For little extra context here (for anyone not in the UK), since the OP article was published we had the coronation at the weekend during which many anti-monarchy protestors were arrested - despite prior approval and communication with the Police ahead of the protest. This has been seen as the first major use of these new powers:
> Police accused of ‘alarming’ attack on protest rights after anti-monarchist leader arrested
Not the MET, the UK government. The MET are just enforcing the law the UK gov enacted, regardless of whether you like the MET or not they didn't suddenly decide to attack the right to protest.
Not quite. Technically, the MET is operationally independent from the government. They asked for additional powers to curb groups that were taking disruptive means (like gluing themselves to roads), and the government gave that to them through the change in the law.
Now, whether there are backchannels on this for the coronation is a different matter...
>The day [20 April] usually draws in huge crowds of Marijuana aficionados with attendees in the realm of 11,000 people.
>Cannabis is a Class B drug in the UK, meaning there is the possibility a five-year prison sentence if you are caught in possession of the drug.
>In what countries is weed legal?
>While medicinal cannabis was made legal in the UK in 2018, it is still illegal to use it recreationally.
>If you are caught growing Marijuana, you can face up to 14 years in prison, an unlimited fine or both.
> The MET are just enforcing the law the UK gov enacted
The police as an institution always also has their own influence on politics. And if there is one thing police across the world wants, it's to get rid of protests.
The role of the Australian Government in doing absolutely nothing to help an Australian whose human rights are being trampled is telling about the structure and priorities of Western power...
... and how "Eastern" it's starting to look.
Freedom, along with a whole lot other words, doesn't mean what it used to mean.
Yes and no. What they decide to enforce is largely political. They won’t get away with ignoring things the Home Secretary wants enforced for very long before some chief is called in to a meeting in which they perspire heavily.
These laws in general may qualify but specifically is it really fascist not to tolerate protest of the coronation in a monarchy? It isn't fascist just to have rules.
Read up on how fascist regimes centralize power, arresting people who object was and is a major aspect of it. By outlawing decent you eventually normalize support for your regime such that even people who despise what’s going on are eventually unwilling to say so.
They may have gotten external damnation for it, but China’s cracking down on protests worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... What seems counterintuitive is the CCP still makes it very clear you’re not allowed to talk about it because they want people to live in fear. Thus, they very much want people to know and not talk about it.
Earlier forms of authoritarianism like absolute monarchy didn’t necessarily include those elements.
Fascist political movements/governments however pioneered them. Thus they techniques are labeled fascist even if they where quickly adopted by communist countries etc.
I'm not seeing how fascism can be said to have pioneered them, concepts of lese majeste - which, for a monarchy is essentially equivalent to the crime of dissenting against the government - have existed for centuries all over the world.
As to timing, it’s the same technological developments which resulted in large companies becoming common and being linked to government for the first time with new options for governmental control.
Radio, telegraph, calculators/computers, and trains allowed for much larger a more homogeneous organizations. The Hitler Youth for example didn’t have similar parallels in the 1800’s and before.
At the same time individuals became less useful to the state. Large prison populations are really expensive in terms of guards and lost productivity. Similarly execution means removing potentially productive people. Historically, only a small number of people within a society would get made examples of until industrialization increased productivity to the point where states could suddenly afford to have secret police capturing large percentages of the population.
> Earlier forms of authoritarianism like absolute monarchy didn’t necessarily include those elements.
Mostly because the technology and bureaucratic mechanisms were not yet sufficiently developed to implement it. It's not as though kings wielding absolute power, ostensibly justified by their god, were champions of liberalism. Maybe a handful liked to think of themselves as liberal humanists, but that was just vanity. More often, these kings had every inclination to be an overt absolute tyrant but simply lacked the technical and organizational means to control large populations in the ways which were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I absolutely agree. Calling such things Modern Authoritarian Practices is more descriptive but it’s simply not what caught on making the meaning less clear.
Calling internet censorship etc fascist is a natural evolution of things, but IMO somewhat dilutes the idea. Creating an out group and book burning are part of the playbook, but public spaces have always had some regulations.
Possibly the early stages of fascism? Something to do with neoliberalism? To me it's more of a shift to authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism equates dissent with violence [1]. And here in the UK we have the "Prevent programme" where people who dissent against the prevailing political opinions can be labelled "extremists" even though they have not done anything illegal [2]. Which is very, very concerning. The laws relating to this were passed in 2015.
I fear that those who complain about the restrictions on freedom of speech and erosion of civil liberties in general, here in the UK, could be considered "extremists" by this government and subjected to Prevent related surveillance by intelligence agencies such as GCHQ.
It's very strange to me how one day 15 or 20 years ago, everything bad in the world was suddenly fascist. Before that time, there was at least this pervasive assumption that something could be bad or undesirable while not wearing jackboots.
And then a switch flipped.
In every government which abuses its people, arresting dissidents was the first resort of the dictators and autocrats.
It’s much older than that, and an outgrowth of both propaganda and the degree to which those governments really did pioneer various methods of social control. This may have simply been timing. The widespread adoption of radio and movies suddenly made it a lot easier to influence society.
Beyond that they really just took things much further, it’s hard to find direct parallels to the scale and influence on society of say the Hitler Youth in the 1800’s or before.
History is full of dictators and political purges, but before this they focused on those with actual power.
Something interesting here is whether your right to protest extends to being paid to protest. If it can be shown an NGO is paying you to engage in a disruptive protest, are you really exercising some kind of human right? IDK, that seems new. It doesn't strike me as being in the spirit of the protected right.
Free choice of employment is article 23.1 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work
Not really relevant. A plumber may have the human right to work (granting such a thing makes any sense for arguments sake), but if someone pays him to cut off the water supply to a neighbourhood, he can hardly defend himself by invoking that right. Someone who is paid to agitate---I dont know if they can then invoke the human right to protest. Is that really in the spirit of law?
Centralizing power and arresting people who cause a disruption isn’t especially characteristic of fascism. China is a communist country, not fascist. You’re deeply confused.
I agree that fascism is much more specific than how most folks use it, but as a tangent I would argue that China is no longer Communist (with Chinese characteristics) and instead transitioned to Fascism after the death of Mao.
China is not just nationalist but often racist, two characteristics of Fascism but not Communism (which is internationalist and egalitarian). China pushes a market economy under strict government control, creating three legs of Workers, Business Leaders and Government, a facet of Fascism; this is contrasted with the single leg of Communism where everyone is a Worker.
Regardless of whether they're Communist™ or Fascist™, the Chinese government is brutal to its people and often threatens (former) citizens abroad with harm to family members in the PRC. The label is less important than recognizing what they're doing.
“a person who is dictatorial or has extreme right-wing views.” Not the OR is intended as either applies rather than an AND where someone must also have extreme right wing view.
This is in reference to specific kinds of activities not the overall political system. People will call unusually restrictive librarians fascist. It’s just how languages evolve over time.
Do you actually think preventing disruptions to the coronation is an indication the British government is becoming Fascist? Fascism has other attributes. Is there a dictatorial power emerging in Britain? Is there an increase in militarism? Is there even a right wing government (no)? Is the government expressing ideas of a natural social hierarchy (no...some of the opposition may be). Whatever is going on, fascism is not the right word.
They didn't prevent "disruptions" they prevented peaceful protests (non-disruptive).
I've seen messages online heralding how great it is that everyone loves the king, their evidence being the BBC had no news of any dissent, and there was no evidence of dissent on the ground.
The reality is police arrested people for planning peaceful protests, and the BBC provided their usual biased reporting.
> 1. a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
> 2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
The current Uk government has introduced laws to limit protest as described in this topic; it's also looking to limit the right to strike (ref. current health service pay disputes). Both are consistent with the definition above.
Where is the dictator or "autocrat"? It doesn't meet either definition at all. I am not here to defend these laws in general, but I don't think ensuring no disruptions to the coronation has much to do with them (they used them against maybe 6 people and didnt even charge all of them?). And I don't think it is indicative of anything like fascism. It might be indicative of something else bad that is happening in the UK political body.
Really? If Charles suddenly issued an order, "seize @trasz4, take him/her to the Tower of London, and chop off his head," do you seriously think anyone in the UK would obey him? More likely Parliament would start the process of declaring him to be Mad King Charles and appointing William as Prince Regent in his place.
¨Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki ... was an American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a US government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first US citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government.¨
He was a terrorist but he still had rights. And then there was the murder of his non-combatant son who was "collateral damage" from a drone strike on a restaurant:
¨Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki ... was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen by a drone airstrike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama on October 14, 2011.
...
¨Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son was there" before the airstrike was ordered.[8] When pressed by a reporter to defend the targeted killing policy that resulted in Abdulrahman al-Awlaki's death, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs deflected blame to the victim's father: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don't think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."¨
Joe Biden could do this and get away with it. Arguably Obama did, as stated above---there might be better examples. If Charles tried, no one would probably listen, and even if he did, once word got out it would probably actually be the end of the monarchy. Charles is not a dictator, autocrat or anything else. And in fact the US president, though elected, is much further along the spectrum towards autocrat than the British monarch. Many actual autocrats are in fact elected, so this distinction isn't really important anyway.
Banning the types of peaceful protests allowed based on the content of their message is deeply fascist.
The British government is seriously leaning into censorship, surveillance, and nationalism which is a very dangerous combination. They have even vilified an out group namely immigrants and cracked down on decent. Add in propaganda with strong ties between the government and large private companies really does make me nervous, though I am not expecting things to devolve very quickly the historic left/right divide isn’t particularly important here.
No, it's not fascist. What the anti-monarchists failed to mention is that the protestors were not arrested because they were protesting, they were arrested under suspicion of attempting to lock-on[1] but were later released without charges because of a lack of evidence. There is a debate to be had about what a peaceful protest is but frequently people use the right to disrupt other people's lives such as blocking roads. I don't think there should be a human right that can deny other people the right to use public roads and paths. That would deny others the right to protest peacefully also.
A real monarchy with absolute power is a facist state by today's standards.
Like you literally didn't have any rights and could be killed on the whim of a noble. Even Magna Carta didn't grabt any rights to peasants and riffraff. The times before it were even more tyranical
Is your post written in jest? Nobles could not "literally" kill peasants on a whim. This is a preposterous claim. The nobility had a duty to protect the peasants on their land and they were bound by various general and specific moral duties toward them. Whatever the faults of the people and arrangements of that era, what you've written is a caricature, like something pulled out of the stockpile of slanderous nonsense that appeared in Enlightenment pamphlets and other rags.
While they are exaggerating robber knights were a total thing where two nobles feuding would rob/kill each others peasants as part of it. Different times and places might have rules against it, the Holy Roman Empire very famously outlawed it but actual enforcement on the ground was minimal because there is nobody around to actually enforce those decrees. This isn't going into actual wartime conflicts at all in which case mass murder of non combatants was absolutely a common thing that was essentially sanctioned.
OP clearly meant "fascist" as a shorthand for "extremely authoritarian and non-democratic", which is a common colloquial usage.
But yes, fascism typically includes an appeal to a (imagined) past glory, a close collaboration between corporations and the state, a designated enemy who is both weak enough to be an easy target and strong enough to pose an existential threat and an empowerment of the military and police force. This list doesn't cover most monarchies by any stretch of the imagination even though there are obvious overlaps.
EDIT: I also think it's simplistic to call fascism an ideology as even the historical examples share as many differences as similarities when analyzed as ideologies. I think it's more accurate to call it a strategy or mechanism, or maybe a meta-ideology. There is no "fascist economic model" for example. It's goal is to bring about a social hierarchy through the use of excessive force and typically waves of ever-expanding mass killings of undesirables. It needs an other to eliminate to maintain itself, making it inherently self-destructive.
I think the most accurate description I've seen of fascism is as an "immune system of capitalism" or "capitalism in crisis": it primarily kills the weak, those unable to work, those unwilling to work and those posing a direct or indirect threat to the social order required to maintain the owner-worker hierarchy (e.g. trade unions, socialists, even progressives) and when it eventually collapses, is overthrown or fades away, it reinstates a liberal market economy (i.e. capitalism) while having mostly maintained the power of those that were previously wealthy or were even able to expand their wealth through collaboration.
