Within Reason - #26 David Renton - No Free Speech for Fascists

Episode Date: April 9, 2023

David Renton is a barrister and historian. He is the author of "No Free Speech for Fascists", discussing the history of, and the case for, "no-platforming" fascist speakers (and only fascist speakers). To support the Within Reason Podcast and get early access to episodes, please visit support.withinreasonpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor, and did you know that you can get early access to these podcast episodes by supporting the podcast on Patreon? Simply go to support.com. This is also the best way that you can help this podcast to continue to grow. My guest today is Dr. David Renton. David Renton is a historian and a barrister who's represented clients in a number of high-profile cases, specifically relating to trade union rights and free speech issues. A former member of the Socialist Workers Party,

he's also written a number of books on left-wing issues as well as fascism and anti-fascism. I came across David Renton when I was walking through a bookshop and found a book called No Free Speech for Fascists, a title that somewhat jumped out at me. I discovered that the book was a history of no platforming and free speech issues relating to fascism. This book, according to the blurb, shows how no platform was intended

to be applied narrowly, only to a right-wing politics that threatened everyone else. David Renton thinks that no platforming on the grounds of hate speech, that views like fascism are hateful, is a mistake, and that this needs to be subtly distinguished from the view that fascism is a very particular kind of ideology, distinguished by its intrinsic propensity to use violence to shut down all kinds of opposition, and that this might make fascism the only kind of view that can be legitimately subject to no platforming. We also discuss the nature of fascism. What is fascism? And what is it not? And what's with everybody seemingly calling everybody under the sun a fascist these days? Is someone

like Donald Trump a fascist? And if not, why do so many people refer to him as one? I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you do too. David Renton, thank you so much for being here. That's an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me. And thanks for having us in such a beautiful room as well. Just off camera, you were telling us that this is quite a historic place to be doing this podcast. Yeah, yeah, we're in Garden Court Chambers, which is in central London, on Lincoln's and Fields.

This is Barrasters' chambers, my chambers. And, yeah, there's lots of history of this building. Spencer Percival, the last British Prime Minister, to have been assassinated. an office, lived in this house before he was killed, but that's a long time ago. A long time ago, yeah. So I came across you because in Oxford, in a bookshop, I was walking through the political or ethics section. I'm not quite sure where it was that they had it. And I saw this book with a rather bold title, No Free Speech for Fascists. I thought that sounds of interest to me. So I picked it up and I gave it a little bit of a read. And I wasn't

quite sure what to expect here. No free speech for fascists. this title for this book, why this? What is it the work sort of getting at here? And why was this a subject that you thought fit to write about at the moment? Okay, well, probably two things. Firstly, in my life, I've been a participant in an awful lot of political campaigns, particularly anti-fascist campaigns. And I've been writing about the far right and about fascism for more than 20 years.

there's a very long and rich left-wing debate about whether anyone should be no platform whether particularly fascists should be no platformed and I could see there's more and more people talking about that in online so I wanted to just give people a sense of that historical discussion some of it also if I'm honest comes from what I do in my day job I'm a barrister I quite often represent people in court in free speech cases since the book was written I've been in some of the leading free speech cases in this country in the higher courts. So again, some of it was just kind of helping me to think through what I thought would be the principal line to take in those cases as well. So is this a position that you're advocating in the book? You're sort of giving a

history of free speech campaigns, but no free speech for fascists is quite specific. The book isn't something like no free speech for hateful ideologues, but specifically fascists. What is it about fascism that is particularly relevant to free speech legislation as compared to other harmful or hateful ideologies and why is it potentially well why is it the one that you chose to reference in your title in particular sure well it just firstly on the the title and then on the substance um a lot of people misread that title i think one of the reasons why they do and you know for example this just happened to me in a really practical way um when the book came out um i did as people often do the new book, you do on your table, bring out the copies of the book,

open and boxed up a nice moment for a lot of authors. I had a really weird experience with the book, which is I did that at home. And there was something like a million people ended up watching the book reveal online, which is far more than my audience. I thought I was writing quite a specialist book for activists and quite a narrow political tradition. I thought I'd had an audience in the hundreds or low thousands. So seeing all those people watching it was a bit of like, well, okay. And not a good, well, okay, you know, that many people was a bit strangely.

And it became very clear to me that somewhere that was coming from is that they misunderstood the word fascists in the title. When I say no free speech for fascists, I really do mean fascists. I'm not talking about people on the right. I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm not talking about that broad sway of the right-wing opinion, which sometimes people on the left wrongly label as fascist. I'm just talking about really people who are in a very narrow,

part of the political tradition. So people, a lot of people on the right were distrust of the book and thought it was an argument for general banning. It's not. It's an argument for saying that if you are going to bat, that banning has to be severely restricted and limited and should only belong to a very small part of the political spectrum. Now that gets me to the substance, why fascists? And it just is, it's a hugely old argument that lots of different people, at all places on the political spectrum, have held since 1945, that fascism was a unique and distinctively violent form of politics and therefore different rules applied to it.

So that's the broad tradition I'm in. Why do you think it is that so many people, it seems like this is something that's a modern phenomenon, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm not sure if people were doing this in the sort of mid-20th century too, but it seems like so many people are using fascism as a, as has been said of democracy,

a promiscuous term to essentially become a chameleon that can apply to anything they don't like. Of course, we've reached something of a consensus, at least in public society, that fascism is bad. And so I think people have a vested interest to label things that they just don't like as fascism. Why do you think that this has happened? And what is it that you think people are getting wrong

when they describe someone who's just right wing or someone like Donald Trump as a fascist? Well, if you take the Donald Trump example, I think what it captures, and maybe I sounded quite dismissive people, who are, after all, my audience, who do make that move. Maybe if you sort of pause on the Donald Trump example, I think it's quite an easy way of seeing why people want to make that argument.

