Last week, Amber Rudd, the former home secretary of the United Kingdom—akin to America’s Homeland Security chief—was disinvited from an International Women’s Day event at Oxford University at the last minute. Students had raised an outcry over Rudd’s speaking engagement, owing to her involvement in the Windrush scandal, in which at least 83 foreign-born people (and possibly dozens more) were wrongly deported from the U.K. Many more were denied pensions and health care, despite the fact that they had arrived in the country before any sort of work permit for Commonwealth citizens was required. (Windrush was not some aberration for Rudd: She oversaw a department that enacted an aggressive “hostile environment” policy toward immigrants and at one point proposed forcing British companies to publicly list all their foreign workers.)
Politicians across the political spectrum denounced the students’ decision. The usual cries about deplatforming and civility rang out. Perhaps most notable was Rudd’s response: She called the decision “badly judged and rude.” Her daughter later tweeted that it was, in fact, “fucking rude,” adding, “This is NOT how women should treat each other.” What kind of International Women’s Day would it be, after all, without a hollow invocation of feminism to protect the powerful from criticism?
It was indeed rude, in an interpersonal sense, to disinvite Rudd at short notice. It probably wasted her whole afternoon. She may have had to purchase an underwhelming croissant at Oxford train station for no reason! But no one other than Amber Rudd should have had much reason to give the matter much thought. Still, this personal slight became a matter of national democratic urgency. The conceptual framework of rudeness, however, should not be broadly applicable to political acts, of which canceling the former deporter in chief’s invitation to a panel is certainly one. If your functioning democracy depends on everyone being polite to each other in perpetuity, I have some bad news for you.
In the U.K., Rudd had an interestingly similar role to that of Kirstjen Nielsen in the U.S., as head of the immigration bureaucracy, and the subsequent brow-furrowing over her disinvitation from the Oxford event is reminiscent of the excruciating discourse that followed the protests of Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., at the height of the Trump administration’s campaign of family separation. It also raises similar questions on the horrors of rudeness, which have cropped up with exhausting regularity on this side of the Atlantic since 2016, when the archetypal young man known as the Bernard brother first logged on to Twitter.