Under Dreaming Spires
Last night’s much publicised Oxford Union debate on the freedom of speech involving BNP leader Nick Griffin and historian David Irving was delayed after protesters broke into the debating theatre.
Perhaps this outcome was in the end not all too much of a surprise since there will always be individuals willing to prevent others engaging in democratic and free debate with whose views they do not agree?
Many Universities in Britain currently hold a ‘no-platform’ policy for groups such as the BNP and the likes of David Irving. Only last year the University of Bath’s Student Union voted to bar Nick Griffin from speaking at a private event hosted in one of its auditoriums. Therefore it actually came as a pleasant surprise to discover that the Oxford Union had actively voted to allow Mr Griffin to be challenged in an open debate.
Regardless of whether you agree with Nick Griffin or David Irving (and I for the most part do not) then it should be generally accepted that if their views are so wrong, then they should be challenged through debate and their arguments shown to be incoherent – not instead to try and force Mr Griffin and Irving into silence, which benefits no-one and in the end often has the undesirable effect of providing them with public sympathy.
In the wake of the recent ‘banking crisis’, the Government is pushing ahead plans to increase powers given to the IMF in the hope that it will become the ‘financial watchdog of the world’.
Back in 1945, Winston Churchill, then still Prime Minister, made the supposedly heavily criticised claim that if the Labour Party won those elections, they would ‘fall back on some kind of Gestapo’ to subjugate and control the electorate.