One of the things about Donald Trump, it seems to be pretty clearly in retrospect, how on earth are we talking about Donald Trump in retrospect when, you know, we're coming up to American elections, God knows what the result will be, God knows whether he'll be the next Republican candidate in two years' time. So I'm going to talk about him as historic figure, knowing that's slightly, odd thing to do. But if you look at the last five years of Donald Trump, at one point, he's a French candidate for the Republican Party, and that's, by all standards, the central right political party. At another point, he's someone who's going online, social media, boosting the internet

personalities. There's some really quite marginal figures. We can think about Charlottesville, etc. And at another point, still, at the end of his term as president, he's seriously considering using his street army with the January insurrection, possibly to force American people to accept the result of an election, or accept the non-resolved election, except his preferred outcome, which is he won despite losing. He would win despite having lost the vote. So if you look at Donald Trump, seriously, it seems to me,

wherever your starting points, whether you're on the left, whether you're on the right, wherever your starting point, Donald Trump is not a stable political category. he's someone who under the context that we're living through which is this really febrile moment in world politics he's someone who's moving in a direction and moving to the right so when people then look at that and then want to stick the end point is fascism on Donald Trump

I think they're wrong and I can go through why they're wrong but I don't think they're totally daft people looking to find certainty in words in times which themselves are moving really fast and disturbing lots and lots of people. So what are the hallmarks of fascism and why is it that someone like Donald Trump doesn't fulfill them? Well, look, for me, really simply,

fascism is a form, a counter-revolutionary form of politics which uses violence in order to do certain things. And those things are to wage a war against its political enemies, which it kills, it jails. It doesn't just criticize them. It's not just rude about them. It goes a significant step beyond that. it's willing to use violence to kill the people it disagrees with.

And those enemies aren't just political enemies. All political traditions have enemies, but they're also racial enemies. And therefore it crosses a couple of moral lines, which most of the time most people believe is absolutely uncrossable. So that's what's different. And again, maybe just take it briefly back to Trump. That's also why Trump isn't, wasn't a fascist, even if at the end of his days he was moving in all sorts of strange directions

at the core of what he was doing, he allowed his political opponents to remain at free, even when he was president. He did not, you know, he said racist things about various ethnic categories of people, but those people, by and large, did not end up in concentration camps. So again, the comparison is just wrong. It's a prediction.

Saying that Don Trump was or would be a fascist was a prediction about how he'd govern, and he governed in a way, which was just much more like ordinary, politics and the words jests. I think people are potentially concerned if someone like Donald Trump is not a fascist that he may exhibit pseudo-fascistic tendencies

that give us, I mean, nobody's a fascist at the start, right? Mussolini's not a fascist at the start. Exactly. And so do you think there's any credence to this kind of claim? I mean, you talk about one of the characteristics of fascism being a willingness to have not just political enemies but ethnic enemies, religious enemies. you can think of Donald Trump talking about a complete and total shutdown on Muslims entering the United States

until we figure out what the hell is going on or whatever it is he says. This seems to be the kind of thing that would strike that fear into people, and I wonder if you think that is the kind of thing somebody should be looking for if they're on guard against a potential future fascists coming into office. Well, look, maybe if I start almost at the end of the book, in terms of where I'm saying that for movements like anti-fascist movements should end up, what I say at the end is that there's certain categories of people who you should never know platform.

So if someone's a central right figure who stands by electoral politics who might use hateful rhetoric to some extent but clearly has no ambition to turn it into violence against their enemies, then you shouldn't know platform them and you shouldn't try to silence them. It's just wrong. It's a mistake when people on the left try to do that.

I also say that there are things which are either fascism or moving very close towards fascism and say that not in every case, but it's a serious legitimate argument that you might want to remove a platform from them. Plainly, there's some middle categories of people between those two groups. My main argument, if I do have lots of people

who, I try and encourage and influence the United States, My main argument for them against trying to no platform Donald Trump is he's got a much bigger platform than they do. So tactically, it's probably going to be a really stupid move. But it's not an argument of principle. If Donald Trump and his movement keeps on radicalising, I could imagine a point to which the boundary between them and fascism might become really quite fine indeed. But I still think that it would be daft for them to go about no platform Donald Trump. It's just saying it suggests that people who are even trying to do that have a seriously misconduct.

mistaken notion of their ability to influence hundreds of millions of people compared to his. In particular, talking about no platforming, one of the points made in your book is that no platforming fascists on the ground that their speech is hateful, which is oftentimes just considered to be the obvious reason that people are doing this. The reason why you want to know platform of fascists is because it's hate speech and we want to know platform. hate speech. But you suggest that no platforming or de-platforming a fascist on the grounds that what they're saying is hateful is an insufficient basis on which to de-platform or no-platform them. Why is that, and then on what grounds is it that you might want to de-platform or no-platform a

fascist in your view? Okay, well, take that in two parts. In terms of hate speech and arguments for why you de-platform someone, what I tried to argue in the book, is that when people try and give some content to the notion of hate speech, it becomes really difficult to limit it in the way that lots and lots of activists want to limit it and think you can limit it. And I try and argue my book that in practice, that desire just doesn't deliver the results they want.

Now, to give some really short history of this, but to give just a flavour of it, if you go back, for example, within the student movement, when people first tried to come up with original no-platformations which got passed by NUS conference in 1974, they thought that you could limit hate speech to, for example, just fascist hate speech. But it just became really hard very quickly to see,

well, if you're going to say fascist and racist hate speech, well, why not sexist hate speech, why not? Very quickly then you have a huge and potentially infinite number of categories for which people might extend the boundary and become hateful, and so therefore need to have to be banned. Another reason is just to do with the prevalence of discriminatory ideas in our society. And again, the problem of relatively small groups of people who feel that they've got history in their sales,

looking around to this society where their opinions actually are a minority. You know, if you look at Britain in the 1970s, you're going to ban all racist comment, well you'd have to ban you know the vast majority of the newspapers in terms of the coverage of migration you'd have had to go after the daily mirror you'd have to go after the most popular programs on TV the most popular sitcoms at that moment

you'd have to go after any number of books any number of songs and you'd end up with really quite a small set of people setting themselves this kind of ludicrously inflated notion of where they were and how far they'd got in terms of winning an argument that all racist speech could be prohibited the difference between that stuff and fascism is about violence.

It's about the willed use of political violence against your enemies, and that's the line that fascism crosses. The point about fascism is not just that if you had a fascist state, then this would be a society and vast amounts of opinion were banned. It's if you even have successful fascist parties, then large numbers of people have to fear for their lives. Now, those are things which you can usefully target and usefully say, that shouldn't happen.

