The absurdity of banning Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur from the UK

Every week, hundreds – sometimes thousands – of undocumented migrants arrive on Britain’s shores. Despite repeated promises to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘smash the gangs’, each government seems to be more useless than the last at putting an end to illegal immigration, which consistently ranks as the highest priority of British voters. Almost daily reports of crimes committed by those who should never have been here serve to reinforce the incompetence of the British state in carrying out this most fundamental duty of government.

Yet we have just been reminded that the British state can repel non-nationals when it puts its mind to it. Not sex offenders, nor wanted murderers, nor even those whose stated aim in coming to Britain is to kill the leader of the country’s most popular political party. No, the ‘threat’ that has stiffened the sinews and hardened the resolve of Home Office bureaucrats is the presence of two American media figures – Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur – who were scheduled to speak at the SXSW technology festival in London this week. Both Piker and Uygur have reportedly been told by the Home Office that their presence in the UK is ‘not conducive to the public good’, and have been denied visas.

Piker and Uygur are contemptible figures. Piker – who boasts a combined 11million followers across his Twitch, YouTube and other social-media platforms – has in recent years become the chic young face of Hamas apologism and Israelophobia. His videos, which receive hundreds of thousands of views, are generally spiteful diatribes against the Jewish State. He has described Hamas as ‘a thousand times better’ than Israel, and expressed indifference to the mass rape carried out by the terror group in its October 7 pogrom (‘it doesn’t change the dynamic for me’). Unsurprisingly, Piker has claimed that the supposedly omnipotent Israel lobby has orchestrated his ban from the UK.

Uygur, who happens to be Piker’s uncle, is a political activist and co-founder of The Young Turks – a left-wing YouTube channel and website. Uygur’s ban seems particularly ridiculous. While he is undoubtedly an Israelophobic bore, his views are of a piece with the general anti-Israel mania that now grips large swathes of the British left. He claims he was banned because he once said that ‘Israel controls the American government through donations to 94 per cent of Congress’ – which is the kind of bog-standard conspiracy theory you would find parroted among many British Israelophobes. He has implied that the shadow-like influence of Israel is behind the UK government’s decision to bar his entry. ‘It’s an honour to have made Israel’s enemy list’, he said following the ban.

Needless to say, the UK’s Labour government is hardly in the pocket of the Jewish State, having recognised a Palestinian state in September 2025. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is herself an outspoken supporter of Palestine and critic of Israel. The bans are instead an expression of the government’s petty authoritarianism. In the eyes of the Labour Party, there is no problem that cannot be solved with more regulation of speech, from anti-Semitism to so-called far-right disinformation, whether online or in the real world.

The same impulse was at work in April, when 11 international speakers were banned from attending the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally organised by Tommy Robinson. At the time, UK prime minister Keir Starmer pitched this visa ban in almost Churchillian terms, claiming that Robinson’s rally represented ‘a fight for the soul of this country’.

It should go without saying that these bans are both pointless and self-defeating. If the government really thinks that the presence of foreign podcasters harms the ‘public good’, then preventing them from entering the UK is nugatory – there is, after all, something called the internet. What’s more, Piker and Uygur’s ban has predictably been covered by nearly every major British newspaper and broadcaster. This has already given their views a far larger audience in the UK than they would have received had they simply been allowed to address a prohibitively pricey tech-cum-culture festival in east London.

The ban on these two bores has already backfired spectacularly.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.