David Renton, a British historian and barrister with an academic interest in the far right, in No Free Speech For Fascists explores the genealogy of this totemic demand and investigates its genealogy in law, history and politics. He explains the origin of the “No Platform” carrion call in Britain in the 1970s as a deviation from what was a cornerstone of left-wing credo – free speech.
The book shows how the demand for No Platform was meant to have a narrow application, in relation to a far-right politics that threatened everyone else. It contrasts the rival idea of opposition to hate speech which emerged contemporaneously and which is now enshrined in European and British law and explains how the rejection by both bodies of praxis to the American First Amendment tradition of free speech differs according to their respective perspectives. It traces out the crucial differences between No Platform and Hate Speech; firstly while the former emphasised the qualitative difference of fascism as a political movement while the latter insists that speech must be restricted if deemed humiliating or offensive to the putative victim and, secondly, anti-Hate Speech advocates rarely distinguish between strategies to counteract fascism from below or above.
The Hate Speech narrative emerged with the rise of the articulation of grievances from social groups outside the spectrum of race: sex, gender, sexuality, disability and so on. Accordingly, far right speech has expanded beyond its old ‘remit’ of race to often encompass a Christian nationalist ideology with explicit anti-Islam themes or anti-globalist rhetoric. Renton argues for a repositioning of “No Platform” in the context of the prevalence of social media and the plurality of far-right speech and for a strategy to identify fascism within this diversity.
The book follows this thematic structure. The early chapters describe the discursive vicissitudes of “free speech.” The left until recently supported free speech in virtually all contexts, except fascism. The emergence of no platform in 1970s Britain in which it was conceived, and at a time of repeated street clashes between the right and left. However with the growth of the far right from the mid-1980s onwards, beginning with the breakthrough of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, the right has become more experienced in claiming victimhood and has used its entitlement to free speech as a recruiting weapon. The far right’s support for free speech is, of course, self-limiting. For example, the far-right platform styles itself as “A social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online” while hosting any number of militant opponents of free speech for defined ethnic or religious groups such as Jews and Muslims, including most notoriously Robert Bowers a Gab member and the perpetrator of the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018.[1]
Despite such atrocities, the relationship between freedom of speech and the far right has become an increasingly productive venture for the latter. Because of this, Renton devotes the middle chapters of his book to explaining why hate speech is an insecure basis to oppose fascist speech – or any form of hurtful speech. For the difficulty resides in the relationship between hateful speech and the particular victimhood status of the subaltern group targeted. As hinted at earlier the plurality and partial successes of previous struggles; there now exists an expanding vocabulary of concepts relating to marginalised or previously marginalised social groups: race, sex, disability, sexual orientation, age, or religious belief … Since nearly everyone occupies a subordinate position in relation to these axes and in recent years the far right has managed to position itself as the defender of the rights of one of these minority groups be it the late far right Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn who championed gay men against migrants or the British far right figure Tommy Robinson who poses as the hero of women and children against the imagined sexual depredations of Muslim men.[2]
In the online sphere, Renton argues that by campaigning against hate speech, left-wing radicals have unwittingly and unintentionally provided to the far right, censorship cause celebre martyrdoms. In the final chapters, the book argues that where a speaker belongs to a clearly non-fascist far right, the starting point should be to challenge the speaker’s view rather than to deny them a platform giving examples of activists succeeding in disrupting and mocking far right speeches, without having to their invitation to speak revoked. In short, the book argues for a strategic defence of no platform, as a necessary and limited incursion to free speech, a means of resisting groups with an identifiable imprint of fascist tradition.[3]
Chapter two describes how for roughly three centuries between the onset of the English Civil War in the 1640s and the formulation of No Platform in 1972, the defence of free speech was a fundamental liberal-left value. The left choose the side which best reflected its values – of equality for all and especially for groups such as workers or the poor who faced the greatest risk of being silenced. The right gave little or no support for campaigns for free speech. The basic dividing line was between those who wished to weaken the monarchy aristocracy while opposing censorship, and those who wanted the old rulers to remain in power unchallenged while opposing greater free speech. In the words of one historian of seventeenth century Britain, Sheila Lambert:
