Two conferences in two European cities. Two attempted bans (though only one successful). Two different responses from politicians and the media. All of which tells us something about the state of free speech today.

Last Tuesday, Emir Kir, a mayor in Brussels, created international headlines when he tried to ban a National Conservative conference in the city. The attempt failed, denounced as “unacceptable” by the Belgian prime minister, Alexander de Croo, and ruled unlawful by the top administrative court.

Five days earlier, with far less comment or condemnation, Berlin police forcibly shut down a conference on Palestine. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, rector of Glasgow University, and a reconstructive surgeon who was due to talk of his experiences in Gazan hospitals, was prohibited from entering Germany. The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, now secretary-general of the leftwing DiEM25 movement, was served with a betätigungsverbot, a ban on any political activity in Germany, including participation by video from another country.

Speakers at the NatCon conference denounced the role of the “liberal elite” and the EU in trying to silence them. It was, in fact, the act of a maverick mayor who had been expelled from the Socialist party because of his links with Turkish far-right politicians. In contrast, the Berlin conference was shuttered with the full force of the state. Yet, no prime minister condemned the action, and few in the mainstream media criticised it.

The issue of free speech is commonly viewed as a left-right issue: the left as supportive of censorship, the right as “free-speech warriors”. That, though, is to take conservative myth-making at face value. Certainly, the left’s historic........

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