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The Oxford Union is a pretty silly university debating club where a lot of puffed-up public schoolboys and girls play at politics, practising overblown rhetoric and putting on daft monkey suits.
That will stand them in good stead when, as so many of their predecessors have, they get a seat in Parliament. In my day, students who supported the Labour Party and all points left boycotted the Union as a citadel of reaction, preferring to spend our time endlessly debating the policy of "no platform" for racists or fascists.
This was the early 1980s and there was still plenty of racism on plain view in Britain - although not a great deal of fascism. Now, almost three decades on, the brazen careerists at the Union have offered a platform to convicted Holocaust denier David Irving and BNP gauleiter Nick Griffin. The current president, one Luke Tryl, has stated that, of course, he finds the views of these two abhorrent, but that he and his members believe the best way "to combat extremism is through debate".
I suspect that with his flair for self-publicising, Master Tryl will go far, but whatever his true motivation, I find myself in agreement with what he says. Freedom of speech is by no means an absolute right in democratic societies but our willingness to tolerate the views of those we disagree with is a sign of our political maturity and confidence in our pluralism.
Times change. Thirty years ago anti-Semitism was still endemic within the British Establishment, while the police were undoubtedly institutionally racist. Nowadays, strident anti-Semites are likely to be Islamic extremists, members of the very minority which itself is the butt of racist anti-immigration campaigners. Ruthlessly extirpating the repulsive Messrs Irving and Griffin from public debate is unlikely to have any impact on either of these groups, while also lending the gagged individuals a cloak of martyrdom.
It's the same with the current impasse over legislation to create a new offence of "gay hate crime". As with other hate crimes, the Government's impulse is not towards combating homophobia or racism - it's merely moral grandstanding. These policymakers seem to believe that if you make something illegal, it simply can't exist, just as those who prevent Griffin and Irving from speaking seem to think that by that act alone they can be willed out of existence. It's a childish belief and it doesn't stand up to intelligent scrutiny.
There are still racists in our society, and they still commit crimes. The same is true of homophobes. The problem is that many of them are lurking in the very institutions that are charged with enforcing hate crime legislation. The Government would do well to set its own house in order before burdening the statute book still further.
As for the Oxford Union, I wish them well with their debate, although there's a certain paradox in the idea, given that to be persuaded by fascists would entail these silly-billies' own dissolution.
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