Attitudes to censorship have always been to some extent a matter of personal and political predilection … Writers who wish to champion the underdog and take the side of those who strive against authority find censorship everywhere, while those who prefer law, order and a quiet life are inclined to belittle the importance of occasional instances of repression, however ferocious those are shown to be.[4]
And right down to the last three decades of the twentieth century, that ideological division remained true in the Western world through the upheavals of the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century; the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the extension of the vote to the working classes in Britain, Germany and other emergent democracies in the nineteenth century; the cataclysm of two world wars in the twentieth century and the defeat of Nazism and Fascism and the anti-communist hysteria of the middle decades of the twentieth. In the United States, censorship in the 1950s was associated with a recognisably nativist, non-fascist far right American tradition (which in our times is being expressed by the MAGA movement) and was articulated in full by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate sub-Committee on UnAmerican Activities which sought not only to blacken the reputation of prominent Democrat politicians and Hollywood actors as pro-Soviet Communist fellow travellers but to ban any writer speaking honestly about injustice in the United States. For example, Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy with its sympathetic depiction of a black man who escapes the Deep South before settling in Chicago was banned in Mississippi and its censorship was defended thus by the right-wing Southern Democrat Senator Theodore Bilbo:
Black Boy should be taken off the shelves of stores; sales should be stopped; it was a damnable lie; from beginning to end; it built fabulous lies about the South. The purpose of the book was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in in the minds of every American. It was the dirtiest, filthiest, most obscene [book], filthy and dirty, that came from a Negro from whom one could not expect better.[5]
In Britain, the deleterious effect of ‘obscene’ and ‘filthy’ literature on the minds of people was a similar preoccupation of a censorious establishment. Bear in mind, that at the start of the 1960s, the British Library still held a “Private Case” of 4,000 books considered so offensive that even bona fide researchers were refused access to them. In perhaps the defining case of obscenity in post-war Britain, the prosecution in 1960 of Penguin, the publisher of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, the prosecution counsel asked the jurors in his opening speech “Is it a book you would wish to have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would wish even your wife or your servants to read?”[6]
Fascist
But there was one period in this long durée, that the left permitted itself a partial derogation from free speech advocacy; this was, as Renton explains in Chapter Three, to counteract the threat of fascism either side of World War Two. As Denton explains, the left’s moral and ideological rationale from the 1920s onwards was that if fascism took power there would be the creation of a state in which all rival parties would be prohibited as duly transpired in countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and Romania. No platform in Britain meant physical resistance to Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirt movement. Their rallies would be disrupted by socialist and communist hecklers, forcing Mosley to cease speaking but also enabling his supporters to shine a spotlight on the hecklers so that they could be beaten as at the Olympia in 1934. Two years later came the iconic Battle of Cable Street when a crowd of 150,000 socialists and British Jews (alongside working-class Irish), summoned onto the streets by East End Communists, confronted Mosley, and the police, and prevented him from marching through the East End.[7]
The intellectual case for no platforming resistance to fascism was made by artists such as short story writer Thomas Burke who characterised fascism as “the regimentation of the people"; the novelist Storm Jamieson who maintained the “civilisation is incompatible with fascism” and the philosopher C.E.M. Joad who agreed that “Fascism suppresses truth”.[8] Likewise, for the anti-fascists of the 43 Group, a body of around 500 young Jewish men and women, many of whom had served in the British Army during the war and who arose to mobilise against the revived Mosleyites in 1946 and 1947, there could be no distinction between no platform and hate speech approaches (the theme of Renton’s book). For Mosley’s supporters were fascists, anti-black and anti-Jewish. Their speech was both fascist and hate speech.[9].