People use "literally" to mean "figuratively", as well. It doesn't help discussion to allow the blurring of distinctions.
In the context of this thread, there seems to be the implication that the new laws the UN is objecting to have something to do with the arrests of protestors. After some digging, I can't find evidence that more than a few people (6) were arrested under that law (which generally seems rather bad)? And these people weren't even all charged? It seems to centre around the claimed possession of devices to lock themselves to things in public. Arresting a handful of people you think are maybe going to chain themselves to infrastructure to disrupt an internationally important event---maybe the government didnt act the best here but this hardly seems indicative of a great threat to human rights or a rise of fascism in the UK. I would personally worry more about airport security.
One of the main characteristics of fascism is forcible supression of opposition so I think a government that doesn't tolerate peaceful protest is in some sense fascist
Doing one thing that fascist government's sometimes do does not make you a fascist government. The UK might be tending toward fascism, but not allowing disruptive protests of the coronation is not really an indicator one way or the other. The king is certainly not a dictator, having little power at all.
Well, the death penalty was abolished in the U.K. in the 1990s, so there's that. More significant: habeus corpus, which goes back to somewhere between the Magna Carta and Interregnum.
Even at its height, the Crown's power to unilaterally command executions was intentionally curtailed for centuries.
So like: sure the attacker stabbed someone, beat them with a baseball bat, punched and kicked them, but the attacker didn't use a gun so it wasn't violent.
The king has no power, that's why he's able to easily bend the national broadcaster and the police force to his will with ease ... that's why we have to get his consent to pass any laws ... that's why the armed services pledge allegiance to him (as monarch) and not to the UK ... that's why we pay him 100s of £millions from taxes ... that's why we organise a hugely costly parade for him in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis ... these are all signs he has no power /s
This is basic vocabulary. “Violence” is a word that encompasses a range of actions. “Fascism” is a word that refers to a specific political ideology combining various elements.
That’s like saying that having four limbs is a major characteristic of mammals so anything with four limbs is kind of a mammal. Many governments of different forms don’t generate protest. For example, in both theory and in practice, suppression of protest is entirely compatible with democracy. In a democratic country with high social cohesion, like Singapore, protest is often a disgruntled minority trying to undermine the democratic will.
"Democracy" is more general term than "liberal democracy", the latter includes protecting political freedoms. Suppressing protests because majority wants to is democratic, but it is not liberal democratic.
Liberal democracy is a check on the possible dangerous consequences of full naive democracy.
Only if you think protesting is a “political freedom” and I think that’s debatable even in the context of liberal democracy. A minoritarian veto is anti-democratic, no matter what prefix you put on that term.
Does the UK have rules against protesting the coronation of the monarchy? Are they following them? Or are they bending/breaking the rules to shut down the protests, to avoid making the new monarch look bad?
Breaking the rules to prohibit protest in one specific case may not be fascist, but it isn't the rule of law...
At the coronation of William the Conqueror the soldiers were really nervous, no one was sure how people would react to William's coronation for a variety of reasons. There was a large crowd outside the church. At a certain point in the ceremony was the acclamation where the people are asked if they accept the king. This was asked in French, then English. Somehow the Norman soldiers got confused at this point and thought this was a start of a riot and began to attack the crowd and set some houses on fire. Some of the more enterprising Norman soldiers took the opportunity to loot nearby houses. The ceremony fairly abruptly ended at that point with no one inside being sure what was going on.
So I guess the MET can point to that as an example of historical precedent and how they handled themselves with relative restraint.
There is also not a really deep right to protest in British law. The right to protest comes from their signing the European convention on human rights (they have some law called Human Rights Act). It is not enshrined fundamentally as in the United States afaik.
Police does not hold any discretionary powers on whether to enforce a law. In a functional State, Police is a subordinate of the executive branch, not it's willing accomplice. It can't enforce laws it deems "ok" and turn a blind eye on those it deems "meh".
Police absolutely have discretionary powers; it would be logically incompatible for them to not have such powers.
They have a chain of command, and at each level decide where to focus their efforts (guided by existing laws, to be sure). Patrol routes are chosen, dispatchers must (effectively) triage calls, and officers make decisions like whether to assess a warning or a citation.
But that is not true, most countries have what is called prosecutorial discretion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_discretion
The police can, for the most part, decide whether or not to enforce laws. They can also choose not to investigate certain crimes as they simply don't have the time to look into absolutely everything.
Furthermore, if police had to literally enforced every law on the books to the letter, they would not be able to drive or walk down the street without having to arrest people constantly.
I sometimes wonder if this would be a net benefit in the long term. My hunch is that after a week or two of people being constantly arrested, and the accompanying collapse of society, there’d be a push to repeal laws that aren’t relevant anymore and revise those that were overly broad.
Yeah I agree, its kind of silly that we allow ancient irrelevant and overly broad laws to stay on the books, especially in most societies that ignorance of the law is not an excuse. For example, in Canada, the police can issue a DUI if you have a BAC exceeding the limit for driving up to 2 hours after you have parked your car. If they literally went to every bar and drinking establishment (or door to door) and enforced that to the letter, it would be changed in quite a hurry.
> Furthermore, if police had to literally enforced every law on the books to the letter, they would not be able to drive or walk down the street without having to arrest people constantly.
It sounds to me that addressing that problem at the enforcement level, as opposed to the legislative level, is the wrong place to address it.
And yet, this happens literally every day. Many individual officers, if not entire forces, have effectively stopped enforcing marijuana posession laws. If that happens, why not refuse to enforce fascist anti-protest laws?
If that were literally true, then the police would arrest everyone who goes even a mile over the speed limit. Everyone who throws out junk mail addressed to a previous renter.[1] Etc.
So there is definitely at least some sense in which the police have discretion. The question is when and how much.
[1] I don't actually know if that's illegal in the UK; in the US it's a federal offense.
I think it's a little silly people pointing to the extremely limited "discretion" police have and saying they should have used it to ignore the law. That's not how police discretion works and in modern policing it hardly exists alongside it's counterpoint which is : neglect of duty.
Policing is not a job I'd want to do. Damned if you do, damned if you don't; and everyone knows how to do it better than the people actually doing it. But those people given the chance wouldn't do any better.
""> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration."
If only they had this much zest and conviction for actual, troubling issues, dangerous issues. While I agree that disrupting a ceremony now is in poor taste, there are much bigger issues at play in the UK that deserve hands-on policing.
Sorry, what? And it's in good taste to piss away hundreds of millions of taxpayers money on a coronation? Please explain why people having a problem with this shouldn't exercise their right to protest.
> And it's in good taste to piss away hundreds of millions of taxpayers money on a coronation?
The British royal family is accretive to the U.K. The coronation brought in billions of dollars of tourism and earned media. There are legitimate gripes one may have about the British royals, but costing the taxpayer isn't one of them, unless we're at the point of seizing their private lands.
Yeah yeah this old excuse. It's conveniently unquantifiable, uncomparable to the alternative, and obfuscated by not knowing how much they're really worth and therefore what's reasonable to pay them. In addition there are plenty of non- working royals on the gravy train happily benefitting from their accident of birth without lifting a finger.
as an American, and not emotionally involved in this topic.. the answer must include actions by degree.. that is, protest by civilized actions, cards and flyers, costumed theater, symbolic union of people via presence or art.. not riot, break windows, steal, attack police or others.. etc
> While I agree that disrupting a ceremony now is in poor taste
Most people would consider coronating Jimmy Saville's BFF king to be in extremely poor taste. The protesters are the only respectable thing about this farce.
This seems like a consensus building post tone-wise. Would be nice to cut back on this sort of thing in favour of posts emphasizing facts, reasoned arguments and other light (as opposed to heat) generating things.
I disagree. The existence of a monarchy necessitates the belief that the royal family is ordained by god to rule over their people. It requires you to buy into the idea that these regular people are somehow more worthy than anybody else. I think that by itself is inherently "evil".
Also, I don't see how this is a "republican propaganda" talking point. Online I've seen many conservative pundits celebrating the coronation.
No it doesn't. I am an atheist and I do not believe the King is ordained by any form of deity. I look past that and support the constitutional monarchy settlement on the grounds of tradition/culture, how it provides constitutional checks and balances, how it can be a unifying figure against the negatives of elected head of state populists etc e.g. president Blair or president Farage. I am not saying this is the setup which I would use for any new countries, but it works at least for us. It also works for many countries in Europe.
You don't have to be religious to recognize that this is the stated reason for which the royal family was given its legitimacy. Obviously that is not the sole reason for its continued existence, but (as an outside observer) all of the rituals and ceremony surrounding the coronation seem to further entrench that idea.
But religion was also the stated reason given for the legitimacy of the US revolution. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..."
The US becoming far more atheist doesn't undermine the legitimacy of the US democracy, even if the original stated basis isn't regarded as valid any longer. The same can be true of the monarchy.
Mind you, I'm not actually a supporter of the monarchy. Where I'm from, we don't bow to monarchs. I'm just saying that this argument against the monarchy does not seem valid to me.
The US Revolution kicked the British government out of the region that would become the United States, but did not itself create the government that the US operates under. That happened 13 years later, when the present secular US Constitution went into effect.
Nuance there is that the legitimacy in the form of line of succession has been governed by law too (and no doubt conquest historically) at least following the glorious revolution of 1688. It has jumped around.
> It requires you to buy into the idea that these regular people are somehow more worthy than anybody else.
Not necessarily. I'm fairly neutral on the (UK) monarchy: I don't particularly like the idea, but some people do and it doesn't negatively impact me at all.
I can see some (small) value in keeping a historical anachronism around, for the sake of culture and tourism. That view doesn't require any belief that a certain family is ordained by God or more worthy than anyone else.
If they had any actual political power I would feel very differently.
I suppose the part that sours it for me is watching the extreme displays of wealth and decadence at a time when a large number of people in the UK are struggling financially. Quite a lot of countries in Europe still have monarchies, but the degree to which they are visibly celebrated in the UK seems to be much greater. This is where the argument for culture and tourism comes in, but I still think its wrong.
It probably negatively impacts your post-tax income. All of that showy opulence has to be paid for by someone and I'm pretty sure Chuckie Threes hasn't worked a day in his life.
I see more and more of this style of heated "fuck the outgroup!" posts on hackernews now. I don't know why this has started happening, but it's pretty sad watching HN decline...
Once you go down this rabbithole you see how most people are hostage to their school system. Most European countries with monarchies today have a majority of their population approving of the system - or so we're told in polls.
Seeing as the monarchy is completely against any other modern values of equality and equity and diversity, the only explanation is indoctrination in the school system somehow works. I cannot fathom for example how progressive countries like the Netherlands are pro-monarchy, but I live here among them and can tell you that while there's dissent, the majority of the country supports it. It's the subject that most boggles my mind in the modern world.
Sweden and Denmark being more examples of countries that say they are pro equality while keeping a family above all others.
The main reason why the Netherlands at least doesn't care so much about their monarch is because the role is completely neutered by the Dutch constitution. The King or Queen functionally has zero power over much of anything - their role is pretty much entirely ceremonial in purpose (they can theoretically choose to not sign laws, but this would just result in them getting sidestepped).
This is in very stark contrast to the UK monarchy, which does hold very considerable power and control over the government still.
Its less "people approve of the system" and more "people don't have any issues with the system". Anti-monarchism just isn't really a thing here because the monarchy is just... kinda bland? The most solid argument here is that it's a money sink, which is a fair point but not enough for most to protest it.
There's also a sentiment among even people in the Netherlands who might otherwise be republicans, that the current situation might actually be the lesser evil, compared to an elected head of state. Especially with populism on the rise, etc.
It's a strange world when you can be convinced that voting is worse than "God's appointments".
Edit: to the comment below, now you're advocating for ilegitimacy as a benefit to a position that "holds no power". It's a very weird position to hold, but if you believe that, then do an opt-in lottery system among all your citizens, not something predetermined by birth with a bunch of lies and religion around it. I'd like to read your arguments about dictatorships too, they're probably great.
The rationale goes like this: If you don't like the monarch, who has this job purely as an accident of birth, well, too bad, they're a person, that's all you were guaranteed. They might have a grating voice, or love hot pink way too much, or insist on calling people "Mate" for no god damn reason, but nobody picked them.
