Britain’s Illiberal Mistake on Speech

National Review Online

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

The British government has banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur from entering the United Kingdom on the grounds that “their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.” This is an illiberal mistake that ought not to stand in a free nation and, if intended to suppress the ideas that the pair hoped to share, a strategic error to boot. Between them, Piker and Uygur have millions of online followers. If they cannot speak in the U.K., they will speak to the U.K. from afar.

 

To put it mildly, we are fans of neither Piker nor Uygur, whose views we consider to be both shallow and grotesque. But, in this circumstance, that is a wholly irrelevant fact. Why? Well, because we are fans of untrammeled political debate, and because untrammeled political debate was the reason for Piker and Uygur’s curtailed visit to the U.K. As the British government has confirmed, the two men were not applying for residency or seeking public office, but hoping to participate in events at the South by Southwest London festival and at the University of Oxford. There are, indeed, a handful of circumstances in which a government might wish to exclude foreigners from its shores, but neither of these rises even close to that level. Britain is the home of Hyde Park Corner, John Stuart Mill, and the Oxford Union. Can it really be the case that there is no room, even temporarily, for a couple of two-bit provocateurs?

 

Responding to the news, Hasan Piker claimed that the U.K. revoked his visa “at the behest of Israel.” Given how effective and ecumenical a censor the British government has become, this seems highly unlikely. In its current incarnation, the United Kingdom is a place in which atheists are targeted for criticizing Muslims, in which Muslims are targeted for criticizing gays, and in which Christians are targeted for criticizing all of the above. Pick a topic — any topic, really — and you will find all manner of investigations, prosecutions, and convictions that have been spurred by its mere discussion. It is true, of course, that Britain’s censorship laws are not enforced perfectly equally. But, insofar as the Crown’s thumbs are placed on the scale, it is rarely in favor of the Jews. Whatever prompted the revocation of Piker and Uygur’s visas, it was almost certainly homegrown.

 

The standard under which the U.K. has acted here is unfit for a liberal democracy. Had the explanation been “Likely to cause a riot,” the instinct would have been comprehensible — even if, as recent history shows, there would still have been ample room for shenanigans. But not being “Conducive to the public good”? That is a term so malleable as to be meaningless. Every government believes that it is advancing the public good. That many people dissent from that conviction is why we hold debates in the first instance. The alternative is stasis, sclerosis, and corruption — and, in this case, the furtherance of a reputation for underconfident censoriousness that Britain would benefit from shedding posthaste.