But to go as far as all racist speech, when racist speech is as prevalent in our society as it is, it's just an impossible. If the reason why fascism is dangerous, then, is because of the threat of physical violence, why is it not enough to, as we already do, ban physical violence and say, look, if you want to advocate for this,

if you want to talk about fascist ideas, if you want to advocate fascist ideas on a public platform, we don't like it, but up until the moment, where you actually start committing violence, we're not going to prevent you from speaking. And then if we do, it's not so much that we're preventing you from speaking

as we're preventing you from committing violence. Well, I think one of the key answers to your question, you don't mind, is about who's carrying out the ban? You're totally right. If you look at the level of society, there is a state, there are laws, and those laws prohibit the use of political violence. But I'm not seeing the law or the state is the key political agent here.

And the whole audience of my book are political activists. They're people on the left, the people who build social movements. And it's really what they should be doing. Now, they don't operate in a mental universe where they say, all right, I want, you know, there's someone I disagree with, so I want the state to ban. Or at least certainly in the 1970s they didn't. They operated in a mental universe where they're saying, for example,

you know, we're talking about platforms. You know, we're talking about a moment where student unions are much more democratic. the decisions about, you know, literally which band gets to play are involved a much wider set of people and they're heated and there's a very high level of discussion. And it's the reason why, for example, the NUS adopts a no platform policy is to help students unions make a decision about the dividing point between, say, people who might want to come along to your student union,

you might not particularly want them there, but you're not going to stop them from speaking. And another group of people who you don't want to have in your space so much that you will not allow them to speak. And then you say, well, what's the dividing line? Because it can't just be, I disagree with them. That would make a very boring society indeed. It's got to be there's such a threshold point

that actually it's legitimate to ban this particular type of group, but that group only. I wonder, because somebody would want to levy this criticism, they might say, for example, that, look, if we allow sexist hate speech to prevail on a university campus, then we quite drastically increase the risk of domestic violence, for example,

misogynistic violence against women in the household. And somebody might say, well, look, if we're going to de-platform fascists on the ground that there's something inherently violent about them, then surely when we're talking broadly about sexism or something like this, there's a way in which it can be described as inherently violent too in the sense that it's so intimately tied to violence against women.

And I don't see why somebody would be able to rightfully say, no, fascism is very special here. It's the kind of thing to which we're able to say this shouldn't be platformed, but every other kind of hateful rhetoric is not because it's not as directly tied to violence or something like this. It seems to me, in other words,

like a practical way to get around the problem of, well, if we want to know platform this person, what about this person and this person and this person, and we just have to sort of draw a line somewhere, you're drawing that line at fascism. I think a lot of free speech advocates would want to say, one step further, just draw the line just before fascism too,

because all of the problems of fascism will exist in these other forms of hate speech to some degree as well. It seems to be a difference of degree rather than kind, in other words. Well, if I think about how this has worked out in practice, you know, I'm old enough, I'm 49 years old, I spent quite a long time around student union politics. I'm old enough to remember a time

when actually people were quite serious about prohibiting sexist speech on campus. I remember, for example, the 1980s campaigns against page three goals. I remember attempts to say that Spock, the anti-abortion organization, shouldn't be allowed on campus. Now, it seems to me that there were groups of people who tried to say that the no platform ban should be extended to them. And it seems to me that in practice had argument lost. And it's worthwhile thinking why it lost. Because I'm talking about people voting with their feet and not making that additional extension. And I think some of it is to do with actual violence

rather than the mere threat of violence. If you want to talk about page three goals, you might say, okay, this is really demeaning use of images about women. That's unpleasant and unwanted. But to say that's violence, you have to sort of wrap in an awful lot of potential that's not there. You compare that to, you know, a supporter of a fascist party wandering around a student union building

and actually looking at that site as a place to carry out attacks against their political opponents. There's no, the violence isn't several steps away. The violence is imminent. It's right there. So that's one difference. I think the other difference is that fascism, the more that it succeeds, has its ambition, the desire to take away the platform of everybody. Now, you might not like the Sun newspaper.

You might think it's got terrible politics. You might think that Murdoch did. over any number of issues is terrible and beyond the pale, but it's very hard to imagine that Rupert Murdoch is someone who's a censor, who looks on his ideal society and plans to achieve it relatively quickly, and in that society no one else would be allowed to speak. That's not his relation to speech. His relation to speech is far more.

He wants a proliferation of speech, a commercialised speech, which his kind of speech dominates, but he doesn't want to silence other people. So those are the distinctions. they may seem fine but their distinctions which I think over time hundreds of thousands or millions of people who've been around these discussions

have actually recognised themselves Of course people at the moment are making similar criticisms of extreme left-wing ideology that seems to carry a character of controlling of language and sometimes including attempts to ban or de-platform or remove the mouthpiece of people with right-wing ideas

The way that certain right wingers might characterize it is a bit more extreme. They might envision a situation in which the left-wing kings of Silicon Valley are trying to destroy the speech, not just of extreme fascists, but people who are just sort of leaning center-right. Now, I'm suspicious as to whether that's actually occurring, but suppose it were, suppose they were right, in other words, about Silicon Valley being this left-wing conspiracy to silence the right and live in some sort of communist uter.

or something. We wouldn't describe this as fascism. Some people would maybe use that term analogously to say it's sort of a fascistic approach, but despite this not being fascism, it would still be doing the same thing of trying to silence political opposition, let's say. Would that be enough grounds to say that this is something else that is subject to deplatforming, or does it have to be right-wing fascism? Well, look, I think there's two things we've got much needed to disentangle a bit. One is this idea

that there's this far left, which has vast amounts of sort of cultural influence and therefore is able to carry out some sort of war against the few well-meaning patriots, whatever. As a description of society right now, I just don't recognise that. I spent quite a lot of my life trying to build

up, left, indeed far left movements, and what I find is to my great sadness, but this is true, is it actually left opinions and left organisations and left wing or organisational kind of heft is actually less right now than any time in my lifetime. I think anyone who's honest can see that. So I think what you're really talking about isn't anything that's going on now. I'm just not very interesting people who look at this world and seriously believe that there's some Hollywood conspiracy. Well great, let them to it. I think a more meaningful hypothetical she raises

