Two images from Europe this week are worth holding in mind simultaneously. In London, tens of thousands of people joined a far-right rally in the city centre — one of the largest such mobilisations Britain has seen in decades. In Basel, Switzerland, thousands of protesters gathered at the Eurovision Song Contest final as five participating countries boycotted the event over Israel’s inclusion, while German police assaulted protesters at a Nakba anniversary rally. In Britain, meanwhile, the government announced it had banned eleven “far-right agitators” from entering the UK ahead of the London rally. Free expression is under pressure from multiple directions at once — and the standard partisan responses to each instance of that pressure are collapsing under the weight of their own inconsistency.
The received wisdom
The liberal-left consensus on the London march is that it represents a dangerous normalisation of far-right politics that the state has an obligation to contain. Banning entry to foreign agitators is, in this framing, not censorship but sensible border management: preventing outside provocateurs from exploiting domestic tensions. The marchers’ ostensible concerns — immigration, cultural change, crime — are, in this reading, not legitimate political grievances but vehicles for ethnic resentment that have no place in a pluralist democracy. Platforming them is dangerous; the state’s job is to limit their reach.
On the Eurovision boycotts and the protests in Basel and Berlin, the same liberal consensus tends toward sympathy: these are legitimate expressions of solidarity with Palestinian civilians in a conflict where civilian casualties have been staggering. European state broadcasters that choose not to participate in a competition that includes Israel are making a principled stand. Police suppressing Nakba memorials in Germany are engaged in a form of political censorship that should be condemned.
The internal tension should be obvious. Both positions cannot be simultaneously principled without a universal standard that applies regardless of which political side is doing the speaking or the suppressing. The mainstream liberal commentariat applies one framework to speech it dislikes (the far-right march: dangerous, suppressible) and a different framework to speech it approves of (Palestinian solidarity protests: legitimate, deserving police restraint). This is not a principled free-speech position. It is political preference dressed up as principle.
A different read
The right-of-centre position on free expression has historically been more consistent here, even if it is not always applied consistently either. The classical liberal tradition — Burke to Hayek, from the First Amendment’s American expression to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle — holds that political speech, including speech that makes liberal elites deeply uncomfortable, deserves the maximum protection available under law. The test of commitment to that principle is whether you defend the speech you despise. On that test, it is worth noting that conservatives in Britain and America have generally been more willing to defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters than progressives have been to defend the speech rights of immigration restrictionists.
The London march raises a genuine public order question, not a speech question. Large assemblies of people, some of whom have histories of violence, do present legitimate policing challenges. But the specific mechanism deployed — banning foreign nationals from entering the country to participate in a political rally — deserves scrutiny. Britain has used immigration powers to exclude foreign speakers before, including in both directions: right-wing firebrands have been excluded, but so have controversial Muslim clerics. The legal basis for exclusion is vague enough to be susceptible to political manipulation, and the consistency of its application is notoriously difficult to audit.
More fundamentally, the scale of the London march — tens of thousands of British citizens, not foreign agitators — reflects a genuine political constituency that has been building for years and that mainstream parties have consistently failed to address. Immigration concern is not, by definition, racism. A country that has received over a million net migrants annually for several years running, that has watched housing costs make homeownership inaccessible to young working-class people, and that has seen wage growth in low-skilled sectors suppressed by labour supply expansion has a real political question to answer about the pace and management of demographic change. When established parties refuse to engage that question honestly — the Conservative Party spent fourteen years promising lower immigration while delivering the opposite — the space fills with less scrupulous politicians.
The Eurovision dynamic is a useful mirror. The same European political class that wants to exclude far-right marchers’ concerns from respectable discourse has produced a broadcasting consortium that excluded Russia for political reasons (Ukraine war) while including Israel (Gaza war) and then faced boycotts for the inconsistency. The inconsistency did not come from nowhere: it came from applying geopolitical values selectively, based on alliance politics rather than principle. That kind of selective application of rules is precisely what populist movements feed on, because it is visibly unjust even when the underlying values are defensible.
What to watch
Whether the government publishes criteria for the foreign agitator ban will test whether the policy has rule-of-law foundations or is simply discretionary executive action. Silence from the Home Office on the legal basis would be significant.
Watch the by-election dynamics in working-class northern English constituencies — Makerfield is one — where Labour’s loss of ground to Reform UK reflects precisely the demographic grievances the London march was articulating, channelled through the ballot box rather than the street.
The five Eurovision boycott countries’ identities matter: if they include NATO member states facing their own domestic political pressures over Gaza, it signals a fracture in the Western coalition’s cultural solidarity that has strategic implications beyond the song contest.
— J