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Hasan Piker’s Ban Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The British government’s decision to revoke the leftist streamer’s visa is part of an ongoing, authoritarian crackdown against pro-Palestine speech.

On Monday, the British government revoked the travel visas of leftist streamers Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, who had planned to speak at SXSW London and at other venues around the country.

Both Piker and Uygur were told that their presence was “not conducive to the public good.” It is widely assumed that they were targeted for their vocal criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

Britain’s Israel lobby had campaigned for this exact outcome. Last week, a group of MPs and concerned citizens called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to ban Piker in particular, claiming he is an antisemite who would pose a threat to the UK’s Jewish community still reeling from recent attacks in northwest London.

But it’s clear from the lobby’s convenient omission of Piker’s 2025 speech at the Oxford Union condemning antisemitism and the conflation of Zionism and Judaism that this travel ban has nothing to do with the safety of the Jewish community. Rather, this act of cowardly capitulation is part of the Labour government’s rapidly accelerating crackdown on expression that is critical of Israel and supportive of Palestine—an effort that is both facilitating the UK’s ongoing complicity in the genocide in Gaza and destroying the country’s own institutions from the inside out.

Last July, the same government department that canceled Piker and Uygur’s visas made the unprecedented decision to designate Palestine Action, a group known for direct actions, such as spraying red paint on factories and offices associated with Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons firm with manufacturing sites and subsidiaries throughout the UK, as a terrorist organization—placing it in the same legal category as ISIS and neo-Nazi groups like National Action and the “Maniacs Murder Cult” (a group that was proscribed at the same time as Palestine Action).

This decision was roundly condemned by human rights organizations and as a grave abuse of counterterrorism legislation. Many noted that the consequences of the ban go far beyond outlawing the group’s activities, as........

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