outside, waved their placards, and chanted peacefully, but that is not what they did. You wouldn’t like it if I forced my way into your house and waved my fist in your face because you had said something I disagreed with, would you?

Incidentally, I think those who invited Griffin and Irving were misguided and being needlessly provocative for their own publicity purposes, but that is there right in what is still – nominally at least – a free country.

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has an interesting point of view on this, which I recommend reading about. Other related posts can be found here.

Unfortunately, my loathing of hate-mongers does not prevent me from recognising that the BNP is representative of a band of opinion. That the opinion is reactionary and ill-formed does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Because freedom of speech is the best defence against incoherence and stupidity it should be used to attack the repositories of anger and hate, not thrown away in a desperate attempt to repress it. The repression of free speech in order to prevent messages of hate redoubles the strength of those misguided emotions in the same way a double-negative is used as positive proof by numbskulls.

Those who would strip themselves of any weaponry at the first sign of a threat will always be the first victims of their own stupidity: crowds who chant “fascist” are actively admitting they have succumbed to the illiberal groupthink of fascism themselves.

As a perfect demonstration of the political forces at work in society the Oxford Union could not have provided a better example. Like flies to the honeypot, all the bastards were there – even Galloway said preaching fear was the cause of the problem, then he went on to do the same. That the police stayed away showed their intelligence to act in the name of liberty and prevent any disurbances ocurring on the fringes and in the shadows.

Antony – by ‘Islamists’ and ‘Zionists’ I presume you mean Muslim and Jewish students? Any reason why you chose to refer to them in this way?

Going on about ‘mob rule’, ‘violence’ and so on is an odd way to describe an event in which no one was injured. I thought the right to protest was something that liberals cared about and valued.

I think the right to mill around and tut is a far better deterrent and a cause dearer to the hearts of most liberals. Losing your temper will never help anyone make a case, and joining in a stampede is an almost certain guarantee to make you drop your thermos of hot tea.

19. I’ve seen the verve that the “extreme left” adopt while never being overtly physically violent, from my time as a student and the involvement with the NUS, to general unfortunate witnessings of campaigns and rallies.

Protesting is one thing but doing so in an attempt to stop the rights of others is missing the point of protest surely? If you’re “protesting” with an aim to there and then shut people up, to intimidate people and to at least verbally abuse then it stops being protesting and it starts becoming a weak form of direct action, a particularly sour version of harassment and abuse.

Why should anyone stand up and say that people ultimately harassing others and engaging in a base form of psychological abuse on individuals going about their perfectly legitimate business are within their rights to do so?

Protest, by all means, but do so for the purposes of protesting and not what ultimately turns out to be fascism under another name.

I think there is an interesting argument here. At what point is violence acceptable?

Cath has a great point when she says:“I refuse to condemn and villify people who are prepared to move away from their keyboards and actually participate in direct political action.”

I’d agree with that. But if the protesters did resort to physical disruption – however mild – have they not overstepped the mark? This is not 1930’s Germany or apartheid South Africa; we have processes for legitimate grievance.

Cath Elliott and those who think like you: It is you who are illiberal. ~ anticant

Anticant, this was unnecessarily brusque. I think Cath is making a legitimate point about perspective. Incidents are often embellished to score political points. That said, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know for sure.

Again, this debate is not really about whether person X has a right to remove person Y’s right to free speech. The protest was against the OU offering Griffin and Irving the privilege of a legitimating forum in which to present their opinions, and against their travelling supporters using this opportunity as a way of establishing a presence on the streets of a multicultural city.

There is a good account of the night’s events here (apologies is this has already been posted):

http://hugahoodie.blogspot.com/2007/11/bnp-debate-at-oxford-union-eyewitness.html

Not a “violent” protest perhaps; but hardly edifying.
Still, that mix of pure adrenaline and even purer self-righteousness can be pretty heady!

chrisc

Yes, I linked to the Hug A Hoodie post in yesterday’s review. Not that it matters. It’s an excellent perspective and very well written. Another link is more than welcome

At what point is violence acceptable? I don’t think that it can ever be acceptable. Maybe it’s better to ask “At what point can the option of violence being taken be understood rationally”

I can’t say I’d ever condone violence as a way of getting what you want, but if the political system has made it clear they don’t intend to respect the rights you as a legitimate political group believe you need, that the law is set up to stop you from being able to achieve those rights and that no effort is being made to negotiate or work with you on the issues at hand then I can understand why violence would seem to be the only option, possibly because it is.

Violence should not be acceptable at ANY point. Certainly not in regard to free speech, and it is utterly wrong to seek by force or the threat of it to intimidate people from expressing views, however wrong or obnoxious, which they sincerely hold. On wider issues, I am not a pacifist and there is an obvious case for national defence against foreign aggression, and also for peaceful civil disobedience against unjust or intolerable laws. ID cards may well prove to be a case on point for liberal-minded people who value their privacy and autonomy from potential State tyranny.

Roger Thornhill hit the nail right on the head.

The Oxford Union voted in favour of inviting Griffin and Irving (and others, such as Evan Harris) to speak. It is not right in the general case that people should be prevented from exercising their freedom of speech, particularly in a private place.

Let’s be honest, protesting in the manner that the protestors apparently did was not about exercising their freedom to protest, it was about preventing the speakers from exercising their freedom of speech, and preventing the listeners from exercising their freedom to listen.

When we start talking about free speech for some but not for others it necessarily follows that there is going to have to be someone to judge who may and who may not speak. Well, history is littered with examples of such people, it doesn’t make for a pretty picture, and by all accounts Wednesday’s protests made it uglier.

ukliberty almost makes the strongest point available.

If the protesters had really wanted to stop these speakers from taking the platform then they ought to have been engaged with the voting process by which the decision was taken to invite them. That they did not participate at that stage negates their argument and left them outside in the cold where they seemed to enjoy themselves at the expense of the more serious members of the community. Getting in your protest late on in the game when there is little chance to influence events is no excuse and does not absolve earlier apathy.

To be fair, not all the protestors were members of the Oxford Union and therefore couldn’t have participated in the vote.

They should be allowed to protest, but should not have protested in such a way as to prevent others from exercising their freedoms.