Quoting the historian Evan Smith, Renton in Chapter Four traces the origins of No Platform to a single source: a front-page article in Red Mole, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group, published on 18 September 1972 “No Platform for Racists.” Written by the IMG’s John Clayton, the piece began, “Up and down the country, fascist activists are organising racist agitation on a scale not seen since the 1930s.” Clayton identified the problem as the National Front and its allies, described by him as “fascist organisations” and the “extreme right.” The piece though was vague about the answer: “The pernicious activity of the extreme right must be knocked on the head.” As the decade progressed, this came to mean that, rather than physical confrontation with the far right, non-fascist organisations (unions, schools, universities) should refuse a platform to them. However there was strategic ambiguity over how to apply “no platform” In May 1974, the National Union of Students (NUS) at is spring conference passed a motion which recognised:
the need to refuse any assistance (financial or otherwise) to openly racist or fascist organisations or society[ies] … and to deny them a platform
But also found it:
necessary to prevent any member of these organisations or individuals known to espouse similar views from speaking in colleges whatever means are necessary (including disruption of the meeting).[10]
The strict anti-fascists were insistent that more moderate tactics were needed for the fight against racists with non-fascist politics: they could be heckled and embarrassed, but no further. They did not call for the likes of Enoch Powell to be banned from speaking as, no matter how abhorrently racist his “Rivers of Blood” speech was, he stood for the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and the toleration of views opposite to his own whereas the National Front sought a one-party state and the submission of the populace to a single leader. In the words of the left-wing journalist Nigel Fountain in The New Society magazine in 1969, it was “a formative fascist party”.[12]
The strategic duality of No Platform is reflected in two mass movements of the mid to late 1970s: the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) and Rock Against Racism (RAR). RAR was launched in winter 1976-1977 and over the five years of its existence, it organised more than 500 gigs and around a dozen carnivals (300 of the former alone in 1978). RAR was joined in 1977 by the ANL which at its peak had 50,000 members, sold some 750,000 badges and distributed 9m anti-fascist leaflets. Both campaigns grew in response to the sharp rise in racism following the press reporting of the arrival of Malawian refugees in Britain. RAR set out to challenge this racism’s vibe in popular music. The ANL, by contrast, had a singular campaign to stop the National Front, which in 1976-1977 seemed poised to oust the Liberals as the third main party in British politics. The central objective of the ANL was to prove that the National Front was a fascist party. The RAR was a movement of fans and musicians against all forms of racism, not merely fascism. Because the target of RAR was institutional racism rather than fascism, its publications largely abjured the phrase “no platform.” As a mass movement with tens of thousands of members, the ANL could realistically set itself the ambition of defeating the National Front in elections and preventing its speakers from being heard. The logic of no platform was to distinguish between fascists whose platform should be removed and racists who should be challenged but not prevented from speaking.[13]
The term “fascism” like its antonym “communism” is often abused by those who employ it to denigrate those who they disagree with. This statement is a shorthand summation of the central theme of David Renton’s book: that no platform is justified only by the fascist nature of the politics at which it is addressed. Renton argues that the tactic loses its legitimacy when it is applied to non-fascist speakers or groups, even they are relatively close to fascism. For the further a person is from fascism on the political spectrum, the less likely is that no platforming will be a principled or effective tactic against them.[14]
Accordingly, it is necessary for progressives to install a definitional firewall between the meanings of fascism and democratic right-wing discourse.
Thus Renton distinguishes fascism from conservatism as follows:
- Fascism seeks a counter-revolution against the existing state and the creation of a one-party state; while conservatives will tolerate a greater range of voices, and while they might on occasion restrict speech, they do not share fascism’s totalitarian ambition.
- Fascism rejects parliament and elections; conservatism upholds them.
- Fascism employs street violence against its opponents; conservatism expects the existing state to deal with its enemies in the street.[15]
That said, for many liberals and leftists the boundaries between fascism and the contemporary far right may be rather more porous. Renton explains that because the term far right is defined relationally – i.e. in contrast to centre-right – it is always, potentially, an extremely vague and amorphous term. And, he, elaborates, it has only become broader in recent years as different kinds of right-wing groups have emerged.[16] Indeed, the term “far right” itself could conceivably fall into the same linguistic category of overreach as “fascism” as critics and targets of “far right” accusations reply that they only use the label to stigmatise those who they disagree with. Hence anti-immigration protestors increasingly proclaim *No Far Right But Right.” Alt-Right and radical right are possible alternative descriptors.