And if you do like them, the same, maybe they've got a brilliant smile, they like the long floral outfits you prefer, they think kittens are better than puppies like you do, but nobody picked them.
They don't have any democratic legitimacy, which is crucial because this means it's clear that democratically the elected legislature is in charge. The monarch can't be making rules, they're not a government they're just a living symbol.
Whereas if you vote for somebody to be President or whatever, that person now has democratic legitimacy. Their preference for kittens is granted the legitimacy of the masses, even though probably most people didn't vote for them because they believe kittens are better, too bad, that's all endorsed. If the Elected President disagrees with the Elected Legislature, somehow their meddling is legitimate, even they can argue, rightfully endorsed by The People.
Unless you're confident that everything you believe can be summarised as a single living individual, and that the majority of other people agree with you, an Elected President is clearly worse than a Monarch.
Well, in the US, Supreme Court appointments are for life. That's for a reason - it's supposed to be isolated from politics so as to judge justly. It's not, but it would be even more subject to politics if judges were appointed to four-year terms (or worse, elected).
This rising tide of populism you speak of implies people in the Netherlands would prefer the "greater evil" of an elected head of state. Why not give people what they actually want?
It's probably hard to build an honest accounting of the financial benefits of having a monarch. The diplomatic missions and relations they maintain probably have some (hard to measure) benefit. They have an entertainment value (for some). Tourism income (especially in the UK)?
> The King or Queen functionally has zero power over much of anything - their role is pretty much entirely ceremonial in purpose (they can theoretically choose to not sign laws, but this would just result in them getting sidestepped).
This is the same in the UK I’m not sure I see the stark difference. The Monarch doesn’t really have power over parliament.
So the Queen read bills and gave her opinion on them, which is public record, before they were debated? And that constitutes political power?
It also states that this is a purely formal part of the parliamentary process and she never refused something being debated, even if she did parliament could override it.
I’d argue that if David Beckham tweeted his annoyance at a bill being passed it would have more influence. Not to mention the hundreds of lobby groups that get their way.
I think people forget that the relationship between Monarch and people in Britain has always been different to the rest of Europe. No Magna Carta or equivalent document was signed anywhere else in Europe in the 1200s. It took the famously rebellious France 150 years to abolish their monarch after the English did.
Personally I don’t mind the monarchy, if they replace it then fine, but I want it replaced with something decent. I definitely don’t want to see a US style presidential republic set up here, with executive orders, etc.
I’ve said this before in another thread but growing up as a not very well off ethnic minority the Queen seemed to care more about me than anyone in parliament. The monarch in the UK shows more civil devotion and service than any politician.
> This is in very stark contrast to the UK monarchy, which does hold very considerable power and control over the government still.
It's exactly like you've described for the Netherlands. Our Monarchs have no actual power, beyond the power that comes with being famous wealthy old white people anyway. English Kings haven't had real power over the Westminster Parliament since it executed King Charles in 1649.
Charles thought as King he could do whatever he wanted, Parliament disagreed, Parliament won and since he didn't accept that outcome they executed him. That's pretty definitive. He was dead, they were not.
Monarchy is a system, and like all systems it has all sorts of parts, including the lonesome fellow wearing the crown. "Our king has no power" yet there is all that machinery of state and you think it is just for 'sentiment and aesthetic' reasons?
That song and dance to beguile the masses is how the ruling keep ruling. Does this really need to be spelled out?
Charles was executed because he, as king, was in conflict with his own set: the ruling class. It was a civil war. But if he was in accord with his class you can bet your pretty neck that it would be in jeopardy if you went againt that ruling class.
> Charles thought as King he could do whatever he wanted
That is right. A monarch is there so that an entire class can do whatever it wants. But s/he will not fare well if they act against the class that upholds their reign. It is the same exact precise equation the world over modulo some rare historic exceptions.
For most people, the monarchy just means a bunch of state-sponsored celebrities who participate in weird rituals. They don't bother opposing it for ideological reasons, because it's pretty inconsequential. The monarchy is a symbol, like the flag or the national anthem. It costs some money, but people don't see any particular reason to get rid of it, because there is no obvious harm in it.
History and tradition plays a major role in those opinions. No one is saying it is fair, but most are willing to overlook it.
Why do you, so confidently, state that the reason is the school system/indoctrination? I've gone to school in these countries, and I've never heard a pro-monarchy argument in class.
Have you heard an anti-monarchy argument in class? One way to maintain a status quo is just to avoid talking about it too much.
That was part of the original point of the New Atheism movement: that politely keeping quiet about religious beliefs encouraged believers to think that their beliefs were universally held or at least respected, among other things. Changing that, pushing back against the status quo, made a big difference.
In Australia I don't really hearing much of an anti-monarchy argument in school, but also not a pro-monarchy argument either. There was just a statement of fact about the monarchy that we live in.
Society as a whole maintains it. As long as not enough people object strenuously enough, it simply doesn’t get discussed and continues on the way it is - that’s pretty much the definition of status quo, “the existing state of affairs”.
> I've only heard about it being discussed in an objective manner.
I doubt that. What’s an example? Objectively, the existence of a monarchy is opposed to the ideals of an egalitarian society. Any discussion of a monarchy’s mere existence without covering such topics serves to reinforce the status quo - it normalizes its existence and lies by omission about its negative impacts.
In Australia, I think fear of getting something like the US political system is why the monarchy is somewhat tolerated. (Though it wouldn’t survive a simple popular vote, the question is what is the “better” thing to replace it with, which monarchists successfully use as a wedge to divide the republican supporters)
There is indoctrination and manipulation going on at all levels. Can't speak about the Netherlands or Denmark, but in Spain the press never published anything remotely negative about the previous king, we typically had to find out from foreign press or minority separatist press. At one point, there was so much stench of degeneracy and corruption from that king (plus the ascent of a left-wing party with anti-monarchy tendencies in polls) that the powers that be apparently decided that it wasn't possible to keep the people content about him anymore, so they made him abdicate.
Now the press does talk somewhat about his exploits (probably disproportionally little, but it does) while the current king is reported as basically a saint and nothing remotely bad is ever said about him (to his credit he doesn't seem as much of a thief as his father, but if you read the mainstream Spanish press, you would think he pisses gold).
That's at least definitely not the case in NL. There's been quite vocal criticisms about the kings choice to go on holiday during the pandemic, about subsidies for royal estates that are closed to the public, etc.
The right to protest is important, but there's a different between disruption and protest that I feel you're overlooking.
> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration.
This sounds like you'll be arrested if you leap in front of the motorcade, scream something in church, etc. Not if you carry a sign protesting the monarch along the route
Indeed they were arrested and held for 16 hours on the basis of 'being equipped for locking on'. An newly created offence barely a week old.
They had cargo ties to hold their placards during transit. Of no practical use for locking on.
The metropolitan police has since says it 'regrets they were unable to join other protestors'.
Between this and the online safety bill there are some dreadful dacronian laws making it onto the statue books in the UK in recent months. Compounding other forms of monitoring and criminalising speech under hate and anti terror laws.
Many people have a cavalier attitude about someone "being arrested" but it's actually the violent and comprehensive denial of all basic human rights, often done on a whim. We should be reserving such an extreme measure for people who represent a real and urgent threat of violence, and almost never otherwise.
Our tolerance towards arrest as a routine procedure is, to me, baffling and unjustifiable.
Not quite. According to the protestors, they had ties that were supposedly going to be used to secure the placards to things as part of the protest (presumably to railings). Any tie that could be used to secure the pole on a placard to something could obviously be used by protestors to lock their own body to the same thing, and the Met are a bit twitchy about this due to having repeated problems with it over the last few years and especially months. (That's also why there's now a law allowing them to stop protestors before they lock themselves to things in the first place.)
Cable ties, luggage straps or string should be of no concern. They're very easily cut by the police, even if the person is uncooperative.
"Lock on" protesters have used things like bicycle locks and handcuffs to shackle themselves to railings or each other. These are difficult to cut without injuring the person, especially if they're not cooperating.
I'd argue cable ties, straps and string aren't capable of causing "serious disruption", and I assume the police/prosecutor agree. It's very concerning that the police made the arrests anyway.
(I also disagree with the law, but I'm more concerned that the police abused it.)
Considering the Met have officially apologised and announced "regret" for the specific arrests that were allegedly for that reason, it's hard to care about that excuse any more.
The protestors arrested say a) they were reversible plastic straps (i.e. no use for human locking on at all), and b) they had discussed their plans with the official police liaison team who approved it all before the event, then the police on the ground refused to care about that nor tried to discuss with the liaison team while making the arrests.
There's also various clips going round, for example this police officer saying they "might" arrest people just for chanting "not my king". Which is just blatantly wrong, albeit possibly down to incompetent officers as much as bad policy (though bad policy seems likely). https://twitter.com/francesleach_/status/1654789805685854208...
They, in fact, do do it on a regular basis. See, for example, the multiple occasions on which they've arrested accredited journalists for covering Just Stop Oil protests, only to apologise a day or two later as if it's perfectly natural their officers didn't realise journalists are allowed to cover protests without being arrested.
>>Any tie that could be used to secure the pole on a placard to something could obviously be used by protestors to lock their own body to the same thing
Nonsense, all you need to tie a sign to a pole is a piece of string that wouldn't hold a human body. If they want to keep that legislation in it should be specific - things like handcuffs, heavy chains with padlocks.....even that I think is an overreach, but it would be better than whatever the law says now.
Exactly - if you take too broad a view, then the protesters having arms and fingers could be considered devices for 'locking on' to something.
Personally I think this has generated renewed interest and publicity for the republican movement, which means in a way, the protest has been a success due to the police action.
The law says there's an offence "attach themselves to another person, to an object or to land" — which could include holding hands — but for "being equipped" it needs to be an object: "A person commits an offence if they have an object with them in a place other than a dwelling with the intention that it may be used in the course of or in connection with the commission by any person of an offence under section 1(1) (offence of locking on)."
I'll not be at all surprised if later this year the Metropolitan Police arrest protesters from linking arms while surrounding a building or blocking a road.
For the record I do not think locking on should be criminalised in general in the first place, much less for it to be preemptively policed based the discretion of some copper.
I think you (and, judging by the moderation, other people on HN) mistakenly believe I don't support the right to protest, I very much do, and have a habit of supporting (both financially and otherwise) various civil liberties organizations.
However I do like to see logical, robust arguments.
> "Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low."
> "We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration."
(and then later)
> And yet... people were arrested for having signs along the route.
Be clear in what it is you object to. It seems like you want to attack the hypocrisy of arresting non-disruptive protests.
Quoting the police saying disruption will not be be allowed, when instead you are concerned about non-disruptive protesters being arrested, weakens and distracts from your argument.
I personally am against both the newly passed legislation, and against police arresting people for not even breaking the ridiculous new laws. I'll complain about both :)
Sure. Here's an example of a more robust response, written from you to me, borrowing some of Silas' points:
> Personally I support disruptive action (insert rationale here).
> Furthermore, the talk of disruptive action is frequently used to mask action against non-disruptive protest. People were arrested for having signs along the route. Others they were arrested and held for 16 hours on the basis of 'being equipped for locking on' which were actually cargo ties to hold their placards during transit - of no practical use for locking on."
By responding to the current topic, before bringing up the other, it strengthens your points on both.
Note that there were quite significant peaceful and good natured anti-monarchy protests over the weekend, and the vast majority of those taking part weren't arrested. So, we're obviously not talking about some widespread systematic crackdown on protest at this stage, but rather what appears to be a very bad call on the part of (some?) Met officers. At this stage it's too early to know why these individuals ended up being arrested, but it seems to me like some officers on the ground hugely overstepped the mark and I hope the arrested parties get a good settlement out of it.
However. There is clearly wider context that makes having a fair discussion about this difficult.