Let's just say that we were in a moment like, again, like the early 70s, where the left was very well organised, was rooted, a number of trade unions, and student unions had a real influence in society. Let's say that might come again in a relatively short period of time, five or ten years. How should the left behave, if we did have a again situation? We had far more like real social capital. I'd argue really hard that we shouldn't look to an audience like we're the banners. I'd say that if people look like that,

they're making a huge political mistake. And the more that people seem to do that, even, yeah, maybe sometimes without a great deal of truth, but even if they're seen to do that, that's the problem. So part of the argument of my book is that in a world which might not be that far away, where the left did have as much influence, say, offline as we sometimes have in certain spaces online, or outside campuses, say, if we left, if again we had that sort of influence,

we really shouldn't play up to the worst sorts of stupid fantasies and lurid fantasies about us because to the extent that we do, we make ourselves seem illegitimate. If the argument for restricting speech is to limit it to people who go around systematically taking away platforms from everyone who disagrees with them, if the argument is that that's legitimate against people who use violence against their enemies repeatedly,

I don't accept the left does that, but the more that it looks like we do that, you couldn't have a principled argument that that should only apply on one side of the political spectrum. It's got to be about the behaviour and the consequences. Otherwise, you know, all arguments about free speech, yeah, they have to be mirrored. If you don't have a mirrored argument of free speech,

you're not in favour of free speech. Unless you have this sense that arguments can apply on both sides of the political spectrum, apply to you, all you're doing is you're saying, I want to speak, but that's not free speech. The moment at which a free speech discussion is meaningful is when you're willing to concede that certain groups of people who you disagree with also have a right to a platform. If you're not, you're just saying, I want to speak. But any free speech discourse that's meaningful has to make that move.

And at the moment you make that move, the moment you're honest about your own behaviour, then you're at least capable of making political mistakes. Hence, I write a book arguing for friends and people who draw on some other rights. say, look, don't make these mistakes. We're in a moment where we could make those mistakes too. So were the left to adopt these policies? Were the left to gain this kind of cultural and political power, which I think culturally certainly exists on university campuses

and across most of social media, but supposing that this existed in an offline sense as well, and we began to see this movement towards this kind of approach that you've just described, of mimicking the very things that it was sometimes criticising on the right. Would this, in your view, just be making the left a bit more fascistic? Or would it, in your view, be making the left something distinct, but yet perhaps now worthy of maybe being subject to de-platforming as well as fascism?

Well, look, two words there that I have some problem. One is fascistic. Now, I do see fascism as a relatively specific political tradition. It emerged on certain circumstances, emerged by certain people. Quite a few of them were people who at some point have been on the left, Mussolini, Mosley. When you mark their political trajectory when they're on the left and when they're on the far right, they're completely different people. They're different in terms of how they relate to forces in society.

They're different in terms of how they use violence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it wouldn't be that the left would be more fascistic, but the point is we'd still be doing things we shouldn't be doing. But would it be doing it to the extent that they should be doing it? de-platformed. Well, again, it's not so much should. What I'm saying to people is that there'd be real danger this would happen. Of course it would.

I wouldn't ever argue for left-win groups to be deplatformed. What I'm saying is that if you could imagine a situation, or one of the things I'm saying, you could imagine a situation where people were making serious political mistakes over and over and over, inevitably the consequences that other people would look at them and say, well, right, we want to de-platform you. And you couldn't, in those circumstances,

say that's tremendously unfair, the right response would be to say, let's think about what we're doing and stop being idiots or whatever word you want to use, because actually you're making a series of political mistakes. I very strongly believe that both people I disagree with and people I agree with are capable of making profound political mistakes. You can't have been around British politics 30 years without having seen causes you believe in get things totally wrong. point is not to get things wrong. The key point is to actually think seriously about what we're doing. And again, one of the themes of my book is that there's a very, very, very long left-wing tradition of support for freedom of speech. This was for centuries, our partisan

signifier. This is how you could separate the left and the right. And if we've lost sense of that on the left, that's a mistake that we're making. You said you wouldn't want to see a left-wing speaker de-platformed a moment ago or a left-wing organisation de-platformed. I'm trying, I guess what I'm trying to do is get at the principled distinctions about fascism, which so far seem to have been something like fascism is violent

and fascism in particular wants to silence its opposition. It wants to disallow the speech and opinions of its political opponents and of its... Well, can I clarify both of them? Firstly, in terms of the way fascism uses violence, it's a completely different way from any other political tradition in the last hundred years.

You know, if you think about the rise to power of fascism in Italy in 1920 to 1923, how it comes about long before fascism in government, long before it's getting 10% of the voting elections, when it's a relatively marginal force, what you see is fascism coming to power through burning down trade union headquarters, through assassinations of, its enemies and so on. Now, that's not just violence in some loose and vague sense. That's not the sort of violence of, say, football hooligans getting into a barnage with their mates on a Saturday. That's a particular and unique form of violence. And every single attempt to revive fascism, which has been a tool like that, has shared that political violence. Even today when a lot of the people on the far right represent an extreme and moderated form compared to the fashion in the 20s and 30s. They kind of look back to it nostalgically,

but there's very little real continuity between how they organise those models from the past. I'm thinking about things like the Brothers of Italy, Maloney's Party in Italy. One of the steps they've taken the last five years was sacking the trade union headquarters of the CGLIL, one of the largest unions in Italy. Now, it's really hard.

There are lots of political forces in Britain on the sort of closer far right, on the centre right, on the centre, on the left, on the far left, who've used violent rhetoric. But there's nothing in Britain or Europe that had that same approach towards its enemies, which was burn down their buildings, assassinate them, from a moment, even when that organisation was relatively weak.

And it's not just Italy. I mean, again, if you look at political assassinations in Germany, in the 1920s, when the number of fascists in that country were in the low thousands, you're talking about assassinations taking place at the rate of hundreds every year. So just using violence in the loose term, fascist violence is of a different kind, and there's a danger if you just use the word violence.

You're actually talking about different things, as if they're saying they're not. There's a complete different to scale here. And again, there's a very similar thing in terms of traditions other than fascism, and their desire to create a kind of totalitarianism. You know, at the moment which fascist parties do at all well, they're immediately looking who to ban. If you think about, for example, the history of Rézombeinand in France, again, even at a moment it was a relatively small organisation.

