In June this year, the Home Office banned Hasan Piker from coming to speak in the UK because, they said, it ‘may not be conducive to the public good.’

I noted it as another nail in the coffin of British freedom and democracy but I didn’t know who Piker was, and my mind was awash with so many unacceptable actions we’ve seen from the government in recent years, so I forgot about it.

This week, poking around for interesting news stories, I saw that Double Down News had published an interview with Hasan Piker. I went on scrolling for interesting news stories while the back of my mind went digging in the files. Ten minutes later, I was back on Double Down News, because I’d remembered Piker had been banned and therefore, I thought (as most of the people I know would be likely to think), that guy probably has something interesting to say.

The interview was a whole hour long. That’s a long time for me to sit in front of a screen looking at talking heads, and I nearly dropped out a couple of times, but one thing kept me listening for the whole hour – I was fascinated by trying to work out why exactly the Home Office were so scared of this man (who seemed to me a fairly typical lefty political commentator).

That, in short, is precisely the effect of attempts to suppress freedom of speech and association. I wonder, eternally, why governments (and schools, and parents) never seem to learn that.

Anyway…

Double Down News interview with Hasan Piker

This was a discussion about the US mid-term elections, recorded before the results came out. It’s famously difficult to translate political conversations from the US to the UK or vice versa – it’s one of those topics where we still suffer from what (probably) Oscar Wilde called being two nations divided by a common language. So here are some of the things that Piker’s discussion clarified for me…

Tucker Carlson, for example. We always used to have that expression PEOPs for people who are ‘progressive except on Palestine’ but lately, we have quite a few people — Piers Morgan in the UK, for example, who are far right or populist right except on Palestine but I found Carlson hard to read until listening to Piker talking about the US’s ‘anti-war conservatives’.

Are there any lefties in US government? Piker thought AOC is the nearest they have, although, he said, she’s nervous when talking about Palestine — not surprising I suppose, given the stance of most of her colleagues but she has to get to grips with that, to match the mood of the people.

At one point, they were talking about clown-show fascism. I had a pretty good idea what they meant, but here’s a definition from The New Republic: ‘Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity.’

Piker pointed out that people tend to forget that fascists are, almost without exception, weak individuals who fear they’re losing control – that’s the whole point. The more they mess up, the more they feel the public are out of patience with them, the more authoritarian they become – well, that’s one thing that might explain the Home Office banning him. I have a feeling that, after the Starmer debacle, and the desperate scramble to bung Andy Burnham into the talentless gap at no 10, the UK government would really prefer that we didn’t talk about politics at all.

Piker discussed how so many people, disgusted by what they saw happen to Gaza, started a major shift of political awareness, how understanding what Israel is can lead to understanding the significance of socialism v capitalism. One of the things that generally makes UK and US political commentary confusing is that, to a large extent, the US ‘does not have a left’ – the word socialism gets an extremely negative reaction – or used to. Piker now has a massive following, and is important enough to get a regular flow of death threats and sabotage attempts. ‘Yes, I get scared but that’s not a reason not to do something.’ – That’s a sentiment familiar to political activists, and one that seriously frightens politicians. Hence the bizarre battle in the UK over talking about, or holding up signs about, Palestine Action.

Just what is our government scared of? This morning, social media is sharing the story of the disabled ‘terrorist’ the police took into custody on a public bus, leading everyone to note that they didn’t consider it necessary to remove the passengers from the bus first, and say ‘well, do you think he’s dangerous or not?’ Clearly not dangerous enough that they need to keep him away from the public. So why seek to put those people in prison? I think the UK government has done enough now to prove that what the Home Office should have said about Hasan Piker was that allowing him to speak at events in the UK ‘may not be conducive to this government’s good’ — because we’re going to start realising that ‘clown fascism’ is fascism. And it doesn’t even make the trains run on time. It must not be tolerated.

Here’s a link to the Double Down News interview…

… oh, and I see the government banned a couple more people from speaking in the UK now. Let’s give thanks for their help, flagging up interesting speakers, and look out for them on Double Down News.

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