Marine Le Pen is awful but she should still be allowed to speak

Marine Le Pen is a hateful, islamophobic fascist. She should still be allowed to speak at the Union.

Apparently, we the students of Oxford have spoken, and apparently, we support the protests against Le Pen appearing at the Union tonight.

OUSU may have rejected an amendment to make ‘no-platforming facists’ an official policy, but their letter to the Union demands that standing committee ‘refrain from inviting such speakers in future’ – No Platform couched in polite wording, with a bit of wriggle room.

It’s this kind of silencing of debate and this desire to remain aggressively a-political that led to the inflammatory Brendan O’Neill labeling us “Stepford Students”.

It’s this kind of no-platforming that led to his self-indulgent rant, painting us a free-speech-hating, ban-happy, 1984-esque drones. It’s also this kind of no-platforming that meant that trolling article has been shared 43,500 times.

The debate he would have taken part in was inherently flawed: it was, in the words of WomCam, two cisgender men debating about what people with uteruses should do with their bodies. Instead of cancelling it, the members of 300 strong ‘What the fuck is ‘Abortion  Culture’ group should have attended and demonstrated the gaping flaws in their anti-choice rhetoric.

Protesters outside the Union this evening

Annie Teriba (pictured) and James Eliot proposed the motion and the letter

By silencing something, you legitimise it. Le Pen’s popularity has soared since the Charlie Hebdo massacre. She can use the attack on freedom of speech as a justification for her anti-Islamic agenda. Right-wing extremists thrive when they can claim they are being oppressed.

The letter to the Union claims that views of Le Pen and her kind are ‘so dangerous’ and ‘so troubling’ that she cannot be given a platform. But what is really dangerous and troubling is ignoring her.

Le Pen is hardly an isolated voice, shouting hate speech from a soapbox at Speaker’s Corner or writing jingoist comments on Daily Mail articles. Her party just won the first round of a byelection. A recent poll named her as front-runner for the 2017 election, triumphing over rivals Hollande and Sarkozy. Her, and her abhorrent views, could be running the second largest economy in Europe. We can’t put up picket fences and hope she runs away. We have to listen, engage and argue her down.

Even without the platform of the Oxford Union, she still has the world stage.