The first thing it did when it won mayoralities is it'd go through the local libraries and pull books off the shelf. Now, compared to that generalised banning, not just of one or two political points, but of every single other tradition. You know, the fascists didn't just ban anti-fascists. The fascists banned liberals. They banned conservatives. They banned religious people.

They banned feminists. That's a completely different scale from any analogous reflux of, well, we'll take away some, you know, we'll deploy people of platforms. So this would be the distinctive factor to somebody who wanted. to claim that actually, you know, the left are exhibiting fascistic tendencies by wanting to ban books and, you know, wanting to de-platform speakers, would you say that then that the distinctive quality here is that maybe they want to, they want to ban the publication of a book on specific grounds of hate speech,

but they don't want to just ban every single other form of ideology that exists on the planet? Exactly. So, again, it's about a scale. And again, it is worth also saying, you know, you keep them coming back to the left and I appreciate we're in a moment where all these discussions take place and it's either far right or it's the left and we talk about as if there's no other political actors I mean it is worth bearing in mind

that stay in the United States right now without the left having done it at all we're living through this extraordinary moment of collapsing of free speech but it's not the collapsing free speech that gets reported online discussions at all as far as I can see it's things like relatively mainstream groups in the United States

going after vast numbers of books from public libraries, pulling LGBT and black interest texts out of children's libraries. That's, you know, we're at a moment where there's, you know, vast terror about, you know, did Milo get to complete his talk at Berkeley? That's really quite a small event in terms of the totality of free speech attacks are taking place right now in Britain or America. do you think that there might be a fear here i mean the classical free speech position when applied to an argument to de-platform or no platform fascists would be to say look i get it

fascism is bad it's really bad but in fact one of the reasons that it's so bad is because of the fact that it completely stifles opposition and it demands complete adherence and the character of the wrongness of this is exactly what we should be trying to avoid by saying that we want this to be silenced, we want this to not be heard. Is there not a sense in which it might legitimize the martyrdom complex of some fascists who say, we're just trying to speak truth,

we're saying what people don't want to hear, and they're going to try and silence us for it, and that's exactly what happens? Is there not a fear that this could actually help to support their campaign because it will begin to anger people and rile people up to fight against what they see as an oppressive mechanism against their ideology? Well, one of the things I try and do in my books, I talk about different approaches for confronting fascists, which people have adopted at different points

in the past. And I talk quite a lot about, particularly the example of the 1970s, which is something I've written about before the anti-Nazi League for against racism. And that's a moment, which I think sets a lot of the template for activist discussions in Britain now. So I appreciate I'm going back into the past. And the people who weren't there that could feel a bit like alienating. I know that. But I think this is a lot of the discussion which has taken place in activists' heads, which they reflect.

One of the examples often talk about of a successful campaign in terms of de-radicalising fascists was against racism, which is much less well known in the British Left today than its sister organisation in the Anti-Nazi League. and one of the reasons why I talk about Ruckhant's racism is it seemed to me that local activists in Ruckhant's racism groups had quite a sophisticated idea about how you de-radicalise individual fascists and quite often this was actually about talking to them

and quite often counter-intuitively compared to activists understanding today this was almost about inviting them into left-wing spaces so for one of a better word this was platforming them But it was platforming them on really quite unique circumstances, which were heavily constrained and controlled by the people who were willing to make that quite bold move. And in essence, they wanted to create a situation where those people were surrounded by other people, they're the minority. And where there was a kind of where there were certain things you could draw on, which might pull them back towards more sensible positions of life. Like in this case, it's a shared love of music, particularly music of black and Caribbean origin. So there were strategies which were about giving people a space.

And that's something I'm very much in that tradition. But again, I'm not going to call off other attempts to try and create a space where fascists can't organise. I think in terms of your point, well, isn't there a danger, then people who complete science can't talk will then get radicalised? Well, you know what? That actually happened in the 1970s. once the National Front started going down the pan in around 1979, in 1980 and 1981,

its members took part from vast number of attacks. Often their main attacks where they tried to bomb bookshops, which obviously has a certain irony in terms of the history of free speech. And it probably is inevitable. When you do have a far right that's defeated, often it does express itself in terms of spasm of violence. But to my mind, the real problem kind of isn't that. The real problem is the way in which in the period before they're able to build a mass audience, have hundreds or thousands of people identifying with them.

It's very hard to defeat a political antagonist without it then in its moment of defeat expressing violence. But if the violence is an expression of its defeat, I think as the rest of us in society, you kind of just have to accept that. The problem is the period beforehand when those views go from being completely marginal. to actually have an audience and that's the point you have to stop because if you've let that go past you're going to be stuck with things afterwards which you're not going to like whatever they are

is your view then that fascists ought be deplatformed it's or are you just sort of protecting or advocating or explaining the rights of university groups to decide to themselves not to platform fascists and sort of supporting them against opposition that says no you should be doing so or are you saying that they sort of haven't they have it incumbent upon themselves to no platform fascists because of the nature of fascism.

I think what I'm trying to do in the book is to set out for people, particularly political activists, the train in which you can have this discussion and work out what's the most effective thing. I'm really not saying that no platforming is ever, even if you narrow it to the category of fascists, is ever something you do in all possible circumstances. What I'm trying to get people to do, when I was writing the book, what I was trying to get people to do is to think through from their perspective, you know, the pluses and minuses of this approach. And I've already identified some of those minuses,

is that, you know, it's very hard if you do it at all, any degree of success at all, without there to being some pushback against it. If it's working, that pushback is tolerable, but if you're doing it badly, that pushback can be absolutely overwhelming. And I think possibly one of the things which has been going on for a lot of left-doing activists

in the last five years is that sense of they're trying to be principled, things which people are doing out of a desire to be principled are actually about firing on them and they're going, why on earth this is happening? And part of the point of my book is to say to them, well, actually it's happening for some perfectly understandable reasons and you need to think about how you're using this tactic

because maybe that's a sign that you're using it in a way which is more destructive to you than it is to your opponents and you need to bear in mind that's the possibility. At its best, there's always pluses and minuses to this approach and there's plenty of time when it's not at its best. Do you think there's a charge of hypocrisy that could be made here? Even if mistakenly, you might think mistakenly,

but you might be able to understand why. You can imagine like a fascist student who, let's say they're fascists in the sense that they're sympathetic to fascism. They don't commit any violence themselves. They're not burning down unions or throwing books into the flame or anything like that. They just have read about Nazi Germany

and think maybe it was a good idea or something like this. And they decide that they want to speak at their local free speech club or something. And they get deep platform. They say, no, you're not allowed to come and give this talk. They get a bit angry. They storm into the room and they say, you know, I demand to be heard. And so they call security, and security come and they drag them out. Obviously, all force ultimately rests on some kind of threat of violence.

