Dear Mr Huppert

I was dismayed to read in Friday's newspapers of Conservative Home
Secretary Theresa May's decision to ban the so-called "English Defence
League" from marching in London this coming month.

Last month in Cambridge we did it right: we allowed the EDL to come
and march and to air its vile principles, and whilst some of us (me
included) counter-marched, others in greater numbers simply ignored
the EDL.

Banning political speech, no matter if it is from a fringe group, is
not the way to preserve a peaceful, democratic society.  Banning a
group's speech only gives that group an outlaw status and pushes its
rhetoric into the shadows where it is less easily confronted and
defeated by reasoned argument.

What kind of state will Britain be?  A free one, or a dictatorship of
the unquestioned and unchallenged majority?  Today Mrs May is banning
the EDL; whom will she ban tomorrow, and whose speech will the Home
Secretaries of the next ten, twenty, thirty years be banning?

Kind regards
Matthew BELMONTE