No-platforming and questions of free speech at King’s from the 1980s to the present

Seamus Branch is graduated from a BA in Culture, Media and Creative Industries

In 1980 Rhodes Boyson, Conservative M.P. for Brent North, who in 1988 voted against applying sanctions to the South African Apartheid regime and was a member of the Monday Club, a conservative faction who opposed British decolonisation in Africa from the early 1960s, was prevented from speaking at King’s by 100 socialist activists from the more progressive London School of Economics, igniting a debate about free speech.¹ In 1974 the NUS had voted ‘in favour of stopping any representative of any “fascist” or “racist” organisations by whatever means necessary’.² While many faculty sympathised with the effort to deny a platform to racist speakers at the university, others viewed it as an attempt to censor conservative voices. Christopher Monro, a KCL porter, pointed out in a letter responding to faculty support of the NUS decision that whole non-violent members of the conservative party and National Front had been interrupted, IRA sympathisers had been allowed to speak on campus without interruption: ‘did any of the students and their contemporaries who tried to suppress the National Front procession on 15th June lift a finger or a whisper to against the militant fenian one of the 9th?’.³ This conflation of freedom fighters with English far right movements like the National Front, a pro-apartheid and anti-immigration evolution of the League of Empire Loyalists was the intellectual basis of many arguments opposing the NUS’s stance. An open letter from Engineering faculty members would write in the same publication after setting Che Guevara in contrast with the National Front: ‘Until the NUS gives assurances by its actions that it is prepared to be fair-minded in its approach to these problems then we can only regard it as a political and doctrinaire forum rather than an academic association, whose outlook on this matter, in its sanctimonious hypocrisy, is merely contemptible’.⁴ While the NUS policy generated national controversy, King’s students seemed to avoid using this strategy, as the Conservative association would write: ‘Thank God for King’s bastion of sanity and moderation in these matters. Perhaps one member of the Labour Club who was present and who recently stood in an election at a UGM meeting on a no platform ticket might be moved to rethink her views on the fundamental rights of free speech, on which the quality of our life depends’.⁵

This debate on whether an institution lends credibility to harmful ideology by hosting speakers who espouse hate and racism continues today. After Boris Johnson said of Barack Obama’s removal of a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, ‘Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire - of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender’, he was ‘no platformed’ by King’s students who had earlier invited him to speak at the University.⁶

While it is not the intention here to advocate for or against no platforming or boycotting as a form of activism, this project as a whole should and can interrogate the ways in which King’s has lent academic credibility to Empire and imperial ideologies. Guests speaking behind a lectern with the King’s crest on it are afforded a certain degree of legitimacy and respect, and while they may not speak on the University’s behalf, their reach and credibility is certainly extended by it. Similarly, as long as the University continues to fund itself through private sector investments, the moral, ethical, and political implications of these investments will be the subject of protest, and perhaps still ambivalence, between King’s students and faculty and the institution itself.

Sources

Aftab Ali, ‘Boris Johnson “no platformed” by King’s College London students over Barack Obama comments’, The Independent, (29 April, 2016).

David Fletcher, ‘LSE Group Halt Boyson Speech’, Daily Telegraph, (29 Feb, 1980), 2.

King’s College London Archives, Publicity Collection, K/PUB63, LSE Stifles Boyson Come To The UGM Today, n.d.

King’s College London Archives, Eric Mottram papers, K/PP106/7/678, Viewpoint n.d.

King’s College London Archives, Serials and Periodicals, K/SER1/84, Society News. n.d.