This past March, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood quoted George Orwell’s essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” during a speech on immigration and asylum.
Two months later, Mahmood’s outrageous decision to block American citizens and political commentators Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur from entering the UK, apparently on the basis of their criticisms of Israel, evokes the very authoritarians that Orwell’s most famous works decry.
Many analysts have discussed the impacts of this decision on Piker and Ugyur as individuals, highlighting the illiberal and undemocratic theft of their freedoms of movement and speech. But it also has broader implications for British citizens.
Both Piker and Uygur were scheduled to speak at the SXSW festival and the Oxford Union when Mahmood revoked their electronic travel authorisations, arguing that their presence in the UK “may not be conducive to the public good”.
This elastic phrase not only positions non-citizens Piker and Uygur outside the borders of the British “public” supposedly defended by the Home Office, but constitutes that very “public” through the expulsion of anti-Zionism. Anyone who dares to speak out against the UK government’s material and diplomatic support for Israel is cast as a threat to, rather than a member of, that “public”.