And this security guard has to drag him out of the room and sort of throw him onto the street. And then he says, what's going on here? somebody explains to him, well, what you don't understand is that the reason I'm objecting to you being able to speak is because your views are such that you're trying to silence other people and you're doing it with the threat of immediate violence. And that fascist might sit there and think, well, hold on a second. Have you not just ejected me from a room you're wanting to silence what is essentially your political opposition with the threat of immediate violence? Why is it that you're allowed to do that to me, but I'm not even allowed to

advocate doing that to you. Yeah. Well, firstly, it seems to me that your scenario involves more than one thing, if you don't mind me saying so. At one point, you're talking about the distinction between some merely holding ideas and then someone expressing them. And at another point, you're talking about the people who use violence, then the consequence of that violence. So you can separate them out a bit. There's actually a scenario in my book, which is very similar to the one you described, which is the story of Mr. Redfern, who is an employee of a bus company in Yorkshire.

And he was a BNP election candidate who got kicked out of his job in Yorkshire because he stood for the BNP in election. But the key point of the story... By the way, for our American listeners, the BNP, the British National Party, far right party, historically of fascist origin, but for a long time being very electoral

and being much more like these parties you see in France and Italy. So what happens is his case end up going to the European Court of Human Rights and he won there. One of the things I tried to explain in the book is why he won. And the reason why he won is because he was someone who hadn't organised in any way in his workplace. So the threat posed by his fascist ideas was a really abstract threat. No one was suggesting that he was making life difficult for his co-workers. No one was suggesting that he was raising ideas in the workplace.

And one of the things I say in the book, in effect, is the anti-fascist people who tried to get Mr. Redfern kicked out of his job were making a tactical error. Even if you see no platform as a generally sensible tactic, and I'm trying to argue my book that it is, there are times when you shouldn't do it. And you shouldn't do it against, as it were, he had to summarise Mr. Redfern in two words. It's the silent racist. The one who's racist and fascism is someone completely invisible to the situation. you're actually talking about, that seems to me a really profound error. It's likely to produce the sorts of effects you're describing.

But the other thing I picked up in your story, you know, the student who comes along and is ejected, is the other thing is the fact that it's the security guards rejecting. To my mind, again, that's an alarm bell. Because one of the whole things about the no platform I'm talking about

is an idea of students taking control of their own campuses or workers taking control of their workplaces, One of the things which argue my book, the letters, repeatedly made as a misstep over the last five years, is relying on a benevolent authority. So the university will ban the event, student porters or whoever will come along and kick out the speaker who's banned. Now, that seems to me a profound mistake as a matter of general approach. And in this scenario you're describing one of the reasons why it's a mistake is if, for example,

you just had a slightly different thing going on, which is students themselves saying that we can try and prevent this thing take place. We might put a human barricade around the event. One of the things that would inevitably happen then is your student who's going in a bad direction but not got there yet is then going to be talking to other students. And there's going to be heated debate. There's going to be controversy. It may not be on the platform he originally wanted, but there will. There'll be people talking to him. And that's always to my mind, likely to produce better results than a bunch of people calling on a referee, bring along the police and the state to sort out the problem

because that's going to have the sorts of consequences you talk about. We saw this happen, well, I saw it happen in person in Oxford a number of years ago. It must have been four years ago or so, something like that. Pre-COVID, Steve Bannon was invited to speak at the Oxford Union. And I remember walking down the main street of Oxford and just hearing drums and chants and I didn't know what on earth it was. So I turned around the corner and it was just a street filled with protesters.

And I wanted to see what was going on. So I tried to get into the Oxford Union and you couldn't. They set up this kind of human barricade that you're talking about. And the whole place kind of descended into chaos. The police were saying that you're just not going to be able to get in. There were people stuck inside. There were people who weren't even members of the union who just had accommodation there who couldn't get home because there were these protesters saying,

no, we hate fascists and you can't go and make your tea and study and go to bed. It was a disaster. One of the effects of this was that, I mean, sure, yeah, people show up and they're debating and talking, but they're not debating and talking. They're screaming at each other. And then the event took place inside the union with basically no one inside, except those who are already there. It was filmed, put on YouTube, and became one of the most successful videos in the Oxford Union's history because of this attempt to no platform. I certainly never would have watched that speech if it weren't for that attempt. And I'm sure that a great number of people would say the same thing.

So there's also a fear, surely, that this can have essentially the exact opposite effect of what you want, especially in an internet age, where somebody can not only say, well, if you won't have me here, I'm going to go and create my own platform, but now also is able to say, come and listen to me, come and hear what it is that they didn't want you to hear. Yeah. But I also think one of the things going on is part of the problem, which is I find it very hard to see Steve Bannon as a fascist. You know, Steve Bannon had been relatively recently the chief strategy as to democratically elected presidents. And therefore, when people are talking about preventing him from speaking, there's kind of an allure and a fascination about what he says.

I mean, can you imagine a scenario which isn't very different when it's someone like, for example, Richard Spencer who'd been inside the Oxford Union? Now, it might well be that there'd still been a crowd outside and there might well still have been, you know, conflict. between people wanting to get in and other people. But the sheer fact, even that it would have been Richard Spencer, to my mind, would have changed the dynamics a bit. You're talking there now about someone who's got the fashy haircut, who's been filmed at times, you know, going hell, Trump. Yeah.

