ABSTRACT
Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), was banned from entering the UK in February 2009. In this chapter we examine how this became a controversial ‘media event’. 1 It generated media commentaries on Islam, Christianity and secularism and their relationship to debates about freedom of speech, multiculturalism and national identity. One of two events we analysed across the British press – the second being the Papal visit of 2010 which we discuss in the next chapter – it provided an opportunity for further analysis of newspaper representations, but also of the media’s role in constructing and managing an event that might otherwise have passed unnoticed with little interpretive embellishment.
