Our Answer to 'No Platforming'

by Les May

LAST evening I went to hear Labour MP Chris Williamson speak.  He’s not my favourite speaker.   He speaks too fast and too loudly, almost shouting.  It’s from the heart and sometimes the head gets left behind.  No one has told him that when things get contentious, lower your voice and raise your argument.  When someone chided him for something he had said it was done courteously and quietly.  He called it a ‘Democracy Roadshow’.   His theme was that you cannot build a democratic society without democratising the Labour party.

But there’s two ways of thinking about ‘democracy’. You can have a hierarchy of committees or you can organise it yourself. The ‘hierarchy of committees’ approach had led to Williamson being ‘no platformed’.  At the event in Manchester to mark the 200^th anniversary of when cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000–80,000 who had gathered on St Peter’s Field to demand the reform of parliamentary representation, financial support was withdrawn by a section of the wider Labour movement simply because he had been invited to speak at the event.

Last night’s event was the other kind of democracy.  A group of people had organised for him to give the talk and circulated anyone who might be interested.   Thirty people turned up and when he had finished his talk, gave him a standing ovation.  Not all of these people were Labour voters, they were people who wanted to hear what he had to say and who were unafraid to have their preconceived notions challenged.

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