It makes sense. You know, you as the passerby would be much less likely to be thinking, oh, I really want to go and hear that because you'd kind of know that actually, even if you did hear it, I would have nothing to say. Well, maybe, but then I don't know. I mean, if I'd never heard of Richard Spencer, if I didn't know who this was,

and I saw some huge protest. And I said, what on earth is going on here? And they said, well, Richard Spencer, the fascist is speaking, especially if, you know, last week they'd said, well, Steve Bannon, the fascist is speaking. And before that, they said, Tommy Robinson, the fascist is speaking. And before that they said, Theresa May, the fascist is speaking,

which is also a thing that happened in Oxford when she was at the Oxford Union. I'm sure I heard at least one charge. I'd probably be like, well, you know what? I want to know who this guy is now. Yeah, but look, look, what I'm trying to convey in my book is there are a lot of fine dividing lines and gradations. And there are moments when this tactic works brilliantly, and then moments when this tactic doesn't work at all.

And I'm really trying to get readers to understand why that is, not from a sense of always ban or from a sense of never ban, but from a sense of trying to understand the politics of this, because it's actually more complicated. If you want to take a complete opposite example from either of the ones you've just given, One of the things I talk about in my book is what it was like being at the end of the Second World War

where members of the 43 group were confronting individual fascists on their platforms. Now, what you've just described in a sense, the glamour, the fascinating quality of those speakers doesn't apply because people walking past are people who've been bombed by fascists, had no interest in fascism at all. So for the 43 group,

the only task is to persuade the people watching that this is a fascist. If you can do that, there'll be complete public support for you doing anything you like against them. But that's kind of like almost the extreme example of the perfect, no platform. Then we can get someone shouting at Theresa May, you're a fascist. Obviously, that's a stupid argument. And obviously there's nothing to it. And obviously that's going to be counterproductive to the person saying that.

Now, between the one end, the ideal example of getting it right and the other end, the ideal example of getting it wrong. the vast number of gradations. And when I'm trying to get people, when I wrote the book, what I was trying to get is from my audience's right, which is overwhelmingly on the left, is I trying to get people to see why some of those scenarios work and why some of them don't.

And just to have a more sophisticated politics that would get people to see, sometimes this is good, sometimes that's bad. Now, if someone wants to say to me, they're a free speech absolutist, and they just think everyone should get to speak, okay, that's a fine argument. But that's not where I'm coming from, and it's not where my audience is coming from.

What I'm more trying to do is explain to them, kind of the ground rules, why sometimes this works and sometimes this doesn't, with an idea that at the end of it, you might restrict this to examples where it might have a chance of winning and not do it in cases where actually you're going to more upset and annoy people than you are going to change the minds of the people you are actually trying to persuade. So it isn't always going to work against fascists to no platform them, but yeah but maybe maybe try and work through why it isn't always going to work against fascists specifically

and I think one of the reasons even with people who are actually clear fascists is that we're living in a moment where fascism per se has done an awful lot to disavow its name you know in the in the 1920s and 30s you had Mussolini you had a fascist international there were all sorts of the political parties in it they didn't call themselves fascists They wouldn't get Italian money. It's that crude. And then same a bit later. If you look at the British Union of Fascism, Britain,

in 1936 it changes its name the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. And it does so literally to chase after money from Germany. So it's that crude. You've got fascist parties in power, and you've got people who are trying to get imitators. Now, we've been in a moment for quite a long time when a lot of the success of far-right politics

or even the specifically fascist element of it has been about a kind of tactical disavowal. So even amongst people who you could recognizably think of as fascists, people where there's a continuity of organisation, funding, personalities to the Second World War, even they are not wandering around saying, yeah, except the label fascist very much. So for all those reasons, you've got to be smart and sharp,

even in a category of fascism, it's not straightforward. But of the examples where no platforming is, let's say, desirable, in such a sense that not only does it work, but also it works in a way that we would approve of, you would say only applies to fascist speakers. Yeah, definitely. And so even in principle, I mean, the reason I kept bringing it back to the left earlier, because I'm trying to imagine a situation in which if we didn't have a word for fascism, and I was just asking you, what kind of things should be no platformed? and you couldn't say fascism, so you might say something like the identifying characteristics you've given about violence against suppression, about suppression of political enemies.

Say sort of super violence. Super violence, if you like. And I just imagine a left-wing equivalent. I imagine that, you know, extinction rebellion protesters go a bit further than they already are and start setting fire to motorways, and then maybe some people in their cars end up getting hurt or killed in the fires, and they say,

well, you know what, it times up and we don't care, and we need to care for the environment. would this kind of thing, the question I was asking earlier, would this kind of thing to you just look like it's beginning to become fascistic, or would it be something that is still not fascistic, and therefore for some reason just still not worthy of no platform? I honestly think I've answered this question. You know, if there were left-win groups,

which did take an approach of, even when they were very small, trying to ban everyone else around them, and that's everyone, that's left, centre, right, everyone and they use that kind of focused in relentless political violence.

Inevitably, they're going to get people trying to ban them, and it's their fault for the way they behave. Are people justified in trying to ban them, is what I'm asking you. In the same way that you might say they're justified in no platforming a fascist, are they justified in no platforming people like this as well,

even though they're not on the right? Right. The problem with me thinking about a specific example, of this is that there are groups in history that behaved like that. And quite often, they ended up actually as fascists, but quite often it took a bit of time to get there. I'm thinking about, for example, organisations in the United States at one time quite close to the weatherman, and then ended up going really bizarre, ideologically diffused directions, but behaved in exactly the way you described. And the gods honest truth is, they may have been of left-wing origin, but if they behave like fascists, If they have that obsessive attitude of violence towards everyone, you don't recognise a fascist because they call themselves left wing or right wing. You recognise a fascist because of the way they behave. And there's nothing that makes it impossible for that to originate within groups,

which at the time they start off doing that, thinking their left wing. Is there a reason just on this, talking about the right and the left broadly, is there a reason why you think that there's a reason why you think that there's a least a perception. I don't know if you think this is true, but there's at least a perception that free speech has become an issue of the right. It's become something that's championed by the right, whereas traditionally it's been championed by the left. Do you think that this is just because, I mean, my suspicion is maybe it's because of some feeling, again, whether it's right or wrong, it's about the perception that historically the people who would want

champion free speech, that the people who feel like they're suffering for not having free speech, that are being silenced. And so traditionally this has been people rising up against their governments. And you have a sort of a left-wing radical movement that the government wants to suppress, and then the left-wing radical movement say free speech. Whereas now people feel as though the cultural power exists

