Banning conservatives while glad-handing extremists is two-tier Britain on steroids - Matt Goodwin

Just look at the glaring double standard that is on display here and then try to tell me we do not live in a two-tier regime.

The very same British state that has rushed to ban a conservative influencer refuses to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, refuses to proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and refuses to stop countless, unvetted ISIS sympathisers, extremists, terrorists and other criminals entering the country illegally on the small boats.

Britain now operates some of the weakest borders in the developed world. We tolerate illegal entry on an industrial scale. We allow foreign extremists to exploit asylum systems designed for genuine refugees.

We turn a blind eye to radical networks, criminal gangs, Islamists, and others in our prisons and on our streets because confronting them would be “politically difficult”.

But a conservative influencer with a large following? A woman who dares to speak about mass migration, crime, and national decline? She’s a threat to society.

Utterly ridiculous.

This is the very definition of a two-tier regime — one rule for those who challenge the failing consensus among Western elites, such as Keir Starmer, and another rule for everybody else who backs them.

Eva herself put it plainly: “I’ve been banned from travelling to the UK. They revoked my ETA. My presence is not considered conducive to the public good.”

Not conducive to the public good? For what? Speaking at conservative conferences? Criticising Keir Starmer in her videos? Speaking at a Tommy Robinson rally in London? Opposing mass immigration? Calling for remigration? Being friends with Elon Musk?

You do not have to agree with Eva’s views to think that in a free and democratic society, she should have the right to share them. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that a certain Keir Starmer was urging the British people to elect as prime minister a man who described the Islamist terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”.

What we are witnessing is not about national security. It is not about public safety. It is not about “extremism”.

It is about control.

It is about what I pointed to in a television debate this week —“authoritarian progressivism”—an instinctive impulse that runs through Keir Starmer, the Labour government, and even the British state to shut down and sideline any views that happen to challenge their failing policies.

They cannot inspire the people, so they try to control the people. They cannot win the arguments so they try to shut them down.

And this is not an isolated case.

As I have written before, it is part of a much wider pattern — one that should deeply worry anyone who still thinks Britain is a free country that values individual liberty.

In recent weeks and months, we learned that computer games now warn British children that feeling concerned about mass immigration is “far-right”.

We discovered Home Office guidance that quietly blurs the line between terrorism and “counter-cultural” views, viewing conservatives as being somehow equivalent to terrorists.

We watched police turn up at people’s doors for tweets, retweets, jokes, opinions, and even throwing people in jail because they happened to share strident remarks about immigration and broken borders on social media.

The message from the British state is becoming unmistakable: challenge the consensus and expect consequences.

This is why this latest case really matters.

It is about whether ordinary citizens are still allowed to question policies that are clearly failing — on immigration, on crime, on social cohesion — without being smeared, surveilled, or silenced.

Eva is not British. But that’s almost beside the point. Because if the state can arbitrarily decide that a peaceful speaker is “not conducive to the public good,” with no explanation and no appeal, then nobody is safe from that logic.

Today, it is a Dutch activist who has called for an end to mass immigration. A few months ago, it was French intellectual Renaud Camus who was banned from entering the country because he had dared to suggest the peoples of Western nations are being “replaced”. A few years before that, it was Dutch politician Geert Wilders who suggested Western nations are at risk of “Islamification”.

Tomorrow, it could be me. It could be you. It could be any one of us who happens to share views that collide with the groupthink that is being forced upon us by a remote and self-serving ruling class.

As Eva herself said, with bitter irony: “I’m a 29-year-old lawyer with no criminal record. But I have an opinion, and apparently that’s my crime.”

Exactly.

This is the same Britain where ministers lecture us endlessly about democracy, tolerance, human rights, and free speech.

The same Britain that claims moral authority on the world stage. The same Britain where politicians were “outraged” by President Trump and

Vice-President Vance suggesting that Britain and Europe might have a very big problem with free speech. And the same Britain that now seems incapable of distinguishing between actual threats and ideological dissent.

Britain has not become authoritarian overnight. But it is drifting — steadily, quietly — towards something far colder and more illiberal than most people realise.

And cases like Eva’s matter precisely because they expose the truth. And the truth is now inescapable.

Britain, once the home of individual liberty and free speech, is no longer a country that is confident enough to debate ideas. It is a country that is increasingly afraid of them.

This article first appeared on Matt Godwin’s Substack