It must have seemed the easiest offer in the world to refuse. Would students at Bangor University enjoy a question-and-answer session with Sarah Pochin – the Reform UK MP famous for saying it “drives me mad” to see TV adverts full of black people – and Jack Anderton, the 25-year-old influencer who helped send Nigel Farage’s TikTok account viral among teenagers? No, the university’s debating society decided, it would not.

And had it filed the request in the bin, you wouldn’t be reading this. Until now, Anderton’s A New Dawn campus tour – a homage to the “debate me bro” style of the American rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, killed last year, who was famed for inviting liberal students to take on his arguments and live-streaming the results – hadn’t exactly set the heather alight. Reform is actively pushing to recruit inside universities, but in Cambridge, according to its student newspaper Varsity, only about 30 people turned up to hear Anderton argue that migrants are taking the part-time jobs students once used to do.
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So imagine how he must have felt when Bangor debating and politics society responded that “in line with our values” it was declining his offer, expressing “zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia or homophobia”.

Finally, a proper no-platforming! (Though strictly speaking, he and Pochin were never actually given a platform of which to be stripped.) That’s worth more in terms of reach than trekking to Bangor on a wet February night to face a half-empty room. GB News and the Daily Telegraph weighed in. Reform’s Zia Yusuf thundered on X that Bangor got £30m from taxpayers and he was “sure they won’t mind losing every penny of (their) state funding under a Reform government”. And that’s where it suddenly got serious.

Threatening to put universities out of business – with all that would mean for students halfway through their degrees, or towns reliant on a major employer – if they don’t fawningly accommodate any regime-backed political nonentity who asks is the stuff of autocracy, not democracy. And the lesson from Donald Trump’s America, where pro-free speech Republicans have proved remarkably intolerant of people speaking against them, is that the pressure rarely stops there.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/13/reform-power-bangor-university-debating-society-authoritarian