Carl Benjamin details his disinvitation from an Oxford Union debate regarding the motion "This House believes that being British is a birthright, not a choice," alleging the cancellation followed a fabricated claim of sexual threats made nearly a decade after his apology. He laments losing £200 on a hotel due to the late-night notice and criticizes the organizers for dishonesty rather than a simple refusal. Benjamin argues that true national identity stems from ancestry, viewing inclusive civic identities as a mere simulacrum, while warning that weakening empires will eventually expel colonists, leading him to reject future invitations from the institution. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Fabricated Lie About Sexual Violence00:03:15
I was supposed to be debating at the Oxford Union tonight, but this morning I received an email disinviting me.
This is what the email said.
Dear Mr. Benjamin, it has been brought to our attention as of this evening by one of our partner organisations that you made a direct threat of sexual violence against a woman in a public office.
While you did later issue an apology for these statements, this came nearly a decade after the incident, during which time you publicly made repeated frivolous reiterations of the threat.
The Oxford Union is a free speech society and is committed to hosting and platforming the widest possible range of speakers and viewpoints, especially those viewpoints that are underrepresented due to controversy in academic spaces but are held by significant sections of society.
However, the right to free speech does not and has never extended to threatening sexual violence against others.
Therefore, the Oxford Union has taken the view that the only appropriate course of action would be for us to rescind your invitation to its week one debate.
This is quite the email, and before I begin, I just want to express that I don't feel that this is a free speech issue.
It's their debating society.
They can invite or disinvite.
Whoever they like, for whatever reason they like, and this is the third time that they have invited me and either stood me up or disinvited me now.
So I'm not very worried about that or bothered about that at all.
I suppose it's a bit frustrating that I had paid for a hotel room that now I'm out of pocket for, and it seems rather unprofessional to send it to me late in the evening.
This was sent at 11 o'clock the day before, so of course I didn't see it until this morning.
So that seems Well, highly unprofessional, frankly.
And it also seems strange because they surely know who I am.
I mean, they've repeatedly invited me.
And so this is a bit of a surprise.
But like I said, I don't mind why they invite me or disinvite me.
And I don't see myself being inclined to accept another invitation because, okay, fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me.
But now it's graduated to an open lie.
I've never made a direct threat of sexual violence against anyone, let alone a woman in a public office.
And of course, not even Jess Phillips has herself made such an allegation.
And if I had done that, why would I not have been investigated by the police?
Why would I not have seen the inside of a courtroom?
Why would I not have a criminal record if that is what I had done?
Of course, I don't have any of these things to my name.
I haven't been arrested for this.
I haven't been to a courtroom.
I've never seen the inside of a courtroom.
And I don't have a criminal record.
At least anything that's not a non crime hate incident.
But the point being, this just isn't true.
The fact of being invited or disinvited is actually not terribly interesting to me.
What I'm concerned about here is the fact that this allegation, this lie, has been used to de platform me.
Now, like I said, if they didn't want me there, they don't have to give a reason.
It's their organisation, not mine.
And I don't mind if they just say no, thank you.
That'd be completely acceptable.
And I would have just got on with my day.
I don't see why they've fabricated this lie about me.
In order to depart from me, it's their organization.
They could have just said no thank you.
Britishness as Birthright Not Choice00:06:20
So that's somewhat of a disappointment.
And I, like I said, I'm annoyed that I'm out £200 on a hotel room, but it's not the end of the world.
And they could have just said no thank you.
So I am actually rather affronted that they've made these allegations against me, which would consist of a crime in order to, I suppose, just blacken my name.
I mean, who are these partner organizations?
Who is telling a lie about me?
In order to do this, I think that's something they might themselves want to look into.
But I thought since we were here, I would present my argument to you.
I had written an argument arguing for the motion, so I thought what we'd do is go through it and I'd let you judge for yourselves.
So the motion was This House believes that being British is a birthright, not a choice.
The debate description is as follows What does it mean to be British?
Is national identity an inheritance rooted in history, ancestry, and shared tradition, or a civic commitment open to all who choose to belong?
For some, Britishness is a birthright shaped by lineage, cultural memory, and an organic sense of nationhood that cannot simply be adopted.
They argue that citizenship alone cannot replicate the depth of historical continuity and social cohesion.
That comes from being born into a national community.
Others maintain that Britain's identity has always evolved, enriched by newcomers who embrace its institutions, values, and public life, and that to define Britishness by birth is to deny the very pluralism that characterizes modern Britain.
Is being British something one is by origin and inheritance, or something one becomes by allegiance and participation?
This debate asks whether national identity is fixed at birth or forged by choice.
You can see why I accepted this debate.
That sounds like a really interesting subject, which is why I wrote.
My argument.
So, the way that the debates at the Oxford Union work is that the proposition is either assented to or dissented from, and you have people who are for the proposition and in opposition to the proposition.
In this particular case, there were going to be four people on either side, and maybe this debate will still go on in my absence, I have no idea.
Maybe they find someone at short notice to replace me.
But on my side of the argument was going to be Professor Eric Kaufman, Sara Lunawat as a student speaker, and Imran Rasiwala as a competitive debater.
And in opposition was going to be Sir Vince Cable, Albie Amancona, Sanjita Miska, and the Chief of Staff at the Oxford Union, Charlotte Wilde.
So, I'd like to apologise to those people that I won't be able to engage them in this debate.
So, this is the argument that I would have made, and I'm going to make it without any edits.
So, I'm going to do my best to speak as I would have done.
The affirmative proposition is obviously and almost trivially true.
