Banning leftwing activists from entering Britain: an illiberal move with a long history in this country |
In August 1967, the activist Stokely Carmichael was banned from entering Britain. An ally of Martin Luther King Jr and head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael was banned because that July he had visited London and given a rousing, militant speech about racism and black power at a leftwing festival in Camden alongside counterculture figures including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
In the Commons, the Tory MP Patrick Wall – a member of the Monday Club, a pressure group that called for the “voluntary” repatriation of black people from Britain – claimed that Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) had been in Britain advocating racial violence. Wall asked Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins to rescind Carmichael’s visa. Jenkins agreed to do so. In retrospect, that decision – by a home secretary usually remembered as a liberal reformer – comes across as an act of petty authoritarianism, a more conservative generation trying to stop the circulation of subversive ideas associated with the 1960s left that it feared.
The Home Office decision announced on Monday to ban Cenk Uygur, of The Young Turks online news show, and his nephew, the streamer Hasan Piker, from entering the UK is history repeating itself. The government said that their presence in the country “may not be conducive to the public good” without providing its specific reasoning behind the decision. The event from which they were prohibited was the London offshoot of........