Shabana Mahmood continues to ban foreigners from travelling to Britain to speak on political issues. Or indeed give musical performances…
Last night Mahmood revoked travel authorisations for leftist podcasters Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker, both of whom were booked to speak at the SXSW London conference on Thursday. They have allegedly been banned for their pro-Palestine views and Uygur’s dismissal of reporting on rape gangs as “Islamophobic”…
Guido is running a rolling tracker of prominent figures banned for speech reasons:
Free speech? I hardly knew ‘er…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”