The Andreas Malm Ban Shows How to Blow Up a Democracy

Andreas Malm – the climate scholar and journalist, based in Sweden – has been barred from entering the UK. The Home Office has offered little justification for its reasoning, beyond a claim that Malm’s presence “is not considered to be conducive to the public good”. The author of How To Blow Up A Pipeline and Fossil Capital had been due to speak at an event organised by Tribune magazine; Malm is a regular visitor to the UK, and has been interviewed by Novara Media on multiple occasions. 

No doubt, there’ll be some quislings in the media taking issue with my framing (Malm’s electronic travel authorisation (ETA) was merely cancelled, he could still apply for a visa, nobody has the unmitigated right to travel to this country, etc). But there have always been journalists cheerleading against their own interests, siding with the government when it comes to censorship. It’s clear that, whether you’re on the left or the right, all must stand together against unprecedented state suppression of free speech.

The banning of Malm’s ETA comes only four months after Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two American leftwing political commentators, had their ETAs cancelled shortly before scheduled appearances at SXSW London and the Oxford Union. The then-Keir Starmer government similarly invoked a ‘public good’ argument. What’s more, it was only this month that it was announced that celebrated author Sally Rooney would no longer be able to sell books in the UK, due to her statements of support for proscribed group Palestine Action.

While the Home Office does its seeming best to avoid offering specific public explanations for why certain public figures are being barred from entering the UK, you can guarantee that there will be a briefing operation afoot. When Piker and Uygur had their ETAs withdrawn, the media (rather than rallying around the cause of free expression, on which our livelihoods depend) preferred instead to jaw-jaw about whether the two men were antisemitic. I do not doubt that, over the course of today, Malm’s public comments about the legally enshrined right of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation will find their way into journalist’s briefing notes.

Malm, for his part, told Radio 4’s Today Programme that he cannot see any other explanation for the Home Office’s decision than his scheduled appearance on a panel in London with Huda Ammori, one of the founders of Palestine Action. As he made clear in the interview, he has not publicly nor financially supported the organisation – the conversation was going to be about the war on Iran. The net snaring people for association with the Palestinian cause is, in Malm’s view, being cast wider and wider.

But Home Office intervention goes far beyond a simple left-right distinction. In May of this year, the Home Office blocked 11 far-right speakers from coming to attend a Tommy Robinson march. US rapper Kanye West had his permission to travel withdrawn to stop him from performing at Wireless Festival. And in January, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch far right activist who had previously spoken at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally, had her ETA cancelled with the same public-good wording. 

As I have written elsewhere, racism and opposition to racism are not moral or political equivalents. And personally, I think we’d all be better off pretending as if Kanye just stopped making music after The Life of Pablo. But a government which takes it upon itself to determine which opinions are allowed to be heard in this country is an authoritarian one. The airing of different opinions is the basis of a functioning democracy. Infringement of this principle isn’t just an assault on individual writers, scholars, and speakers: it is an assault on democracy itself.

The government’s job is to restrict those who incite violence, and to ensure that visitors abide by the law when they’re here. It’s for the public to determine what’s in the public good – not Shabana Mahmood, Andy Burnham or Keir Starmer. And any journalist worthy of the name must adopt the same position.