On the side against the police and government, there have been far too many instances in the past few years of bad calls, misconduct and, in some cases, using the position of authority to sexually abuse or murder women. There have also been reports finding evidence of systemic racism, homophobia and misogyny within the Met. These do not appear to be isolated incidents. It would appear the Met has a serious cultural problem, and the new Met police chief has admitted this is the case. There hasn't been any real discussion on whether authoritarianism is a factor, but police officers are bound to lean towards authoritarianism and would imagine that's makes them likely to abuse their power. On top of that, this recent police powers bill has been rushed through and hasn't been scrutinised as much as it probably would have been if they weren't working to the deadline of the coronation.
On the other hand, there have been a lot of disruptive protests lately causing, I think it is fair to say, a level of havoc that is not considered by most British people to be a protected form of protest. The Just Stop Oil, Animal Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion protests in particular have illegal disruption as an explicit goal. They have been blocking roads, gluing themselves to trains, throwing paint over art at galleries and have publicly stated they have plans to step up the disruption. The majority of Brits do not support this form of protest and have been demanding the police crack down on them, and I suspect there would have been a huge level of criticism against the police if they had allowed one of these groups to disrupt the coronation. Demonstrations and organised marches aren't controversial, but few people consider these new disruptive tactics to be a legal expression of protest. The other thing to consider is despite the recent issues, the UK is one of the countries where you are least likely to experience any sort of police brutality or corruption, and despite the coronation being controversial and attended by many thousands, only 52 people were arrested over the weekend, which is pretty good going for such a major event.
Personally, I'm sympathetic to these protest movements and agree with their goals, but we need to have a limit to what we consider protected protest. If they still want to take part in illegal protest and risk prosecution for political purposes, that is entirely up to them to decide whether their cause is worth that. But obviously we need to make sure the crack down on those sorts of groups doesn't spill over into limiting free expression as it has done here, and any police officer with these kind of authoritarian tendencies ought to be screened out of the police.
The people they arrested for giving out rape alarms were part of a charity who are in central london every weekend giving them out to women at night - they were arrested the night before, i.e. a very weird time for them to be out if their intention was to protest, and I've not heard anything about the police having any actual reason to believe these people intended to protest at all?
>The police found placards and “items which at the time they had reasonable grounds to believe could be used as lock-on devices,” according to the statement, and arrested six people “on suspicion of going equipped for locking on.”
>The protesters who were arrested said that the devices were in fact luggage straps to fasten banners. After the police investigation failed to prove that anyone had intended to use the straps to lock on, all six had their bail canceled and no further action would be taken against them, the police said.
The police themselves have expressed "regret" over the arrests and made personal apologies to those arrested. [0]
Now, I doubt the sincerity of that regret, but the fact that they're choosing that message at all means there's no cause for a devil's advocate here. It's a bad law, poorly implemented.
I disagree, from a UK government perspective, its a excellent law, implemented perfectly.
Yeah, there was a little backlash this time. The police have issued an apology, maybe a few front line officers will be disciplined (somewhat unlikely), then it'll all be forgotten and next time it will barely make the news, and after that its just an everyday occurrence.
The opposition (Labour) party is refusing to say they will repeal the legislation if they win the next election, they haven't said they won't, that's not the politicians way, but what they did say was “We can’t come into office, picking through all the conservative legislation and repealing it” [0].
make no mistake this isn't a law our government wants, its a law our parliament wants, both sides of the house, and it is here to stay, whether we the people want it or not.
It's almost like people that want power and control become politicians to enact laws that give them power and control... Maybe we need some kind of checks and balances on the power of parliament, or maybe, the desire to be a politician should make you ineligible for the role.
Yes, many people who crave power and control will gravitate to positions of authority. In many cases it's a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, a personality disorder, that causes it. The behavior is compulsive, they have to be in control at all times. And there is a cluster of symptoms that come together, it's possible to spot this.
No point shooting yourself in the foot when you're this clear in front... Ammendements will be made, I'm confident of that, when they actually have the power to do so.
They might as a concession for confidence and supply from the Liberal Democrats. Which might suit all involved since the lib dems could be blamed in such an event.
The same police that had the chief say "oh they weren't supposed to, he he he" when people were arrested for quietly holding A4-sized signs a few months ago on this topic.
They're fascists. That used to be hyperbole, but now they're actually arresting people for their peaceful opinions on the government.
Yes, that is because the Overton window has shifted so far towards authoritarianism. If it didn't the Police would find resistance both within, from the population and from the government as well.
People should hold up a blank piece of paper, that echoes what people do in russia to protest against the war.
Interesting to contrast the (sometimes) global opinion that the US First Amendment is too extremist with the current situation in the UK arising in part from the lack of such an extremist "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" framework.
That's how far the Overton window has shifted, when the 1st Amendement of the US Constitution is being branded as "extremist". What dark times we are living in....
And he whole society is shifting in the process, the public becomes more tolerant of the erosion of liberty. While the government starts to clamp down on our freedoms more than ever before. That is how we arrived at the place we are at now, with widespread mass surveillance and censorship.
All supposedly accepted by the public in the name of "safety". With the public maybe so accustomed to that feeling of supposed safety that they might actually oppose rolling back the surveillance in some cases?
> That's how far the Overton window has shifted, when the 1st Amendement of the US Constitution is being branded as "extremist".
The US’ freedom of expression rights are so much stronger than any other state I’m aware of that calling them extreme is quite accurate. There’s nothing like the First Amendment in any other country.
Yes, the US is at the forefront of individual liberty, it is highly advanced in this respect. And it is likely the reason for its economic prosperity over the decades.
Many of the other countries in the world are collectivist. The recent shift in the Overton Window is a regression towards pre-Enlightenment values.
I doubt the police would express regret for enforcing the law, however bad a particular law may be. I'm pretty sure they are expressing regret knowing they acted unlawfully even under the new law.
The Republic protest was a planned protest, ie they were co-ordinating with the police for weeks beforehand about what they were going to do, where and when, which the Met told them was ok[1]. Then on the morning they were arrested, and have now been released and not charged.
Just to clarify, my comment is not passing any judgment or offering any analysis. I intend to provide context in the aftermath of this weekend, and why I assume this has been posted and voted to the top of the homepage.
Of course there is nuance, and not all "protest" activities can be justified.
I was replying to: "protest is meant to be disruptive".
Speaking in a public place is free speech.
Interrupting a motorcade is not free speech. Pushing people around to get in from of cameras is neither.
By the way, I'm using these two possible behaviours as examples of disruptive actions that do not constitute free speech. I'm not stating that people in London were arrested due to such behaviours.
Depends entirely on the kind of interruption. Remember that a mortorcade is itself already a disruption of the normal use of a public space.
> Pushing people around to get in from of cameras is neither. By the way, I'm using these two possible behaviours as examples of disruptive actions that do not constitute free speech. I'm not stating that people in London were arrested due to such behaviours.
Yes, that's called a strawman. And you are using very imprecise language to boot - pushing people around can describe a number of behaviors from a gentle nudge to ouright assault.
Saying that protests should be allowed to be disruptive does also not mean that any kind of disruption needs to be accepted. Obviously if a protest prevents effectively detains you it is not ok. But having to take a slight detour or hearing people say things you want to ignore, that's something that is effectively required for a protest to have any result at all.
> is effectively required for a protest to have any result at all
I'll say it again: you don't have the right to expect that your protest be successful.
Democracy (and the UK isa democracy) means that the status quo is fine for the majority of the people. If anyone had the right to change things at their whim, that would become a dictatorship.
Protesting is to inform people at large of a problem you feel important, but the solution cannot be up to you alone. And if you can't even convince people to listen to you without coercing them, why do you think your protest should be successful?
Am I not exercising free speech if I talk over you? Why is interrupting a motorcade any different? Motorcades are arguably expressions in and of themselves.
> Am I not exercising free speech if I talk over you?
In civilized places, we do not talk over another. We take turns to speak.
> Why is interrupting a motorcade any different?
It is not different indeed. They are both wrong. Especially if the motorcade is organized by the public authority in a democracy, and the protestor is a small group in search of an audience that could not be bothered to listen to their arguments.
And you're overlooking the fact that laws always appear to solve some trouble or evil, even if the definition of said trouble is nonsensical or evil itself.
The most frustrating thing for me is that whenever you talk to people in the UK about this stuff you notice there is this cultural attitude that if you're sticking your neck out too much that its somehow your fault.
People here don't care about being monitored by CCTV because they believe that so long as you keep your head down you'll be fine – and that any respectable person is going to keep their head down anyway.
You'll also find a lot of people here just dislike the act of protest in general. Again, I think it's because protest involves drawing attention to yourself which a large percentage of people here dislike on an instinctive level. So you find even the most agreeable protests seem to receive some level of pushback and shame which I think bleeds into our attitude towards policing. That said, I don't know what it's like in other countries. I just get the sense that the UK has a much more conformist attitude which enables the state to take a more authoritarian approach to policing protest here.
As an example, I'm not an anti-monarch but I was extremely angry about how the police handled anti-monarch protestors during the coronation. Yet when I've spoken to people about this over the weekend, most people have expressed to me that it was rude for there to be protestors at the coronation... But that's the point of protest!! Still, this doesn't change the fact that the act of protest is largely incompatible with our otherwise polite and conformist culture.
> As an example, I'm not an anti-monarch but I was extremely angry about how the police handled anti-monarch protestors during the coronation.
This is exactly my position too.
And if you force me to chose between a) democracy, free speech and right to protest OR b) a monarchy, then I will very quickly become an anti-monarchist.
The fact that the government felt that they had to rush in legislation in the last week which was - completely predictably - used to detain people unlawfully, to save possible embarrassment during the coronation, has done nothing to improve my view of our monarchy whatsoever.
I struggle to believe that this would have happened without some sort of implicit or explicit pressure from Buckingham Palace. They did afterall have veto rights on aspects of BBC coverage [0] so it seems highly unlikely to me that they weren't also working with the government to attempt to "contain" possible protests.
As someone who is anti-monarch I have to admit that this seems like the logical extension of monarchy and exactly what democracy is meant to help with. Can I ask why someone wouldn't be anti-monarch in 2023?
Let's be clear here, the UK isn't a monarchy, we just have a monarch who has effectively zero power and simply serves as a hereditary head of state.
As for why I support this, I think it makes sense diplomatically to have an apolitical head of state and I also believe the British monarch functions similarly to second amendment in the US. If the UK ever needed to revolt against the government the monarch serves as way in which the public (and armed forces) could side with the state over the government. I cannot express how much I like that our armed forces swear allegiance to a largely powerless Monarch that represents the state rather than Rishi Sunak.
However, getting back on topic here, the fact the UK has a monarch in my opinion has zero relevance to the fact the UK is becoming a place increasingly hostile to protest. Instead, it seems to me to be far more to do with the fact our two major political parties both have authoritarian tendencies, which I suspect stems from the UK having cultural values which lend themselves to certain kinds of authoritarian social policies.
Specifically, laws around limiting "improper" behaviour like rowdy protests, being rude online, and consuming porn that's a little too edgy seem to be ways in which our dislike of improper behaviour manifest politically. In most ways we're quite a liberal society, but there are certain ways that our conformist and overly polite nature seems to work its way into our politics via democracy – protest perhaps being the most clear example of something that people here seem to struggle with since freedom of expression requires an acceptance of impoliteness.
> Let's be clear here, the UK isn't a monarchy, we just have a monarch who has effectively zero power and simply serves as a hereditary head of state.
The article we're commenting on makes it very clear that the UK is a monarchy and that the monarch has the power to disrupt public life at great expense to the public and to have said public arrested for offending them.
> The article we're commenting on makes it very clear that the UK is a monarchy
It absolutely doesn't. The article doesn't even mention the word monarchy.
It was written before the recent arrests at the coronation.
We can talk about what influence the monarchy may try to exert on the government behind the scenes (and I believe there will be some - and there shouldn't be) but back channeling aside, our democratically elected government is the body which runs our country, not the monarchy, and therefore is correctly the target of this article.
Your statement is somewhat contradictory. The monarch has zero power but also controls the military and can violently oppose the government? He’s also powerful enough that people can be arrested for protesting his coronation. Democracy was created precisely because history shows people will be consistently oppressed when they don’t govern themselves.
> Specifically, laws around limiting "improper" behaviour like rowdy protests, being rude online, and consuming porn that's a little too edgy seem to be ways in which our dislike of improper behaviour manifest politically.