That said, Renton sticks with the appellation “far right” and maps out how the political far right has been able to draw on the energy of the cultural right i.e. through a gamut of online practices ranging from trolling, the emergence of video-blogging celebrities, many with audiences of hundreds of millions and who use the iconography of the far right such as Pepe the frog memes and the retweeting of far right accounts. He also traces out the “solidarity,” cross-national nature of far-right political organising though money, speakers, and the myths of white suffering.
A key node in this network has been Tommy Robinson or Steven Yaxley-Lennon as a local expression of a pan-European and worldwide movement for free speech against Islam.[17] Tommy Robinson first emerged as the leader of the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009 a street movement comprised largely of football hooligans (“Tommy Robinson” was Yaxley-Lennon’s Luton Town hooligan moniker) and other fissiparous groups of alienated young men “radicalised” by the jeering of the returning Royal Anglian Regiment in Luton by the later-to-be-banned Islamist extremist group Al-Mujarahoun. A self-styled citizen journalist, Robinson went onto be a UK figurehead for the pan-European anti-Islam network, PEGIDA, and has been a central organising figure in the Unite the Kingdom demonstrations which have brought tens of thousands of marchers onto the streets of London. While Tommy Robinson and other far right leaders have explicitly distanced themselves from inter-war racism (Robinson has tattoos of Churchill on his arm), and style themselves as “Patriots”, his role in the online mobilisation of violent response to events in Southport in 2024 and, in the last fortnight, in Southampton and Belfast, (on top of his criminal record for violence, fraud and contempt of court) raises conundrums about No Platform that go to the heart of Renton’s book.
For although Robinson and those who he radicalises may not be fascists in a totalising ideological sense, his anti-Islam and anti-immigrant standpoints are little different from the explicit racism of the National Front of the 197Os. The Christian Nationalism which he has begun to espouse with its patriarchal views about the threat of Islam and of immigrants from “alien cultures” to “our women and children" while not a throwback to the 1930s has incipient totalitarianism to it and thus could pose a long-term threat to democracy. The explicit racial targeting that has been a feature of the riots in the UK in the last three summers negates any free speech rights which Robinson and kindred ideologues may claim.
For, ultimately, as Renton puts it, the best evidence of fascist intent is where a party or a speaker has a repeated history of using violence, where they have done this against a wide range of opponents (i.e. not just anti-fascists, their other racial/religious enemies), and where they make that threat within a structure which bears a recognisable comparison to fascism. It is at this juncture that its opponents can successfully label an opponent fascist and refuse them a platform.[18]
Should Tommy Robinson continue on this trajectory, and indeed others on the more ‘inside’ far right like Rupert Lowe MP and his Restore UK party (a breakaway from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK) who also stoked up the X storm that led to people of colour being burned out of their homes in Belfast last week, then the time will come to regard him as a fascist and no platform him and his retinue on that basis.
Likewise, across the Atlantic, while Donald Trump may not be a fascist in the inter-war European sense, a similar case can be made for no platform of the Proud Boys and the militias which have provided Trump and the MAGA movement with their muscle on the ground. For they have progressively shifted from threatening liberals, socialists, and anarchists to physically attacking anti-racists and those who were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. With their propensity for violence, their belief in the immutable subaltern status of racialised others and an organisational structure based on battalions of young males and a leadership cult they resemble the social movements which formed the wellsprings of interwar European fascist movements.[19]
To conclude, this book is a valuable source for those wishing to understand the shifting terrain of the contemporary far right and provides a strategic guidebook for activists for appropriate resistance that draws upon the history of fascist movements and the journeys of the modern far or Alt Right. Written as it was in 2021, I feel that it could do with an update to cover the transformative moments of this decade – Covid; wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the almost perpetual falls in living standards and how they feed into the mix. An update would also need to analyse the second election of Trump and the erosion of democratic standards and values in America; the electoral rise of populist nationalist right wing parties and their possible symbiosis with street level proto-fascist movements. But for now a valuable addition to anti-fascist and anti-racist literature.
