Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s visa ban betrays Labour’s mad priorities

Britain’s porous borders have become a national scandal – and an international joke. Illegal migrants know they’ll be welcomed with open arms. Drugs and weapons flow in with ease. But there is one thing that triggers the UK government to suddenly pull up the drawbridge: foreign citizens who spout the ‘wrong’ opinions and hold the ‘wrong’ beliefs.

For while the state doesn’t bother to properly check the criminal records of the thousands of migrants flooding across the Channel, it takes a hard-line, zero-tolerance approach to those it deems ‘speechcriminals’. Enter the UK illegally while evading a criminal conviction? Enjoy your stay in Britain – the hotel is free. Post a spicy, right-wing meme on X? Your kind isn’t welcome here.

On Wednesday, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch hard-right social-media influencer, announced that she had been barred from entering the UK. She shared a screenshot of an email from the Home Office, stating that her electronic travel authorisation (ETA) had been revoked. No explanation was offered, other than that her presence in Britain would not be ‘conducive to the public good’. The email also made clear that there is no possibility of appeal.

Why? Vlaardingerbroek has no criminal convictions and poses no threat to British citizens. Which leaves us to conclude that it’s her views, not her conduct, that are deemed undesirable by the Home Office.

Now, some of those views are indeed somewhere between kooky and extreme. She has become a youthful, Instagrammable face of Europe’s identitarian right. She promotes a whole gamut of the online right’s pet issues, dabbling with vaccine scepticism and dipping her toe into the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.

What probably irks the British authorities most is her pallyness with their bête noire, Tommy Robinson. She spoke at his Unite the Kingdom march in London last September, where she called for a process of ‘remigration’ to remove even long-settled migrants from Europe. She would have been speaking at another Tommy rally in May, no doubt peddling a similar anti-migration theme, had her ETS not been blocked.

Vlaardingerbroek isn’t my cup of tea, to put it mildly. But nor do I want the Home Office to block her from entering the country. Neither I, nor anyone else in Britain, needs to be ‘protected’ from the witterings of a social-media pin-up.

Her case also reveals a staggering set of warped priorities. The same government that issued a swift ban on a social-media influencer tends to twiddle its thumbs as terrorists, rapists and other foreign criminals cross the border with impunity.

What’s more, if the point of the visa ban was to limit the spread of Vlaardingerbroek’s views then it has backfired spectacularly. It has provided the perfect excuse for her to do the podcast / alternative-media rounds, providing her a platform many magnitudes larger than would have heard her at the Tommy rally.

Starmer’s useless government can’t even do authoritarianism properly.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.