Jimmy Saville was way worse than any porn, yet his main enabler just became king. The outrage about the “impolite” seems very unevenly distributed.
> If the UK ever needed to revolt against the government the monarch serves as way in which the public (and armed forces) could side with the state over the government. I cannot express how much I like that our armed forces swear allegiance to a largely powerless Monarch that represents the state rather than Rishi Sunak.
> Can I ask why someone wouldn't be anti-monarch in 2023?
The sibling comment by kypro [0] answers this question much better than I could have. But at the same time, I'm not the British Royal Family's most diehard supporter by any means.
The legislation has been on the way for a while as a response to XR and others. It certainly aligns with royal interests, but I don't think you need to look any further than Braverman and the hang'em-and-flog'em electorate she appeals to for a source.
> rude to for there to be protestors at the coronation
Many monarchists are offended by republican views. For that reason alone, I would have recommended against a republican demonstration in the middle of a large crowd of monarchists (if I'd been asked!)
Also, I don't think republicanism is very widespread among cops, a group of people that tend to have an authoritarian mindset.
I think some people have a sense that the monarchy "is theirs", as if this hyper-privileged family were their own children.
I didn't watch any of the coronation coverage on purpose, but it's been devliishly difficult to avoid. Something that struck me is that many of the most ardent monarchists in the crowd seemed to be yanks and aussies. I find that really weird.
> Something that struck me is that many of the most ardent monarchists in the crowd seemed to be yanks and aussies. I find that really weird.
It's not weird if you consider that only foreigners who give a shit will bother to come. Add that to them this whole thing is distant enough to treat it as a theme park where they can larp their mediaval fantasies and it only makes sense.
Regarding CCTV, in my time, there used to be much opposition to the government installing such systems, but they kinda snuck in through the backdoor, being setup and run by private companies and individuals (A quick google seem to indicate this is still the case).
We've handed over many public spaces to private interests and cctv proliferated that way, arguably with even less oversight than had the gov done it.
This is happening in New Zealand now[1]. The public has been pretty clear that it doesn want a surveillance state. The police just worked with private business to set up the feeds.
More of this is to come. There are talks about Palantir (you know, Thiels profitable firm) working with the NHS.
But I'm not sure what the state of that is no.
By and large the UK feels like a gutted country, where every scavenging corporation took one organ and left.
>As an example, I'm not an anti-monarch but I was extremely angry about how the police handled anti-monarch protestors during the coronation.
The monarchy is classism personified.
Do you not think that by not being anti-monarchy you're tacitly OK with a class based society, and that's a part of where the conformism comes from - class identity?
Bear in mind the various loyalty swearing that goes on - MPs, Armed Forces, Police, is loyalty sworn first and foremost to the Monarch - implicitly a person at the top of a heirarchy of class.
> Do you not think that by not being anti-monarchy you're tacitly OK with a class based society, and that's a part of where the conformism comes from - class identity?
No. Newborn babies aren't anti-monarchy either. Are they part of the problem? This rhetoric of "silence is violence" is deeply polarizing.
We aren't born with rights unless there are people living at the time of our birth willing to fight for those rights. I mean, monarchy exists with supporters today despite being against the basic human rights you assert we are all born with.
Speed limits on roads exist; if someone's speeding, it's a question of enforcement.
Similarly, we're born with human rights as ratified in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. To your point, they're moot if not enforced -- I get that. But it's easier to enforce what exists than to fight for the original law.
We could be born with human rights as ratified by the Flying Spaghetti Monster and it would be just as meaningless. Enforcement is equally meaningless if there is no recognition of authority.
Why does the UN get to dictate human rights and not some other body? Did those human rights exist before the UN or not?
> Bear in mind the various loyalty swearing that goes on - MPs, Armed Forces, Police, is loyalty sworn first and foremost to the Monarch - implicitly a person at the top of a heirarchy of class.
After the New Model Army chopped off a previous monarch's head (they purged parliament and the remaining MPs passed legislation that found King Charles I guilty of treason) I can see why subsequent monarchs were somewhat keen to have an oath of Loyalty.
UK doesn't have free speech, think that culturally makes a big difference compared to how Americans look at these issues. Gotta remember they have a birth right to rattle cages and say anything while the UK does not. Changes "I don't agree with it but they do have a right to say it" to "I don't agree with it..."
There is a world of difference between free speech and the right to voice your opinion, and interfering with other people's right to go about their business unimpeded.
What we call 'The King's Peace' is the British sense of fair play. You can do whatever you like as long as you don't interfere with my equal right to do the same. Where those two try to occupy the same space, then the current majority opinion will prevail and the minority suppressed.
Breaching the King's Peace is a public order offence.
The right to protest in the UK is the right to be heard and listened to voluntarily, not to dominate proceedings or act in a manner that heads towards terrorism. Where there is intelligence that physical disruption was on the cards, the authorities are right to step in and head it off. That is the British way.
Most people in the UK still support the monarchy. Nobody stopped Spiked publishing their views on Republicanism, and nobody was forced to read it. That's free speech.
If the individuals objecting had waved a few placards and otherwise been respectful to those whose views differ from their own they would have been left alone. They didn't do that and were removed. I suspect that was the idea since that leads to greater publicity.
> The right to protest in the UK is the right to be heard and listened to voluntarily
A bit difficult to get heard once you get arrested for having violated no law… Funny that when putin does this to political opponents he's a dictator, but king charles is a great guy uh?
Hear hear, though that doesn't stop everyone asking me about the royal family all the time. It follows me around like a disease. From living abroad I get the feeling that the royal family is a lot more popular abroad than it is at home.
It may come off as low-effort, but "V for Vendetta" seems more and more accurate. Keep calm, don't draw attention, everything will be fine if we just go along with it - until things are not fine, and they come for you. By then, the mechanisms of state control have been well exercised on those who stood up earlier.
Has King Charles made any efforts or donated any money to causes that could help the people in this time of recession and retraction from the EU? I know he isn't supposed to be involved in politics, but if he doesn't speak as the "conscious of a nation" then he really does seem without purpose at great cost.
Versailles brings in more money and the head of the monarch didn't need to remain attached to the rest of the body for the home to still be a tourist attraction.
> most people have expressed to me that it was rude for there to be protestors at the coronation...
Yes, it was.
> But that's the point of protest!!
No, it is not.
From Cambridge Dictionary: "protest": a strong complaint expressing disagreement, disapproval, or opposition.
You can express your dissenting opinions without being rude. And, by the way, the monarchy has been in UK for centuries, and it is still there: if you don't like it, you have any day available to protest. No need to pick that particular day when you can be most disruptive.
Nobody is condemning the rudeness against the royal family, but against all the people who like to give special treatment to the royal family for whatever reason, and especially to all the people who just want to keep giving special treatment to the royal family because it has been so since their grandparents were born.
Those people are complicit with all of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the royal family. Without them, the monarchy could be abolished. They are the very source of the problem.
> if you don't like it, you have any day available to protest.
There are people thinking that we should not spend our public money on the monarchy. This viewpoint is absolutely topical on the very day when a large chunk of money is being spent on celebrating something they don't want to celebrate.
If you think that is rude, bad for you. Sometimes people will be rude to you and you have to take it.
> There are people thinking that we should not spend our public money on the monarchy.
They may be right, they may be wrong. They surely have the right to express their opinions. But the fundamental question is: who cares? Or, actually: how many people care?
If enough people cared, that would be on the agenda of a major political party. If it isn't, they have to suck it up.
> But the fundamental question is: who cares? Or, actually: how many people care?
I don't know. But I care about their right to shout their slogans and wave their placards more than I care about the existence or non-existence of the monarchy.
Why should your right to be seen be more important than the right of the government to organize a nice party for an event that will be in history books?
You have the right to protest, but the others must retain the right to ignore you. You talking in the centre of the public square, in the middle of the market, is ok; you screaming in my ear is not.
The right to ignore someone else is not the right to have police arrest and remove them without charges because you don't like the opinion they're expressing. That's fascism.
Wow, that's quite the leap. Peacefully attending a public gathering in yellow shirts with printed slogans is nowhere near the violent insurrection perpetrated on Jan 6, 2021. You are approaching "Hitler was a vegan" territory.
"Peacefully attending a public gathering in yellow shirts with printed slogans" is my perfect definition of a protest. You take a message with you, I can read it and decide whether I'm interested in joining your protest or just go on with my life.
My comment's parent called me authoritarian because I said that printing the message on my car would not be acceptable.
Authoritarianism has clearly been feeling its way into the UK ever since the 90s when they put up CCTV cameras everywhere. The UK effectively has an inherently and self-evidently illegitimate government based on its own actions and words, as do most western governments at this point.
These types of bills/laws are those of authoritarian governments fearful of its own population wising up to what has happened or what the authoritarians are up to and they want to make sure they can snuff out any little bit of burgeoning opposition before it can organize and get off the ground. It’s the repression part of 1984 style government. It’s the same thing all authoritarian, evil governments do, regardless of how long they can get away with it or how much the brainwashed masses go along with it, even if just out of fear.
Yes, when you think about it on a fundamental level, having so many CCTV cameras recording people's movements everywhere is absolutely dystopian. It's incredible that it got this bad and there wasn't a backlash against it from the general public.
The presence of the cameras is a marker for what's going wrong with government and society. That the state is imposing the surveillance on us. And the people happen to tolerate it.
It has the potential to get worse, the Police are rolling out facial recognition, but by that time I will have left the UK for good, due to our civil liberties situation, in particular the forced encryption key disclosure laws.
I wonder if those cameras will ever go away. How long is it going to take, 20 years, 50 years, or even more?
When are we going to get our public spaces back? So we can be ourselves, be spontaneous, silly, eccentric, protest and so on, without experiencing the psychological effects of pervasive recording by the state. And thus the chilling effects.
It got pretty ridiculous at one point where one restaurant I knew of was told to put up 5 CCTV cameras by the police as a condition of their alcohol licence.
This wasn't a pack 'em and feed 'em booze restaurant, just a perfectly normal couples style restaurant.
Afaik the local council eventually reined the police in, but the police just don't seem to view any of it as a massive invasion of privacy, or consider the cost to the businesses involved.
There's only upsides for the police requesting more, no downsides as they don't bear the cost.
This is a reference to the Charles Stross's Laundry Files series. SCORPION STARE is a firmware update to CC cameras that allows any two cameras can look at a target and destroy it. Without too many spoilers, the first time it's used automatically, bad training data causes a lot of civilian casualties.
> The presence of the cameras is a marker for what's going wrong with government and society. That the state is imposing the surveillance on us.
I'll point out that the vast, vast majority of the UK's CCTV cameras are privately owned and installed, not connected together, but having worked in retail positions, an awful lot of them aren't even working or turned on and used soley for deterrance.
Like, going by this: https://clarionuk.com/resources/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-in... (which may or may not be accurate, looks like they did their work on it), cameras controlled by the Metropolitan Police, local councils and TfL come to less than 10% of the total.
Yes, if the public didn't accept it, then the insurance companies would not be able to get away with imposing it on us.
Maybe the state was the first to introduce the cameras, once the public got accustomed to them, then private actors were able to get away with it afterwards?
We also have the TfL London Underground and National Rail cameras, which are very likely to be linked to Police systems. Public transit is where people's movements can be tracked very effectively.
And we now have services such as Facewatch where these private cameras are networked. And the Ring doorbell cameras. No idea what intelligence agencies might be doing with that data? Running facial recognition on every video stream? Just as they did with people's webcam images (from the Snowden leaks).
The Amazon Ring camera might be a NSA, GHCQ or even an FBI camera "masquerading as a home surveillance device". They only need to process the images when motion is detected, which makes things a lot simpler.
And Amazon does have a lot of contracts with the government for cloud computing services. They wouldn't want to lose those, would they? So it's a distinct possibility, given what we learned from the Snowden leaks.
There are certainly authoritarian wings of the two main parties.
Though I can't help thinking that a big part of the creep is driven more by spineless pandering to various public constituencies and short term perceived vote winning rather than a particularly thought through desire to crush dissent.
