Don’t turn Renaud Camus into a martyr

So it seems the UK can control its borders when it chooses to, after all. This week, the Home Office banned French author Renaud Camus from entering Britain. He was due to appear as a headline speaker at a conference organised by the hard-right Homeland Party in the East Midlands next week.

Although the Home Office has not specified any exact reasons for the ban, beyond Camus’s ‘presence in the UK’ supposedly not being ‘conducive to the public good’, it is obvious that he is being targeted for his hardline anti-migrant beliefs. You do not have to agree with any of those beliefs to be troubled by the Home Office ban, and the low view it betrays of the British public.

Camus (no relation to the legendary absurdist philosopher, Albert) came to prominence in France in the 1980s for his hyper-explicit, semi-autobiographical gay erotica. However, he is best known internationally for popularising the phrase ‘the great replacement’ in hard-right and far-right circles. This is the contention that a liberal elite is deliberately ‘replacing’ white, indigenous Europeans with non-white, mostly Muslim migrants. He writes of a ‘genocide by substitution’ of white Europeans, organised by a ‘genocidal bloc’ of political parties and interests. He accuses migrants from the Middle East and North Africa of staging a ‘colonial and genocidal occupation’ of the West.

To suggest Camus merely ‘criticises mass immigration’, or is simply ‘alarmed by immigration’, as some UK outlets have euphemistically suggested, is to severely undersell just how inflammatory, hysterical and obnoxious his arguments are. That said, his reactionary and conspiratorial thinking is perhaps less dangerous by dint of the impenetrable philosophical word salad through which it is expressed. Take this typical Renaud Camus turn of phrase, bemoaning an ‘egalitarian anti-sexist anti-racism in the service of Davocratic global replacism and the Machination’. No, me neither…

Still, if the Home Office had hoped that banning Camus from the UK would shut him up and keep his ideas from our shores, then this has already backfired. In the space of 24 hours, Camus has gone from well-deserved obscurity in the UK to having his name splashed across national newspapers and appearing in TV interviews. Plus, the organisers of the conference he was due to speak at say he will appear via videolink anyway should his appeal against the ban be unsuccessful. The only tangible effect of the ban, so far, has been to turn him into a martyr for the hard right.

Far preferable would have been to simply let Camus speak to that select audience of malcontents, as he had originally planned to do. For the UK government to fear that his views would find a wider purchase with the British public is to severely sell the public short. Many Britons are indeed worried about mass and illegal migration, but are surely observant enough to recognise that they are not actually victims of a ‘genocide’ or living under a kind of reverse ‘colonisation’. Nor would they imagine our useless leaders to be capable of pulling off such a complex and nefarious conspiracy when they can barely organise our bin collections.

Whatever the Home Office might think, we do not need to be protected from Camus’s crankish witterings.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.