ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to place the tactic of ‘no platform’ and the National Union of Students’ policy within a broader historical and contemporary context. While ‘no platform’ is often linked in contemporary discourses with ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, ‘deplatforming’ in the media and debates about academic freedom, this chapter differentiates ‘no platform’ from these other concepts, but also demonstrates how they are linked, both in the past and the present. Furthermore, the chapter highlights how ‘no platform’ has become a transnational concept in the twenty-first century, from its origins in Britain in the 1970s to being employed as a pejorative term by conservatives, libertarians and ‘classic liberals’ across the English-speaking world.
