I have a confession to make. I was one of the several hundred or so people who popped along to listen to Katie Hopkins this week. Am I a fan? Not particularly, but I can admit that some things she says resonate with me, whilst others make me physically cringe at their crassness. She is – as is clearly her brand – Marmite, and that’s unashamedly her schtick.
I went because of the reaction to the premise that the show was even allowed to go on.
The furore that surrounded Katie’s show took me by surprise. I hadn’t even registered that Miss Hopkins was gracing our island until the now notorious complaints emerged. Those complaints had the opposite effect of what one might have expected. Far from shutting the event down, it amplified it; selling not one, but two shows and guaranteeing a level of attention it would never have otherwise achieved.
That struck me as more interesting than the show itself. After all, it was, as billed, a couple of hours of laughter and not a political rally.
As the offspring of a libertarian and a woman in her mid-40s, I was brought up in the dying embers of an age where people minded their Ps and Qs but didn’t have to live in permanent fear of being cancelled for the slightest misstep. I’ve witnessed massive shifts across my lifetime towards a society that has grown more cautious about expressing views that may offend. That is not always a bad thing. Civility matters. But there is a difference between being considerate and becoming so risk-averse that we begin to close down debate altogether.
A society which avoids offence entirely is one that risks avoiding discussion altogether. That is not freedom of expression and it definitely is not freedom of speech.
In short, I just didn’t get all the fuss about a stage show. After all, what could one middle-class, English woman on a stage in Guernsey possibly say during a stand-up show that would incite hatred, provoke a riot or increase safeguarding risk in our relatively safe jurisdiction?
As it turns out, nothing. In fact, as expected, she played to a polite Guernsey audience, who laughed and clapped and cheered in all the right places and dutifully sang along at the end. No riot gear was required and not a single drop of tear gas was expended.
Some will insist that only the mob supported the show, but that could not be further from the truth. The audience was not a caricature; it was Guernsey. Office workers, tradespeople, professionals – individuals making their own choice to buy a ticket.
For all the noise in advance, this was never really about public safety. It was about whether some felt the event ought not to happen at all. That is a very different question and a far more uncomfortable one.
Once we move from ‘I don’t like this’ to ‘this shouldn’t be allowed’, we cross a line. We stop trusting people to make their own choices and start suggesting that someone, somewhere, ought to be making those choices for them.
In February this year, Education, Sport & Culture got that balance right. Beau Sejour operates as a business, not a school assembly, it said. It is not for ESC selectively to curate taste or opinion. When Deputy Montague said ‘freedom of expression protects not only popular and agreeable views, but also those that many people strongly oppose,’ had I been allowed to whip out pompoms and cheer during a States meeting, I would have done. Sense prevailed and life moved on.
But it hasn’t stopped there. Katie Hopkins may have won the battle in 2026, but the war, seemingly, rumbles on.
Why? Because one of Guernsey’s premiere theatre venues is owned and operated by the States of Guernsey and there is now talk of a review of the terms of its use, which could very realistically result in a curtailing of fundamental freedoms in this next iteration of the rules. So the choice remains: will politicians trust the people of Guernsey to choose what they attend and what they walk away from or will politicians assume a role of deciding on their behalf?
This is not a line we should cross. Access must be determined by rule of law rather than by political opinion. Our role as politicians is not to censor, but to preserve the rule of law.
Hundreds attended the show and there are many more who would have had they been able. Whether or not you like Katie Hopkins, she sold out two nights at Beau Sejour within hours of tickets going on sale and added to the take at the bar, the holy grail for performance venues over recent years. Selling out Beau Sejour is no easy feat. Selling out at that speed is impressive. The people spoke. If only the recent by-election had generated as much interest.
Our theatre spaces must not become subject to the preferences of a few or the pressure of a handful of loud voices. To preserve freedom of speech, we must tolerate what we may personally find distasteful. At the point where entertainment risks crossing that line into criminality or public discord, we already have the mechanisms to deal with it.
Until then, the principle should be simple: trust people. If we lose that, we lose far more than a single stage show.