Weren't all the CCTV's based on frequent bombings? We've seen in US, that based on 'a problem of the moment' there are new laws passed, like Homeland Security. Then years go by, it looks authoritarian, then everybody is calling it 1984, when really the people asked for it. It seems less like a grand government plan and more humans just Forest Gump'n themselves along into this situation.
Mob Rule is exactly how democracy is defined. When a government does things the mob does not like, then they are autocratic and authoritarian. When government does what the people want, suddenly it's mob rule and just going by the latest poling numbers. -- Can't really win, someone is blaming someone for something no matter what side.
The mob is generally not the whole populance but just a loud part. Let's not pretend that acting on (often manufactured) outrage is even remotely related to democratic rule.
Sure, but its hard to tell isn't it? This mob issue goes back to Plato. Even a majority can act like a 'mob' against its best interest. I just object when people start talking about 'Oh my god its 1984', 'the government is totally fascist'. When in reality, we meandered here. Decisions from 20 years ago look bad now, it doesn't mean the government now is some 'deep state conspiracy'.
For the world to turn into a surveillance state a la 1984 does not require a deep state conspiracy. It's also worth mentioning that new generations come of age and grapple with the norms of their parents, wrestling with decisions made 20 years ago now. In any case, it would be foolish to think that the governments of the world are devoid of actors who would jump at any opportunity to increase their own power or wealth.
I agree with this. I'm just saying it can be confusing, because typically the doomsayers/1984/conspiracy's are on the right, and the right professes a love of individuality and freedom. But then the 'right', turn around really want to restrict 'freedom's for people they don't like, typically along religious grounds. So yes, governments can have bad actors. But figuring out who the 'mob' is, and who gets what freedoms, and how to solve the problems of democracy are really not clear cut. And maybe my point, I think a lot of the current situation is not bad-actors so much as idiocy. Is the government really a monolithic evil, or just top heavy with bafoons sitting over a large middle management just wondering what is for lunch.
Fewer bombings than I remember. -- I wonder if it is because bombs make a big splash, lot of flash for the news. The US kills many more people with guns, but it's so passé, old news, let them die. But a bomb, that gets people outraged, 'we have to do something'. Wonder if there is a racist component, bombs are something 'poor countries' use (brown/terrorist). But Killing with Guns is just a God Given right (white), "I should be free to kill".
More than anything else, there are fewer bombings today because the Irish dispute was settled through a political agreement. Violent republican separatism and monarchist unionism are, thankfully, now beyond the pale, for most of the political and social body in both Ireland and the UK today. May it stay so.
> The US kills many more people with guns, but it's so passé, old news, let them die. But a bomb, that gets people outraged, 'we have to do something'.
The United States has not, in the last century or so anyway -- maybe during Reconstruction -- actually experienced widespread targeted violence of the kind experienced in the UK and Ireland during the Troubles. More than 10,000 bombs exploded, many hundreds killed, many thousands injured. And that's just the bombs, not the shootings etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombings_during_the_Tr... Unlike American spree killers, most of these killings were highly targeted political acts. They weren't making a mountain of a molehill, in terms of the violence itself. It was a black mark for many decades for the two islands.
The people didn’t ask for it, they had a prepackaged idea sold to them leveraging the crisis of the moment (and even then it was controversial at the time.)
True of the Department of Homeland Security, true of many similar crisis responses.
> based on 'a problem of the moment' there are new laws passed
Well, a problem of the moment needs a solution now. I hear many fellow leftists complaining about several "authoritarian", "fascist" laws, but I've never heard a proposal for a law that would be less "authoritarian", or "fascist", while at the same time solving the actual problem we had in the first place.
The option you don't mention is to resist the pressure to change laws to fix the situation, but instead to work to fix the situation within the existing laws. That should be the first resort. "We have to do something* is not a recipe for good laws.
"We have to do something" is often just the reflection of reality. Whether it leads to good laws is secondary.
By the way, working "to fix the situation within the existing laws" fits the definition of "doing something", too. But complaining that a law is bad and the instead we should have done "something" does not look like a constructive criticism to me.
I am still unsure how I ultimately feel about the use of these technologies by government. I do believe that people want safety over all, and by most of the statistics I have seen, the UK is somewhat safer than before [1]. Is the government implementing these measures to take advantage of its people or to provide safety for them?
Is there any country in Europe not passing authoritarian laws?
In Sweden the current government is on its way to defund the largest opposition party.
The swedish riksdag recebtly (with broad support) changed the constitution to limit the freedom of speech.
Poland and Hungary are shitfests, with almost complete political control of the justice system.
Spain has increased the ability to give large civil fines, seemingly disconnected from the regular juridical process (please correct me on this one. My Spanish is sub-par).
Edit: my poland name-calling was apparently uncalled for. There are other bad things going on, with Kaczyński at the rudder.
It's just the trend of government. First there is chaos which sheds all law and order and supplants it with something else. Then it trends towards authoritarianism. Simple as that. Best case scenario is the trend is slow and a little of that chaos keeps it in check for a while.
It's a cliche at this point but this reality is what the American constitution was designed to combat.
>Poland and Hungary are shitfests, with almost complete political control of the justice system.
Not really true in Poland. They kinda tried to take it over from other political side, but failed, hard.
What's worst is that Polish justice system is, and always was, a shitshow in general - judges have deadlines, but no penalties for ignoring them... and they are only judged by other judges.
Complaining can get your case stonewalled, and there are plenty of catch-22 situations where you can't do anything.
And what current ruling party incompetently did basically destroyed any chances of that changing in next 10-20 years, or more.
Gross incompetence is the theme of current government.
> The swedish riksdag recebtly (with broad support) changed the constitution to limit the freedom of speech.
Source?
There's been a recurring theme where a Danish right wing extremist named Rasmus Paludan crosses the border every once in a while and burn's the Quran outside of various embassies for muslim-majority countries.
In 2020 there was a proposal to make it illegal on the basis of the consistent consequences of these actions (riots, damaged international relations, increased threat profile against the country ect). AFAIK, this proposal fizzled out and never lead anywhere.
> In Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) Press Freedom Index 2023, Sweden dropped one spot and ranks fourth. One reason is the new law against foreign espionage, which came into effect on January 1st of this year.
> The law, which makes it a crime to disclose information that may damage Sweden's relations with other states or organizations, has already had an impact on journalism.
> Last week, SVT chose to stop a publication for the first time citing the spy law, despite the fact that exceptions are allowed for journalistic purposes. The news concerned map images from the Pentagon Leak regarding Ukrainian energy supply.
This is incorrect: the Swedish police tried to ban Quran burning, which is mainly related to a Danish right-wing extremist, but it got quickly overturned by a court. Instead, they are trying to appease the authoritarian Erdogan with a new terrorism law so that he will let Sweden into the NATO. (From a quick overview, the law is not that bad; e.g. it mainly outlaws belonging to a terrorist group, etc.). Likewise, in Finland the local police made an absurd decision to accuse a protestor of defamation from carrying an Erdogan doll. There are no grounds whatsoever for such a decision in Finnish law.
In general, these things indicate how the much cherished and hard-fought rights can be sacrificed at the altar of geopolitics and/or security.
The changing tide in Sweden seems to be lost on those evaluating its level of freedom -- it ranks 4 on RSF's press freedom index, perfect marks on Freedom House, etc.
> Poland and Hungary are shitfests, with almost complete political control of the justice system.
That's not exactly true, Poland is a country where most of the judges are basically in open rebellion against the current government, and the government can't do shit about it.
Honestly it's pretty scary how easy it is to pass such legislation in the UK.
That's what happens when there's no written concise framework of government but centuries of "tradition" and "precedent" that are improvised upon, and which have no special threshold of change (e.g. to change the constitution in some countries requires a special assembly, or qualified majority, or plebiscite, etc.).
The devil (as ever) is in the detail though. A "proper, written constitution" is of little value if the next parliament can just amend it.
People seem to look across the pond with envy at the US, neatly forgetting the completely different arrangements that make their constitution hard to amend, and also forgetting the problems that arise from having a hard-to-amend constitution (e.g. the second amendment).
I don't really think US is really the amazing freedom loving place they're supposed to be either. There is plenty of spying on citizens, repression of whistleblowers and the like. Luke at Snowden, he should be rewarded in a truly freedom loving society.
The illusion of freedom is there but I personally think it's really a small fraction of rich people doing pretty much whatever they damn well please with very little oversight and hope of more equality.
Sure, so if we're going all the way down the route of "parliament is no longer sovereign" and throwing away the principle that no parliament can bind a future parliament (which has been a bedrock principle for a good while now), then that's... a view, certainly.
I wonder why they don't lead their manifesto with the statement "we believe that parliament should no longer be sovereign"?
> that no parliament can bind a future parliament (which has been a bedrock principle for a good while now)
It's that the excuse the UK uses when it breaks international agreements? And I wonder how it works for the ones it hasn't broken (e.g. Good Friday) or stuff like debts.
And things existing "for a good while" is a shitty reason for them to continue existing. The same could be applied to the monarch, or the legal system.
> It's that the excuse the UK uses when it breaks international agreements? And I wonder how it works for the ones it hasn't broken (e.g. Good Friday) or stuff like debts.
Any country is free to break whatever treaties they previously signed. There's just usually consequences to doing so, which is why we still have peace in Northern Ireland.
> And things existing "for a good while" is a shitty reason for them to continue existing. The same could be applied to the monarch, or the legal system.
Oh I completely agree. It's just that if you want to re-invent the wheel, you need to be realistic about how much work and disruption will be involved, and the knock-on effects there will be.
I think people underestimate how much expertise and knowledge we have baked into our system based on these long-standing principles, and what we'd lose by throwing them away.
Reading these, it strongly smells like they started with the answer and then worked backwards. It's not at all clear how you can start from the enumerated of rights and end up with "replace the crown with an elected policitian".
Similarly, there's a lot of hand-waving and contradiction. "The will of the people should be the basis of the authority of government." contradicts "Citizens have the right to be protected from tyranny, whether the tyranny of one or the tyranny of the majority;". If the will of the people is to deport all black people, then which institution is going to protect them? What protects that institution from being dismantled by the will of the people?
I'm no monarchist, but the republican movement really needs to put a bit more effort in than that. This stuff is hard.
Can you give an example of a law being deemed unlawful on common law basis?
My understanding is that typically precedent is used in the absence of statute law and for the interpretation of statute law, so a new law will typically override older precedents.
Perhaps it's up to a judge to decide which takes precedence if two statutes contradict each other, but really that shouldn't happen (Parliament employs lawyers to check for that sort of thing) and if a statute states explicitly that it overrides an earlier one then it does so, as I understand it.
(I'm not a lawyer, not even a competent amateur, just interested in this stuff and hoping someone will correct my misunderstandings.)
Oh, that's a great basis. Some random lord sued another random merchant in the 16th century and a judge decided whatever, how very useful as a legal base upon which to decide modern things. (Like that story which is the basis of contract law about some ships a couple of centuries ago).
It's quite sad how obsolete and overcomplicated for no reason whatsoever (as in, to understand a case today, you have to go dig up precedents going back centuries to understand how they might impact this case; no wonder there's entire professions, software, AI assistants to help lawyers navigate this quagmire) common law is, and how countries have stuck with it.
> Some random lord sued another random merchant in the 16th century
I think the point of "common law" is that the precedents describe laws that people basically understand, and they expect that what governs their behaviour now is the law they understand.
Statute law, especially modern statute law, tends to be a mess of exceptions, definitions and cross-references. It's all legalese, and only an expert can understand it. Plus, it's all subject to intepretation by the courts, so precedent affects statute law as well as common law. And unlike statutes, most court precedents aren't publicly accessible, unless you have access to a law library or Westlaw.
If you expect people to obey the law, then you need to express it in ways that people can understand. If they don't know what the law is, you can't expect them to comply.
One of the nice things about the US constitution is that it's mostly written in fairly plain English. I suppose that might be why many non-Americans admire it. One of the nastiest things about it, though, is that its so damned difficult to change.
The scariest legislation happened during WW1/WW2. If there’s a majority in parliament for press censorship, banning strikes outright, or sending millions of men to France without regard for their will then there’s no legal or traditional limit on what a parliamentary majority can do.