For although Robinson and those who he radicalises may not be fascists in a totalising ideological sense, his anti-Islam and anti-immigrant standpoints are little different from the explicit racism of the National Front of the 197Os. The Christian Nationalism which he has begun to espouse with its patriarchal views about the threat of Islam and of immigrants from “alien cultures” to “our women and children" while not a throwback to the 1930s has incipient totalitarianism to it and thus could pose a long-term threat to democracy. The explicit racial targeting that has been a feature of the riots in the UK in the last three summers negates any free speech rights which Robinson and kindred ideologues may claim.
For, ultimately, as Renton puts it, the best evidence of fascist intent is where a party or a speaker has a repeated history of using violence, where they have done this against a wide range of opponents (i.e. not just anti-fascists, their other racial/religious enemies), and where they make that threat within a structure which bears a recognisable comparison to fascism. It is at this juncture that its opponents can successfully label an opponent fascist and refuse them a platform.[18]
Should Tommy Robinson continue on this trajectory, and indeed others on the more ‘inside’ far right like Rupert Lowe MP and his Restore UK party (a breakaway from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK) who also stoked up the X storm that led to people of colour being burned out of their homes in Belfast last week, then the time will come to regard him as a fascist and no platform him and his retinue on that basis.
Likewise, across the Atlantic, while Donald Trump may not be a fascist in the inter-war European sense, a similar case can be made for no platform of the Proud Boys and the militias which have provided Trump and the MAGA movement with their muscle on the ground. For they have progressively shifted from threatening liberals, socialists, and anarchists to physically attacking anti-racists and those who were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. With their propensity for violence, their belief in the immutable subaltern status of racialised others and an organisational structure based on battalions of young males and a leadership cult they resemble the social movements which formed the wellsprings of interwar European fascist movements.[19]
To conclude, this book is a valuable source for those wishing to understand the shifting terrain of the contemporary far right and provides a strategic guidebook for activists for appropriate resistance that draws upon the history of fascist movements and the journeys of the modern far or Alt Right. Written as it was in 2021, I feel that it could do with an update to cover the transformative moments of this decade – Covid; wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the almost perpetual falls in living standards and how they feed into the mix. An update would also need to analyse the second election of Trump and the erosion of democratic standards and values in America; the electoral rise of populist nationalist right wing parties and their possible symbiosis with street level proto-fascist movements. But for now a valuable addition to anti-fascist and anti-racist literature.
References
[1] Renton, pp.5-6
[2] P.6
[3] P.7
[4] Pp.11-12
[5] P.25
[6] P.39
[7] P.35
[8] P.36
[9] pp.38-39
[10] P.41
[1] Renton, pp.5-6
[2] P.6
[3] P.7
[4] Pp.11-12
[5] P.25
[6] P.39
[7] P.35
[8] P.36
[9] pp.38-39
[10] P.41
[11] Pp.44-45
[14] p.150
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Barry - another deep dive.
ReplyDeleteHave that book so must get around to reading it.
Routledge do an excellent series.
Renton raises plenty of nuance which you identify so well.
There is a distinction between conservative right and fascism that is often blurred on the left for the purpose of censoring anybody it disagrees with.
I find it also around some trans activism where the champions of the right to be different abandon the principle when a different idea about women's rights or science comes up.
Barry - I'll have to add that to my ever-growing list, finding the time to get around to it is not always easy, but your summary helped provide an insightful overview. Excellent, thank you.
ReplyDeleteAM - I had a discussion with someone close just a couple of hours ago regarding what in my opinion is the wrongful attempts by some leftists at censoring anybody they disagree with. I initially spoke in general terms but felt it necessary to point out certain examples to show that some on the left are not innocent in this regard. I recall you mentioning here on TPQ the position set out by AC Grayling, I think this position is always a useful reference when it comes to free speech and censorship.
Matt - Grayling laid out the best guide that I have come across. I try to follow that in the way I manage TPQ.
DeleteThe whole no-platforming and safe spacing, at times rigorously imposed on university campuses, is to my mind the antithesis of what universities should be.