Nation comes from the Latin natio, meaning birth, origin, breed, or race, and ethnic comes from the Greek ethnos, meaning roughly the same.
A nation or ethnos is commonly defined as a group of people connected by shared bonds of ancestry, locality, society, and history.
The British people, that is, the people of the British Isles then, are the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish.
Your nation is indeed a web of bloodlines that carries with it an inevitable inheritance of tradition, custom, and situatedness.
It's an entire worldview.
It is both material and metaphysical, and you have no choice in the matter.
In short, national identity is an essential characteristic of a person and cannot be separated from them nor merely adopted out of convenience.
No person is born outside of this inheritance.
It informs everything from the big issues upon which we debate to the smallest habits and prejudices we don't even notice.
The identity you carry from that inheritance is the sum of innumerable negotiations you have had throughout the course of your life between people like you and people not like you.
Your identity is dialogical and formed by identifying what you are relative to what you are not.
Moreover, the counter proposition on whether being British is a mere civic commitment is contingent on the existence of the first.
How would we identify what British civic life were, were we not to examine and extract what it is from the active civic participation of the ethnos itself?
What possible characteristics could a British civic identity possess if it were merely a geographical occurrence?
Why would it only be limited to the British Isles and why would it not spontaneously occur in other parts of the world were that the case?
The institutions, values, and public life are all expressions of the ethnos that the counter proposition would seek to deny or sublimate, and these are all predicated on the habitual cultural life and unique history of the nation.
At best, participating in British civic life as an outsider is a simulacrum of what it is to be British.
A cosplay.
This is not in itself wrong, and in small numbers it is tolerable, even celebrated, as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
But that isn't what is happening now.
Not only are there millions of people in Britain who have no interest in making a positive contribution to public life, but they are outwardly here to extract resources from us and send them home.
The argument for an inclusive, participatory identity falls apart.
When it attempts to define British identity to include people whose prime ancestral origins are identified by reference to foreign countries, it forces the natives to take a look at themselves seriously and examine the hitherto unexamined presuppositions of their own lives.
Walking around the streets of London, Birmingham, Luton, Leicester, and numerous other towns in England, including my own town of Swindon, makes me realise that these people are not British.
Trapped in the Empire Paradigm00:05:26
They are not replicating a culture that is native to the British Isles.
They are an imported people who have brought their foreign cultures here and are replicating them on our soil.
They are, for want of a better word, colonists.
It becomes apparent that we are in fact still trapped in the paradigm of empire.
Again, it is in the very definition of this debate.
The empire is a collection of institutions.
informed by certain values which form its public life that exists separate from a people.
Empires exist above nations.
They command them, they control them, they allow a class of people to enrich themselves off them.
From the time of Ashurbanipal to this day, the imperial creed has been to subordinate all national sentiment and transform the people into human resources.
The empire then engages in the mass movement of peoples for the sake of itself and institutions.
This is why there were Indians in Africa, why they were expelled by the decolonial movements that, in many cases, the Indians themselves fomented.
This same principle is being applied now.
We are told constantly that fungible human labour is required to keep our institutions afloat, pay for our pensions, and support the NHS.
We are told that people of any kind can be imported without limit to ensure that the system may survive just one more budget.
The incorporative ideology is just window dressing to justify the empire's mass movement of people and is promoted by individuals who look to secure their own place in the administration.
As it was in Assyria, as it is now, the identity which begins in a particular people ends by incorporating any and all people.
Because the system demands it.
This is always and without exception at the expense of the nation.
And when the nation feels itself sufficiently undermined, degraded, and eventually at the point of abolition by the empire, it provokes a reaction against the empire and any imperial colonists who relied upon the empire for their protection.
While the empire is strong, this can be contained.
But when the empire weakens, the reactionary principle boils forth, and we see the same pattern everywhere in the world.
The incorporative ideology of the empire is shown to have been a fiction.
Enforced by state power for its own ends, and unravels very swiftly when this power abates.
In each case, the response of the reactionaries has been the same.
The reactionaries will say to the colonists that, because of the colour of their skin, they will be sent home by the suitcase or the coffin, and that in time they will come to see the sense of their own departure.
This has happened within living memory.
Millions of Europeans and their Indian administrators were expelled from the colonies by reactionary nationalists, throwing off the yoke of empire to reclaim the dignity and pride of their oppressed nations.
And there is no reason to think that this cannot come to pass in the future.
So, what we have here in this house are the arguments on this side for the nation and on the other side for the empire.
We represent those who are suffering from the current state of affairs, and they represent those who are benefiting from them.
The conceptual fiction that a nation is merely an abstract voluntary organization that can be rationally chosen is not only obviously untrue, it's dangerous.
National identity is, by definition, based on ancestry, heritage, and a common sense of feeling, or else it would not be a national identity.
And woe betide any empire that fails to understand the key lessons of history.
The first one being that all empires fall, but nations endure.
And when the empire falls, the pent up resentment of a long abused people comes rushing forth, and the sight is rarely pleasant.
It would surely be better for all involved to accept the nature of nations and empires and respect the boundaries that exist to prevent these acts of barbarism in the first place.
That boundary, the primary boundary that prevents the empire from eating the nation, Is the integrity of the national identity.
I shouldn't imagine that in future I'll entertain any more invitations from the Oxford Union.
I'm rather disappointed with how they've behaved here, and I don't really appreciate being lied about, frankly.
And I don't really appreciate having my time wasted and money wasted, actually.
Sorry for any people who I'd spoken to who were quite excited to see it happening.
I guess we'll not ever find out what the reaction of the House would have been.
Thanks for joining me, folks, and I'll see you when I see you.