Not sure how much of that can be blamed on the system - countries with written constitutions and enumerated rights (United States, France) also implemented drafts and massively restricted individual freedoms during the wars.
The US even went so far as to imprison the leader of the Socialist Party for his opposition to the WWI draft and urging resistance. He ran his final presidential campaign from a prison cell.
Don't forget, in the UK, you legally must notify the police of any march or protest. The police can then say no, change where you protest, or impose any other condition[1]
And yet we decry the way China handled protests in Hong Kong. The UK population are blindly walking into deeper in to the dark ... but hey, as long as the McDonald's drive-thru is has milkshakes there's no problem?
Not in the UK, but I once organized a protest. I talked to the police beforehand. Their questions were very interesting: "Where? When? How many people? Will you have signs? Will the signs be on poles? What will the poles be made out of, and how thick will they be?" They didn't care about the act of protest, or about the content of the protest. They cared about the potential for sign poles to be used as clubs - about the potential for it to turn violent.
I must say, I think that's legitimately a concern for the police.
I'm sure 90%+ cases are legitimate concerns and even handed enforcement.
The issue is the legislation doesn't specify those things and just allows control of protests for basically any reason at the discretion of the police.
The police are not equipped to make those societal decisions IMHO, and the legislation is far far too loose.
Incidentally, the times when the legislation is abused tends to be the times when it matters greatly that it isn't.
In the UK, though the page I linked is a bit misleading:
Section 14 of the Public Order Act: - Public Assemblies
"As with Section 12, the senior officer may impose conditions on public assemblies, which he considers are reasonably necessary to prevent serious public disorder etc. Unlike Section 12, the conditions he may reasonably impose are in this case limited to specifying:
a) the numbers of people who may take part,
b) the location of the assembly, and
c) its maximum duration.
An assembly is defined by Section 16 of the Act as consisting of two people or more"
In effect, the police can limit the size, location and duration of an assembly at their discretion. That is, they can end it, make it so small it doesn't matter or move it to somewhere it doesn't matter.
I'm pretty sure that legal requirement is not only quite old but was put in place to stop literal, actual fascists from holding marches a few years before World War II.
Interesting perspective from Joshua Rozenberg, a fairly well-known legal commentator in the UK:
"The Public Order Act 2023 was passed by parliament exactly a week ago, on 2 May. Regulations were made that day by a Home Office minister bringing sections 1 and 2 — as well as several other sections — into force a day later, on 3 May.
"This is unusual for new criminal offences. A couple of months is usually allowed for the Home Office to issue a circular explaining how the new offence is to be used. Those at risk of committing the new offence — people who carry bicycle locks, for example — can learn how the law has changed and seek legal advice. Police forces have time to train their officers. Police lawyers might regard items that can easily be cut — luggage straps or cable-ties, for example — as not capable of leading to serious disruption.
"Only a day’s notice was given on this occasion, presumably so that the new law could be used against anyone intending to disrupt the Coronation. Home Office officials apparently wrote to demonstrators but it is not surprising that the subtleties of the new law did not filter down to front-line police in time." [1]
I'm absolutely not a supporter of the current UK government, and I think the met police are pretty incompetent when they're not being corrupt, but the above may partly explain some the weekend's events wrt protest.
(Personally I think its a bad law, created for authoritarian purposes, rushed into effect, and incompetently implemented by police who seem only too happy to protect the interests of the state over the freedom of citizens.)
Everything you quoted makes it sound like an overtly anti-freedom power grab meant to meet a minimum of resistance, and implemented specifically to control protestors at an event that was planned for months.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with "I'm not a supporter of the current government BUT" - it seems like the quote explains perfectly how bad it is.
> Everything you quoted makes it sound like an overtly anti-freedom power grab meant to meet a minimum of resistance, and implemented specifically to control protestors at an event that was planned for months.
I agree that that is the government's intention. I'm not sure the police are that smart.
> I'm not sure what you're trying to say with "I'm not a supporter of the current government BUT" - it seems like the quote explains perfectly how bad it is.
In pointing to a commentary that hypothesises that the rapid introduction of the legal powers may partly explain the police's heavy-handed behaviour, I'm not trying to excuse either the govt or the police. The may be multiple factors at work here: government authoritarianism, police complicity with that authoritarianism, and also police confusion.
It was blatently obvious the police were going to release the Republic protestors without charge, even if they have to pay them compensation. The Establishment didn't want anyone questioning their relevance. If this wasn't the case the BBC would have reported these arrests on Saturday.
One simple bullshit apology later and they have plausible deniability. "Oh, we'll learn a lesson for next time Charles has a coronation"
The UK has been watching Canada. Our Prime Minister had people's bank accounts frozen and their vehicles impounded and hundreds charged with mischief for attending a peaceful, albeit 3 week long protest in our capital. There was NO violence, no vandalism, no injuries and certainly no deaths and yet our PM chose to use the strongest law in the land, the one reserved for emergency situations like invasion or nuclear attack, to lock down protesters. Their primary crime was being too loud and too long.
The Met decided they needed to be seen to act to remove the "dangerous" rape alarms, but the easiest way to do that was to arrest these poor folks (https://twitter.com/ProfColinDavis/status/165561644937587509...). The police knew they knew were around and had rape alarms because that's their job and the police gave them the alarms.
There’s a similar crime in China called “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, it’s definition is so vague that the law enforcement has been abusing it and locking up whoever they want (especially those who go against CCP) for picking quarrels and provoking troubles… a very popular personality (Luo Xiang) who has been well known in China for spreading legal knowledge on Chinese social media was shadow banned due to him urging online the government to amend the law and get rid of this crime.
There's definitely a balance to be struck between allowing protests to take place and also preventing a minority of protestors disrupting the lives of ordinary people.
But when they organised "rings of steel" around the city, preventing drivers from coming and going about their business, as they did on a few occasions, they had gone too far.
I don't know the full details of the anti-monarchist arrests, but unless they were planning to disrupt the events, I feel they should not have been arrested.
But I would argue that the Cornoation is an important public ceremony / event with every right to go ahead.
It's the same as when a foreign head of state visits and the police cordon off the roads for security.
In my view, this is different to pressure or protest groups disrupting traffic or public events.
If President Biden visits the UK, people should not be able to stop his going about a state visit. But they should be allowed to protest with banners and so on if they so wish.
Protesting itself is meant to be disruptive though - otherwise what's the point?
You can stand around in a group in a fenced off corner and make some noise and no one will care.
You can annoy people, disrupt a small part of their lives and suddenly they will have an opinion on what you are protesting about, but also an opinion on what protesting should be.
Disruptive protests do eventually change the little part of the world around you, for better or worse.
Quite. A protest is supposed to be disruptive. Disruptions isn't violence.
What next, strikes that you can only do while working?
Perhaps we should only be allowed to criticise government with prior written permission where we detail the criticism and they can veto or censor it? ... oh wait, like marches and protests[1]
If a pressure group closed off the main roads into a city in protest of some government policy, is that the kind of disruption that should be tolerated? If yes, where do we draw the line in tiny groups being able to grind the operation of society to a halt?
We draw the line at violence, destruction, direct harm.
Look I get roads being closed is crap, and you could argue that if they don't allow emergency services through then they're doing direct harm.
A protest isn't supposed to be defined, it is outrage expressed. We're supposed to look and listen and think about how a big enough group of people to be disruptive felt the need.
It isn't tolerated, that's the point.
Note: Blocking roads is directly addressed in Section 137 of the Highways Act 1980 which prevents you from ‘wilfully obstructing the free passage along a highway without lawful authority or excuse’. This police power is often used to remove demonstrators who are standing outside buildings, sitting down blockading entrances or roads and in many public order situations.
I'm conflicted because there are parts of this bill that are awful and massively chilling to free speech, but also within it are provisions to make the areas directly outside abortion clinics free from harassment by anti-choice groups.
But isn't that how they get you? By lumping in some common sense good stuff with some dystopian crap. If they really wanted to fix the issue at abortion clinics they could have done that in a small quick bill.
It is a smaller scale version of the cameron government that cut everything to the bone, but they legalised gay marriage (though needed labour votes to actually get it done) so they aren't the bad guys, right? (obviously that was separate bills but I think the point works on a larger scale too)
I've not heard about that being a big issue here on the first place, and it absolutely doesn't justify the blatant dismantling of our democracy.
They've been gradually pushing fascist laws into place for years, this is just the latest in a long stream. I honestly don't understand why nobody seems more concerned about stuff like this.
> I've not heard about that being a big issue here on the first place, and it absolutely doesn't justify the blatant dismantling of our democracy.
As someone who lives within walking distance of an abortion clinic, I can say that it is a very serious issue and money is pouring in to anti-choice groups in the UK.
Political apathy is at an all time low in the UK it feels like. We've had political upheaval after upheaval in the last 10-15 years, be it Brexit, Covid-19, Tory Austerity, the Coalition government, rising Scottish Independence sentiments, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and Truss almost singlehandedly rocketing inflation to something we haven't seen since the financial crisis in the early 2000's.
People are exhausted by a never-ending parade of scandals. The conservative government should have been out in 2019, but were saved by having a socialist, Corbyn led opposition party that did not resonate with any of their centrist Blairite voter base. Labour crumbled into infighting, and the Conservatives swept up another 48 seats.
Most people just want to keep their heads down and make it through this period of financial uncertainty, waiting out until the next general election so they can oust the Conservatives. Of course the Tories are going to try and sneak in as much abhorrent policy as they can in the time they have left.
Labour have been captured by the fringe outside of its own party
I hear this a lot from a lot of people in and around the Labour Party, but no one seems to agree on who is 'inside' and who is 'outside'. Which fringe are you referring to? The "Blairite" fringe or the "Corbynista" fringe.
>Political apathy is at an all time low in the UK it feels like.
Do you mean all time high? "Apathy" means a "lack of interest or concern"[1], so "all time low lack of interest or concern" would suggest political interest is at an all time high due to double negatives ("low lack").
The problem with the Tories is that they have imposed some of the highest levels of personal taxation ever seen. If the Conservatives are not a low tax party, then they lose their whole purpose and we get the Labour-lite Davos-man bunch of incompetents we have now.
Is harassment by religious fanatics right outside abortion clinics actually a problem anywhere in the West but the US? Europe doesn't really have the US-type fundamental evangelical movements at all, and Catholics are for the most part a pretty chill bunch.
A massive problem with political issues in the UK is that the US constantly tries to export their bullshit to us. So yes, unfortunately there is a problem with it - although no where near the scale of the US. There's also a problem that failed politicians on the far right in the UK can essentially fund their entire political projects with support from US interests trying to push us further right.
USA's biggest export has always been culture. Western countries without legally-mandated (weaker) cultures have pretty much always just absorbed American culture wholesale. We are seeing Canada's attempt to protect a Canadian identity now with laws that Netflix and Spotify have to carry at least 30% Canadian-made programming.
But there's only so much Bieber and Rush you can listen to and I honestly can't even think of a Canadian television show.
So you can see that this frog has already been boiled.
Define Canadian made, because I feel like half the time I look up someone working in Hollywood, they grew up in Canada (or UK). They choose to work in Hollywood for obvious reasons.
The top five US exports are Gasoline and Other Fuels, Crude Petroleum, Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) and Other Natural Gases, Civilian Aircraft Parts and Passenger Vehicles.
And Canada has always had Canada-first set asides.
There is no straightforward answer that I can link you to, but it boils down to attempts to export their flavour of politics, types of news outlets (GB News), cultural controversies (hot-button issues that are mostly an issue in the US), and to some extent overall culture (via Hollywood & Disney productions mostly, IMO).
It would be a mistake to lump these two broad groups of influences together. Mostly because while they're both intentional, paid campaigns, they're paid for by very different groups.
It would also be a mistake to assume any of this is what one might call natural cultural contamination.
Are you sure all of that is not just a consequence of economies of scale and using a common language?
It does not take a grand conspiracy to influence businesses to seek more profit by selling their near zero marginal
cost media to other English speaking countries.
But I also would not characterize it as “trying to export their bullshit”.
It is UK residents deciding to spend their time and money on content made by/for Americans, so would it equivalently be described as “UK trying to import the US’s bullshit”?
