Gair Rhydd

Can you hear that? The crows and ravens carping malevolently in the wind? Listen. You hear? Just across the Bristol Channel in Bath, something wicked has been afoot. Something that, according to Ruqayyah Collector, the NUS Black Students Officer, could have caused students to study “in fear”.

What possible event could engender such dread? What could arouse this mood, so dark and doom-laden, that might cause students to wander nervously about their campus, eyes flicking intermittently toward the shadows behind the Music building?

It is that good old-fashioned charmer Nick Griffin, the oily, clay-faced wunderkind of the BNP, who had been due to give a speech at Bath University. No wonder the weather has turned bad. Don’t look at him; he’ll make you racist!

At least, these are the kind of gorgon-like powers one might credit the goblin-like Cambridge graduate with if they were to judge the man by the furore he has inspired throughout the world of Higher Education.

Somewhat predictably, the NUS and University and College Union (UCU) have been up in arms over Griffin’s scheduled appearance. Threats of protests and sharp recriminations were followed on Thursday by Bath’s Union voting against his appearance, and the University subsequently reversing their decision to allow Griffin a platform.

Freedom of speech is always much harder to defend when that freedom produces bile-suffused discourse from the mouth of a moron.

But that’s what the whole thing is about: it isn’t freedom of speech (unless the speaker holds extreme views, barely masking bigotry); it is the freedom to say exactly what you think, that most essential of privileges, and there will always be a small amount of people who think things that are, well, just stupid.

To call the initial decision to allow the BNP on campus “at best naïve and at worst dangerous”, as NUS President Gemma Tumelty has done, is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. Students are a smart bunch. We are perfectly capable of forming our own opinions based on the evidence at hand. A speech from Nick Griffin that purports to explain why the BNP is “doing so well” in elections would not have sent insidious strains of racism seething through the university corridors.

When Griffin’s presence is able to stir up more support than it ignites opposition, when his party galvanises more proponents than it does adversaries – only then should there be cause for alarm. And despite what Griffin and his deluded cohorts might think, this will never happen.

That the clamour of criticism surrounding Griffin’s appearance has been successful in preventing it from going ahead marks the second bad decision on the subject of freedom of speech made in the last few months. At the annual NUS conference on March 29, a motion was passed to adopt the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s (EUMC) definition of anti-Semitism.

Obviously, it goes without saying that anyone who is genuinely anti-Semitic, who has an engrained, instinctual hatred of Jewish people, is a contemptible simpleton. Just as anyone who aligns themselves with the BNP possesses a similar vacuity of intelligence – or, at least, decency.

The problem lies in a couple of dangerously vague sentences that make up the EUMC definition, which contend that anti-Semitism “manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”

This conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel has extremely dangerous repercussions.

Personally, I hold many reservations about Israel’s political behaviour, particularly with regard to the war in Lebanon last year. But does this make me an anti-Semite? Of course it doesn’t. To equate political opinions with racism is to be as myopic as any member of the BNP. As with the Griffin episode in Bath, the good intentions of protectionism risk critically stifling debate.

Freedom of speech means putting up with vile things that you don’t want to hear. Universities should not be condemned for allowing a platform for this odious little man; they should be applauded for being prepared to put its belief in the right to freedom of expression ahead of the potential stain on its reputation. Briefly housing a goblin does not make one a monster.

Every political viewpoint, even the ones that the enlightened majority of us find ignorant and abhorrent, should be given the chance to be heard and debated.

It is better to face such warped and repugnant political perspectives head-on than to hide them away as if we are frightened of them. Let’s not pretend the BNP doesn’t exist; let’s bring them out into the light and let them have their pathetic and prejudiced say, which they have as much of a right to as anyone else.

There is nothing to be frightened of. It is the BNP. They are a bad, loathsome joke. Let them speak their hate-filled spiel, and then cut them down with words of reason. Why dignify them with such a panic?