Who are they? They are currents of opinion.

The Trinity College Debate: To be or nor to be!

The Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, UKIP, the Green Party, Respect, the English Democrats, Stormfront, the National Front, the UAF, the Trade Unions, Searchlight and many others including ourselves the British National Party, what are we all?

We are talking about different peoples and different organizations with a wide range of views. Pro-Abortion and Anti-Abortion groups are very much part of the same world and trying to make an abstraction by excluding ideas or banning legal organizations that we don't like is a pretty useless exercise.

Welcome to the real world! As you start increasing the number of issues of a debate, cracks start to appear all over the place because every one of us has different opinions that rise to the surface as soon as we examine issues in detail. Even when we agree in general terms, there will be nuances of opinion.

Why does this happen? It happens because we are individuals and each and all of us have a different set of experiences that somehow shape our views.

Do the 30 or so individuals responsible for the cancellation of a debate really think that by trying to exclude people from a debate they will actually stop people thinking about the issues the British National Party wanted to talk about? Socialist Students actually do think that they can stop people from thinking and they are deluding themselves.

The debate about immigration will not go away and it will become ever more intense as the financial crisis bites harder and harder. It is always better to listen. Listen and think, debate presenting facts, agree to disagree but always challenge arguments in a rational and fair way.

Students should go to University to learn to debate with everybody, with those they agree and with those they disagree. Unfortunately, the levels of intolerance shown by University Students prove how low educational standards have fallen. This inability to debate is also evident in the workplace. Quite a few employers say that graduates are not good enough to succeed in the workplace. Why? Lack of flexibility and adaptability coupled with insufficient knowledge are a real life nightmare.

I reckon Trinity College in Ireland should be less concerned about disagreements and heated arguments and should be more interested in real debates. Socrates himself mentioned Methodical Doubt as the Midwife of Knowledge. Millions of students are missing out. They might have many A Levels, but they are missing the A Levels of Real Life. As a country, we need people ready and willing to stand for issues they care about. Who loses with every banned debate? All of us lose. The country as a whole loses and this includes the group of 30 or so individuals that stopped the real debate that was going to take place at Trinity College in Ireland.