The protest beats the speaker

In November 1968, Bath University Conservative Association (BUCA) invited Enoch Powell to speak to Bath University students at the Claverton Community Hall. This was just a few months after Powell made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Though the topic of the talk was the seemingly non-controversial Fulton Report - a very long report about the outdatedness of the Civil Service and recommendations for reforms - it was evidently a very politically-charged decision to invite Powell to speak about it, rather than any of the other less-controversial committee members.

The event led to much uproar on both sides, with the Conservative Union strongly defending Powell’s right to free speech while the Students’ Union towed the awkward line between endorsing freedom of speech as well as freedom to protest. This feeds into a commonly misunderstood part of free speech debates - free speech and the right to be heard are very different things.

The practice of ‘no platforming’ is commonly misconstrued as denying freedom of speech, when in fact it is merely preventing an individual from speaking from that particular platform. Such individuals often have significant platforms elsewhere and have no trouble making their views heard, regardless of whether a certain university gives them a platform to speak or not.

There are similarities between the protests held against the Powell event and ones held in October 2023 against BUCA’s invitation to Jacob Rees-Mogg to speak about conservatism. Mogg was the MP for North East Somerset at the time so had slightly more relevance to the University than Powell, however, he was still a highly controversial figure, and his invitation could be seen as provocative. The Bath University Left Union (BULU), along with numerous other student societies, organised a demonstration against BUCA’s event as well as a simultaneous alternative event called ‘MoggOFF’, which won the SU award for Best Collaboration in 2024.

With both these events, the protests against them caused more noise than the talks themselves. In the case of Powell, after a staged walk-out, other non-protesting students left the event “because he was so boring” - the subject of Civil Service reforms not quite living up to the expectations of Powell’s previous talks.