When fear shouts louder than freedom, who actually gets to speak in Britain?

In turn, it is the rights of those seeking to prevent free speech and debate which are prioritised at the expense of those committed to open discussion and mutual respect.

At King’s College London last week, Jürgen Hardt, the foreign policy spokesman for the CDU-CSU (Germany’s governing political party), was disrupted from speaking at an event on German foreign policy.

Protesters demanded to know whether he ‘stood with the people of Palestine’ whilst chanting the genocidal slogan of ‘From the River to the Sea’.

Over the weekend, police had to intervene to prevent protesters from demonstrating outside a synagogue. A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable, but failure to act has emboldened agitators.

Almost simultaneously, there are people defending the actions of those who are alleged to have assaulted a police officer with a sledgehammer after breaking into a UK factory belonging to an Israeli company, in the name of Palestine Action - a proscribed organisation. We must be prepared to call out when protest becomes a tool for intimidation, or worse still, violence.

What we are witnessing is a wave of politicians, academics, and industry experts being prevented from speaking freely, unless they disassociate wholly from the state of Israel and condemn it unequivocally.

This binary highlights our inability to process and discuss complex ideas with nuance and debate, whilst also demonstrating how poorly free speech is being safeguarded in the UK in 2025.

This issue has become particularly pronounced on our university campuses. Although our universities remain the envy of the world, they have largely fallen short of their promise as true marketplaces of ideas.

As far back as the mid-2010s, agitators sought to use their right to protest as an opportunity to quash rather than engage productively in challenging conversations on Israel. In one incident, 'violent' anti-Israel protests left Jewish students barricaded in lecture theatres.

At another event organised by the Pinsker Centre, students were met with chants of ‘shame’ as they sought to engage in critical, nuanced discussions with a former Israeli cabinet minister.

The alarm was sounded at the time, and on many occasions since, but a decade of meandering over policy proposals and failure to grasp the nettle has led us to this point.

Protest tactics have only become more brazen, infringing on the rights of many ordinary people. Scenes of suffering in Gaza and in the Middle East more generally have understandably captured emotions, but this cannot be used to justify the countless examples of masked protesters attempting to intimidate people into silence here in the UK.

What is perhaps most frightening is how widespread and how quickly deployed these protest tactics have become. No longer are they reserved for Israelis who are - god forbid! - invited to speak on university campuses. Now they are applied to those who are not critical enough of Israel.

James Cleverly, admittedly a friend of Israel’s, but one who is no stranger to criticising decisions made by the Israeli government, was recently accosted at KCL.

When he asked protestors to remove their masks so they could engage in a meaningful conversation about their concerns, protestors shouted into a microphone, asking how he sleeps at night, and whether his career is more important than Palestinian children.

Luke Charters, a Labour MP who passionately supported his party’s decision to recognise a Palestinian State, claims pro-Palestinian demonstrators threw a can of baked beans at his head.

Simply put, the mob cannot be satisfied. There is no reasoning.

These examples illustrate the grave danger we face. This is not a call to end free speech - instead, it’s the opposite. It’s a call for everyone’s speech to be protected, not just that of protestors who seek to silence the views of others.

When centrist European leaders cannot speak on our foremost university campuses, when Jewish people cannot attend communal events at a synagogue without fear of protest, when police officers suffer life-changing injuries allegedly at the hands of ‘protesters’, we must recognise the failure of our approach.

If we continue down this path, we risk creating a society where intimidation overrides ideas and where fear, not freedom, determines who is heard.

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Ben Freeman is the Executive Director of the Pinsker Centre, a think tank focused on international relations and Middle Eastern affairs.

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