within the left and that they're being silenced by Twitter or Facebook. And so they say that we want free speech and they happen to be on the right. That, to me, is maybe a potential description of why people attach free speech to the right now rather than the left. I don't know what you think about this. Well, look, unfortunately, you use some words,

and those words exploding in my head. One of them's Twitter. The idea that Elon Musk owned a Twitter... Yeah, but that's the celebration now, though, isn't it? The reason people are celebrating Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is because, look, it's the return of free speech. I mean, whether or not that's correct. That's part of the feeling that people who are celebrating the takeover

are characterizing, that there's this sense in which Twitter has been a fairly oppressive platform. It just feels to me that you're being incredibly generous to some people on the far right who really don't deserve it. One of the ways in which I mean by they don't deserve it, to put it this concretely, if you think about the classic left-wing defence of free speech, one of the key things about it is it really was a defence of free speech for everybody. and that included defence of free speech outside the sphere of politics.

So in the last days when free speech is still a partisan signifier of the left rather than the rights, so the 1960s, it means defending Lady Chatterley's lover. It means defending all sorts of weird things, but the left just goes into it in terms of supporting free speech. Now, when I think about, I don't know, Tommy Robbins, say. I just can't find it in me to believe for a single second that Tommy Robinson believes in free speech for anyone other than himself. I don't see Tommy Robinson getting up and saying if you think about all sorts of different campaigns who deprived their free speech. People

speaking out against the kind of nationalist misuse of the British Empire getting monstered by the Daily Mail. If you think about, say, some of the people I represent who included, you know, Corbyn supporters got kicked out of the Labour Party. They've included teachers who said that they were, they distrusted the way in which the government was coming too fast out of the lockdown. Now, Tommy Robinson wouldn't ever speak up for any of them because Tommy Robinson's not in favour of free speech. He's in favour of Tommy Robinson's speech. So I find it very hard to recognise the description you give because you seem to be saying, well, look, there are these right people, they're the insurgents, so they're all going to use the way

free speech was used by a different generation of people 50 years before, but they're not. All they're saying is they've got an audience, great, they've got a platform great, and they don't want anyone to get upset with them, to get annoyed with them, to heckle them. Their notion of free speech isn't free speech. It's not they want to create the conditions for a dialogue or a debate. It's just they want to be allowed a megaphone to speak very loudly people will have to listen. That's not what I think of as free speech. It's not the generosity, it's not the broadness, it's nothing like a free speech argument that I can recognize. Presumably if somebody were to press Tommy Robinson in an interview, even if just to say face, it's unlikely

that he would agree with your characterization, surely. He would say, well, okay, I haven't talked about those examples because, you know, they're not in my purview or I didn't hear about them or something, but now you mention them, he might say, but yeah, of course I support their right to free speech, and I think it's terrible that, you know, they've been dismissed in the reasons that you've given. But Tommy Robinson begins with his attempt to close down the speech of other people. That's where the Tommy Robinson campaign starts. It begins in Luton, is it 2010, 2011, the protests by a bunch of Islamic provocateurs or Al-Mahjaroon who are trying to, you're trying to, do a protest against the war,

trying to do it in the most annoying and unpleasant way possible. Tommy Robinson's responses say, they must not be allowed to speak. If you gauge people not by what they say their politics are, but by what they do, it's not difficult at all to find lots of examples of Tommy Robinson campaigning against the speech rights of people he disagrees with.

If you're going to say, but give them a platform and give them the right opportunity, he might say he's in favour of other people's speech rights. And so, well, that's undermined by what he's done over his entire political career, surely. It's rather like, I mean, one of the experiences I talk about in the book was being in the Court of Appeal and watching his case before the Court of Appeal

where he was arguing that he shouldn't go to prison for standing in fact outside of court and disrupting court process, which might have led to the, or should have led, the jailing of men who'd been convicted for sex crimes against minors. Tommy Robinson, bless him, was doing all in his power to sabotage that process. But I remember his advocate getting up before the Court of Appeal,

and I remember him arguing with a straight face that the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 10 principles of free speech protected his right to speak, and that was why he should be allowed to protest. And I remember these just judges laughing. At the barefaced audacity, someone who's made their political career arguing X, now in a situation of adversity arguing Y.

That argument didn't win in that courtroom. And amongst the reasons why it didn't win in that courtroom is he just hadn't done the things in his life. So that argument could be put with any plausibility at all. So do you also think that the characterization is an incorrect one, that free speech is an issue now championed by the right more than the left? I think that's going too far, but one of the things I try and talk about in my book is why that perception might have quite deep roots.

And it's not really to do the things you were just talking about in terms of a far right saying, we're being silenced and look at us, poor us. It's actually to do things which are broad than that and are bigger than that. It's to do with a really big tectonic shift, particularly in American politics, and in terms of the centre right in America

or adopting free speech as a partisan signifier. And I talk about things like George Bush, the attack on political correctness, the really big shift away from the pre-1939-45 US tradition to the Supreme Court now suddenly actually quite regularly giving free speech decisions, which are objectively free speech decisions. Those things are real, and they have actually, you know, it's like continents have shifted a bit,

and people on the left aren't noticing that's happening and that I think does create a bit of bases for these arguments it's not about the relatively small number of far right and far left activists and the arguments we approach towards one another it's about the hundreds of millions of quite ordinary Americans in the middle and how they see things I think that has changed it it has changed it in terms of just how the left is perceived and how the right is perceived and I think as a left we need to do quite a lot of work to kind of unpick that assumption. But that begins with not actually adopting a generalized position of opposition to free speech. It begins with saying if you're going

to have exceptions to free speech, they need to be really specific and they need to be part of what's a broader and general argument in favour of speech, including, and this is the key part, this is the moment at which a free speech argument becomes principled and worth listening to, including supporting the right of platforms for people you disagree with. Unless as the left we do that, we're not going to undermine that broader public perception. So I wouldn't say that's true yet, but unless we're careful, it could be true. And that, I think, for anyone left, should be quite a troubling thought, frankly. Well, the book is no free speech for fascists, exploring no platform in history, law and politics.

David Renton, thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely pleasure, Alex. Thanks so much for having me.