By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
Oxford : Non-white students were urged to boycott Oxford University and up to 1,000 protesters kept a noisy vigil after the university’s debating society invited two far-right speakers — a racist and a holocaust denier — to talk about free speech Monday night.
A group of 30 protesters broke into the debating venue — the Oxford Union debating society — and held up the event for nearly two hours before they were removed, allowing British Nationalist Party chief Nick Griffin and pro-Nazi historian David Irving to speak to an audience of around 400 that had turned up to hear them talk about “the limits of free speech”.
The protesters, who turned up in 10 coaches from nearby towns and cities, sparked a security nightmare but police did not throw a ring around the venue and allowed students and anti-racist activists to climb over the wall.
Both men are controversial for their views — Griffin was convicted of incitement to racial hatred in 1998 and Irving spent a year in an Australian jail last year after being sentenced for denying the Nazi holocaust. Holocaust-denial is a crime in Australia.
The decision by the 184-year-old Oxford Union, which calls itself the world’s most famous debating union, to invite Griffin and Irving has already led one senior Tory MP, shadow defence minister Julian Lewis, to resign his life membership and several leading politicians to cancel their speaking engagements there.
The event — described as a “night of discussion on the limits of free speech” — descended into chaos when protesters from cities such as Birmingham arrived to register their anger and besieged the Oxford Union building. They draped anti-racist and trade union banners all over its walls and blockaded the building.
“There are a lot of people who are very angry and upset about what is going on,” said Martin McClusky, president of the Oxford University students union. “It is not just an Oxford issue, this will have ramifications for other places where the BNP are active… this is going to give legitimacy and credibility to their views.”
But Oxford Union president Luke Tryl defended his decision, saying although he personally found Griffin’s and Irving’s views “disgusting and repugnant”, they needed to be “defeat in debate”.
He said the two men had “portrayed themselves as free speech martyrs” over the past few years.
Meanwhile, a London-based race equality activist said her organisation would discourage ethnic minority students from applying at Oxford.
“The counter signal today with this debate is that white Oxford does not genuinely care for black students or race equality — more important is the publicity to maintain the Oxford Union elitist label — the quirky English eccentricity only allowed to upper class twits and Hooray Henrys,” said Karen Chouhan, Chair of the Black Londoners Forum and Chief Executive Officer of Equanomics UK, a non-government body which seeks to promote equality via economic justice.
“Equanomics UK will not be encouraging black students to study there if they will face this level of ignorance, disregard, and disrespect,” she added.
“Would the Oxford Union be allowed to invite (Al-Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden? Or Hitler, if he was alive? There are clearly limits and what determines those limits is the racialised judgement of an elite, predominantly white establishment that is struggling to attract black students.”
Two years ago, Oxford University, complaining of “chronic underfunding”, announced plans to slash the number of British students in favour of those from overseas, who are charged up to 10 times the tuition fees that British undergraduate students pay each year.
In 2004, Griffin had told a local paper, the Oxford Mail, that if his party ever came to power foreign students would not be welcome at Oxford.
“We’ve found bright youngsters in Middlesbrough or Gateshead who are capable of going to university, and we look forward to seeing them go through Oxford rather than swathes of kids from Taiwan — that’s for the Taiwanese government,” he was quoted as saying.