This week the British government banned Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, two leftwing US commentators with millions of followers, from entering the country on the grounds that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good”. It did not spell out what it meant by this very broad phrase but Piker and Uygur have accused the government of denying them entry because of their prolific criticism of Israel. Some critics have accused the pair of antisemitism, which they deny.

A lot has been written about the Piker-Uygur ban, and I don’t think I need to litigate everything they have ever uttered here. They have undeniably said some objectionable things (Piker, for example, said some Orthodox Jews are “inbred”, which he later apologized for.) What sort of speech crosses a line that makes you detrimental to the public good, is not clear, however. Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, for example, has said that “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage”. While he later apologized for this, he has repeatedly characterized Arabs as barbarians who “value murder”. The British government has never banned him from speaking in the UK.

The Piker-Uygur ban is ... about what Britain, and the US and Israel, wants us to believe is ‘good’

Neither Piker nor Uygur have said anything that is more divisive or dangerous than former Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s declaration that all Palestinians were responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October. A UN commission of inquiry found that Herzog incited the commission of genocide with this statement and said that his later modifications of that utterance were an effort “to deflect responsibility for the initial statement”. Still, the British seem fine with that first statement: Herzog met with Keir Starmer in London in 2025. Clearly that meeting was deemed to be conducive to the public good.

But, again, I don’t want to pronounce on each of Piker or Uygur’s statements here. I don’t want to fall into the trap of making this a story about two American commentators or the limits of free speech. Because at its heart, the Piker-Uygur ban is about a far more........

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