Liberals Without Teeth

Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread.
~Michael Sandel

British prime minister Keir Starmer doesn’t believe the birthplace of modern liberalism can defend liberal ideas from Turkish-American podcaster Hasan Piker and his more indignant and less charming uncle Cenk Uygur. These popular streamers have been barred from entering the United Kingdom after the Home Office determined that their presence on British soil may not, in the words of British officialdom, “be conducive to the public good.”

There was a time when this kind of panicked response to the fleeting presence of an illiberal guest or two would have been anathema in the British Isles. In 1912, the Anglo-Irish polymath J.B. Bury summed up the popular feeling towards free speech in the Edwardian age: “At present, in the most civilised countries, freedom of speech is taken as a matter of course and seems a perfectly simple thing. We are so accustomed to it that we look on it as a natural right. But this right has been acquired only in quite recent times, and the way to its attainment has lain through lakes of blood.”

Unfortunately, Great Britain is no longer the bastion of free expression that Bury described. Its modern lunge into identitarian managerialism has left it unable to resist what National Review’s British-born senior editor Charlie Cooke called “the state’s inexorable temptation toward suppression” more than a decade ago. (Some things are true even if JD Vance says them.) For years, British authorities have imposed harsh restrictions on expression in an attempt to suppress ideological and political fashions they deem objectionable. The architecture of British law groans under capricious injunctions against causing “offence” with the written or spoken word. British citizens in thrall to populism of one sort or another have not just been shouted down and canceled but also subject to arbitrary arrest.