The British government’s decision to revoke the leftist streamer’s visa is part of an ongoing, authoritarian crackdown against pro-Palestine speech.
On Monday, the British government revoked the travel visas of leftist streamers Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, who had planned to speak at SXSW London and at other venues around the country.
Both Piker and Uygur were told that their presence was “not conducive to the public good.” It is widely assumed that they were targeted for their vocal criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.
Britain’s Israel lobby had campaigned for this exact outcome. Last week, a group of MPs and concerned citizens called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to ban Piker in particular, claiming he is an antisemite who would pose a threat to the UK’s Jewish community still reeling from recent attacks in northwest London.
But it’s clear from the lobby’s convenient omission of Piker’s 2025 speech at the Oxford Union condemning antisemitism and the conflation of Zionism and Judaism that this travel ban has nothing to do with the safety of the Jewish community. Rather, this act of cowardly capitulation is part of the Labour government’s rapidly accelerating crackdown on expression that is critical of Israel and supportive of Palestine—an effort that is both facilitating the UK’s ongoing complicity in the genocide in Gaza and destroying the country’s own institutions from the inside out.
Last July, the same government department that canceled Piker and Uygur’s visas made the unprecedented decision to designate Palestine Action, a group known for direct actions, such as spraying red paint on factories and offices associated with Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons firm with manufacturing sites and subsidiaries throughout the UK, as a terrorist organization—placing it in the same legal category as ISIS and neo-Nazi groups like National Action and the “Maniacs Murder Cult” (a group that was proscribed at the same time as Palestine Action).
This decision was roundly condemned by human rights organizations and as a grave abuse of counterterrorism legislation. Many noted that the consequences of the ban go far beyond outlawing the group’s activities, as proscription places restrictions on everyone’s ability to express support for the organization and its actions, not only the group’s members. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned that the ban “limits the rights of many people involved with and supportive of Palestine Action who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association.” In doing so, he said, it “conflates protected expression and other conduct with acts of terrorism and so could readily lead to further chilling effect on the lawful exercise of these rights by many people.”
That future has come to pass.
In the 11 months since, more than 2,700 people—including many pensioners and faith leaders—have been arrested under anti-terrorism laws for holding signs or otherwise expressing support for the group.
In January, the UK’s High Court ruled that the proscription was unlawful, but the government immediately challenged the decision. While the appeal takes place, the law still stands; recently, around 500 supporters were arrested in London’s Parliament Square.
The impact of the government’s crackdown on Palestine Action has not been limited to mass arrests. Over the last few months, we’ve begun to witness the deeply corrosive effect of this authoritarian turn on the broader justice system.
It was recently revealed, for instance, that a High Court judge will seek to sentence four Palestine Action activists as terrorists—despite the fact that they were not charged with terrorist offenses and their arrests for a raid on an Elbit factory occurred a year prior to the proscription of the organization.
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Shockingly, the possibility that a “terror connection” could be retroactively added to the conviction was not communicated to the jury, which found the activists guilty of criminal damage last month. At the same time, strict reporting restrictions kept the developments of the case from reaching the public. According to Novara Media, this is understood to be the first time that a court will use terrorism laws to sentence individual activists taking direct action.
In another unprecedented development, a barrister defending some of the Palestine Action activists, Rajiv Menon, was referred for contempt of court proceedings as punishment for the content of his closing speech in a January trial. Menon, widely recognized as a leading human rights lawyer, allegedly broke a directive from the judge ordering him not to tell the jury that they had the right to acquit the activists on the basis of conscience.
The legal profession’s response to the prosecution has been scathing. In a statement, Garden Court Chambers (a collection of barristers, of which Menon is a member) wrote, “Not only is this the first time in English legal history that a barrister is being prosecuted for contempt in respect of a closing speech at a criminal trial, but the procedure being used to prosecute Rajiv is wholly novel and without historical precedent.” Paul Heron, a solicitor with the Public Interest Law Centre, told Declassified UK that “this case risks establishing a dangerous precedent in which the boundaries of criminal defence are narrowed precisely in cases involving protest and dissent,” and expressed fear that this could place at risk the right to a fair trial.
Menon won an initial challenge to halt the contempt proceedings, but the case against him may still continue.
There are countless other examples of the shrinking space for pro-Palestine speech and activism in British life. In December, for example, police began arresting those who chant or march with a sign that says “globalise the intifada,” deeming such an act to be a “racially aggravated public order offense.” In April, the government’s new Crime and Policing Act 2026 ushered in a host of new police powers to restrict protests near places of worship, all of which are clearly intended to curb the country’s massive pro-Palestine marches, if not offer justification for outright banning them, too.
One doesn’t need to think hard to imagine how a far-right Reform government might command a state with a weakened judicial system, highly restricted civil liberties, and substantially enhanced police and counter-terror powers.
But when it comes to Palestine, it’s difficult to see how Labour’s record of authoritarianism can be surpassed. As Green Party leader Zack Polanski said in response to Piker and Uygur’s bans, “People often talk about [the] dangerous road we’d go down under a Reform government—this is another clear warning we’re down there already.”
Evan RobinsEvan Robins is a writer and an editor at Vashti Media.