Same here; reactionary right-wingers are importing US-style culture wars out of nowhere. Suddenly abortion is a big red issue when it hasnt been for 2 decades.
But don't be naive. If they are importing this whole mess, it must mean it works to some extend.
I think there are still protests outside clinics, but we still have the most permissive abortion law in Europe - 24 week limit, whereas the most common time limit is 12 weeks [1]
Of course, you do also get ridiculous police overreach where a woman was arrested for praying silently in her head outside an abortion clinic.
Worth noting, if calling UK abortion law "the most permissive", that it is actually still technically illegal to choose to have an abortion just because you don't wish to give birth. You need a medical reason to get one, luckily most doctors agree with the logic of "my mental health will be harmed if I can't have an abortion" so generally speaking it's effectively legal...
UK: there were regular demonstrations outside of a clinic in my city some years ago. Not nice. Residential area so local householders not happy either.
There was an abortion clinic in Bloomsbury square that had a core group of protesters outside it a few years ago. But generally most people in the UK feel like it's a personal decision for the mother to make and it's certainly not a left/right issue like in the US.
Isn't it annoying how hard it is to ban behaviour you don't like without risking banning behaviour you approve of. What's a progressive authoritarian to do?
> areas directly outside abortion clinics free from harassment by religious fanatics
There are some videos of "religious fanatics" standing alone, silently, outside abortion clinics, being moved on by police, on the suspicion that they are praying in their minds.
You can't really pick and choose which views are acceptable. Either you have the right to protest peacefully, guided by your own conscience, or you don't.
Interestingly, the FACE Act in these United States ("Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances") provides equal protection to crisis pregnancy centers and other related pro-life clinics and counseling offices. The definition used by FACE covers pro-life and pro-abortion facilities alike, and so all types of pregnancy centers have the same buffer around them, protected from fanatics who would harrass vulnerable mothers who are about to make a momentous choice which affects them, their children, the father, and their whole family.
Yes. I live near where this woman protests. Those sources you've provided are clearly biased and very inaccurate. She was arrested after breaching a protection order in that particular space after being repeatedly warned not to and being given the chance to move 100m up the street. She chose not to, and was arrested.
ADF in particular are not nice people. In 2003 they even tried to recriminalise homosexuality in the US.[1]
Speaking as a local resident who has to put up with her group taking up space, disrupting locals and during the pandemic flanking the outside of the abortion clinic with their faces covered, I think they should move 100m up the road where their impact is limited but they can offer whatever "help" they want to people who seek it.
So is me not being able to demonstrate inside your house. That free speech can be limited by the right of free association, private property and public safety needs has been an established principle for centuries.
And if anti-abortionists can demonstrate elsewhere, which they can and do, it isn't much of an issue. It's not as if the pro-life camp is at risk of not having their views heard if they can't block the doors to abortion clinics and call women whores and killers right to their faces.
>So is me not being able to demonstrate inside your house.
That is quite the movement of goalposts. "Outside an abortion clinic" is by definition a public space. Inside my house is not a public space. Demonstrating in a public space should be protected as free speech.
I think you moved the goalposts from making a broad argument about free speech to now a narrow argument about property rights.
Now maybe try to address my actual point, which is that no rights are absolute and always need to be balanced in context against other rights and public safety.
>Demonstrating in a public space should be protected as free speech.
That, for me, is an absolute.
Demonstrating doesn't include blocking a highway or not allowing entrance to such clinic. Not even touching a client or worker. But staying there? Yes of course it should be protected.
If that's actually such an established principle, there wouldn't be such a problem with the way the law goes after "peaceful actions used by those protesting about human rights and environmental issues" because the peaceful actions it's targetting are things like protesters gluing themselves to famous artworks in museums, public protest whose main goal is to shut down major roads, railways and other critical infrastructure rather than protest somewhere where they're likely to be seen by the public, and vandalism of company headquarters. After all, it's not like the environmental activists are at risk of not having their views heard if they can't sling paint all over the doors of fossil fuel and chemical companies and banks and call their employees murderers to their faces, especially since most of the mainstream media in this country is already on their side.
If you scroll down to the bottom of the comments, downvoted into the grey, someone even linked an article pointing out that these protests included roadblocks that stopped ambulances getting through. Clearly public safety only matters sometimes. (And to be clear, this wasn't an incidental side effect of some protest where the sheer volume of protesters caused disruption. Building blockades and maintaining them for days/weeks was the protest action.)
Someone does have the right to demonstrate inside your house, if you've first invited them to be there. Even if you tell someone "I'm only inviting you inside if you don't bring up abortion" and they do anyway, they have not committed a crime unless they also refuse to leave after you revoke their invitation. If someone has the right to be at a location they have the right to peacefully protest there.
Free speech does not allow the right to do harm. We can debate where exactly that line is, but in my book protesting right outside of a clinic is harassment.
Why does the protest have to be right in front? Isn't a march through the city just as, if not more, effective to get your voices heard? Of course you won't be able to terrify vulnerable young women, but it'd be great if we could all agree that's a good thing!
If you are mentally capable of doing something then you should be mentally capable of hearing that doing that is wrong - it'd be great if we could all agree that's a good thing, also.
Using the term "vulnerable young women" is trying to remove the agency from them, which is despicable.
> If you are mentally capable of doing something then you should be mentally capable of hearing that doing that is wrong - it'd be great if we could all agree that's a good thing, also.
Would you be okay if, for the rest of your life, protesters stood in front of your home and shouted "die for breathing, die for breathing"? Presumably not, right? Although you're mentally capable of breathing, which should mean you're mentally capable of hearing that doing that is wrong?
> Using the term "vulnerable young women" is trying to remove the agency from them, which is despicable.
Can you explain why? I don't see how any agency is removed from them. Pregnancy itself makes women more vulnerable, and someone going through a very hard decision will be impacted even more. Whose agency did I just try to remove?
By definition, breathing and killing are complete opposites.
I wouldn't like it if people shouted slogans in front of my house but they have a right to it.
If women are in a vulnerable, hormonal state maybe they shouldn't be the ones making these decisions. Either they can make the decision and go through the consequences, or they can't. There's no middle ground of doing something and then having people who disagree with what you did silenced.
So no thing that isn't a person (yet) can be vulnerable?
Pets can't be vulnerable? Trees can't be vulnerable? Buildings can't be vulnerable?
Perhaps the baby is extra vulnerable exactly because it isn't a person yet capable of defending itself. It will become one though, unless someone murders it out of selfish convenience.
If you hit an animal with your car, do you leave it to bleed out because it isn't a person and thus can't be vulnerable?
We don't agree that an unborn fetus isn't yet a person. I was deconstructing your logic. I think a person is created the moment sex cells fuse. Sometimes I even think about the hypothetical potential of a person and what they'd want me to do, such that they could one day exist and tell me.
My use of the word 'murder' is for dramatic effect to emphasize my beliefs. I concede that it's an opinion counter to the current laws, and thus technically incorrect. Still gonna call it that though.
> If you hit an animal with your car, do you leave it to bleed out because it isn't a person and thus can't be vulnerable?
I would treat an animal I hit with my car very differently from a human, since I'd call an ambulance for a human, but would bring the animal into an animal clinic myself. Would you not call an ambulance for a human, or would you call an ambulance for an animal? Which one is it?
> I think a person is created the moment sex cells fuse.
Are you trying to do anything about IVF clinics? If I were to follow your standards, that would be way worse for me, since IVF clinics produce a big surplus of inseminated eggs. Every couple might kill multiple "babies" instead of just one.
> My use of the word 'murder' is for dramatic effect to emphasize my beliefs.
Could you try to refrain from doing so for our conversation? I'm going to take what you write literally since I assume you're writing in good faith, so misrepresenting your own positions is just going to hurt the discussion.
> [...] since IVF clinics produce a big surplus of inseminated eggs. Every couple might kill multiple "babies" instead of just one.
True, but at least they do so unintentionally and in the pursuit of creating life. It's still kinda bad, especially if the woman needs IVF because she put off her motherly duties for so long she can't concieve naturally.
A woman getting an abortion is doing so intentionally and in the pursuit of her own convenience. In my opinion that should be criminal negligence, so I call it murder. That's not a misrepresentation of my position, that's what I actually believe. I know current laws disagree. That doesn't affect my position. Laws have been so very very wrong before, too.
So we agree that things that aren't persons can be vulnerable, but we disagree on the degree of vulnerability. Is my understanding correct that in your opinion a human being with a functioning brain is by definition more vulnerable than any other kind of life? So you equate vulnerability with degree of consciousness, presumably due to its ability to comprehend pain and injustice?
> True, but at least they do so unintentionally and in the pursuit of creating life.
That's not true, they do so fully intentionally. That's what should make it way worse than abortion: they create babies just to kill them! Why does it matter that it's in the pursuit of life? Or could it be that you dislike abortion for other reasons than you previously stated?
> A woman getting an abortion is doing so intentionally and in the pursuit of her own convenience.
And a woman getting IVF is doing so intentionally and in the pursuit of her own family wishes. Imagine if every family sacrificed dozens of children to receive their newborn. Why are you not fighting against this monstrous horror?
> That's not true, they do so fully intentionally. [...] Why are you not fighting against this monstrous horror?
Nobody goes to an IVF clinic intent to kill babies. Everyone goes to an abortion clinic explicitly to kill babies. IVF could be attempted one life at a time. What you're describing is a cost-cutting measure, a technical implementation detail of the clinic, and who said I'm not fighting against it?
> Why does it matter that it's in the pursuit of life?
Killing in the pursuit of life is less worse than killing in the pursuit of death.
> Nobody goes to an IVF clinic intent to kill babies.
Everyone goes to an IVF clinic knowing they'll kill multiple babies in the process. How can this be acceptable to a single person?
> IVF could be attempted one life at a time. What you're describing is a cost-cutting measure, a technical implementation detail of the clinic, and who said I'm not fighting against it?
You didn't say anything against it so far. So based on your statements it would be okay to abort babies to save the mothers some money, right? After all you find IVF acceptable, where they kill babies to save money?
> Killing in the pursuit of life is less worse than killing in the pursuit of death.
Really? Does the law say that? Is it generally okay to kill people if you also create new people?
> Everyone goes to an IVF clinic knowing they'll kill multiple babies in the process. How can this be acceptable to a single person?
Knowledge =/= intent. And I bet most people going to IVF don't know the process involves killing viable babies, unless and until they are informed of it at the clinic. Regardless, it's definitely not the intention, but an unnecessary side-effect. If I had to peruse IVF, I'd take my business to an ethical clinic that doesn't do such cost-cutting, just like I buy ethical food even though it's more expensive. Factory meat is torture and murder for me as well.
> You didn't say anything against it so far.
Factually incorrect. Me, two days ago [1] in reply to you, about killing babies in IVF process: "It's still kinda bad".
> Really? Does the law say that? Is it generally okay to kill people if you also create new people?
A very good and complex question with ethical dilemmas and conflicting precedent.
The simplest case is that of self-defense and defense of others. If suspect A is threatening to murder victim B, it's largely accepted that killing suspect A to preserve victim B's life is a necessary evil, especially if victim B is a pregnant woman.
According to the old unwritten Custom of the Sea it was accepted until 1884 that shipwreck survivors were forgiven for killing and eating each other to pervail. Mignonette The case of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884 14 QBD 273 DC) convicted two sailors to six months imprisonment for murdering and eating their unconscious crewmate to survive, which de facto set the practice antiquated and illegal.
Consider the maternal–fetal conflict of an unconscious woman in childbirth with complications lethal to both herself and the baby, doctors able to save one but not both (somewhat common trope in media). My understanding is that the husband gets to decide which of them dies by choosing who to save, and conventional wisdom says to save the baby at the mother's expense. My cursory search provided poor information so I don't know.
From a practical and moral standpoint I consider this an analogue of the trolley problem, and posit that yes, of course an act of killing is less worse if it additionally results in a new life (or saving of existing one(s)). That's the natural precedent for predation.
How does that matter? Have you ever encountered the concept of "negligence"? You're knowingly and willfully killing multiple babies.
> Regardless, it's definitely not the intention, but an unnecessary side-effect. If I had to peruse IVF, I'd take my business to an ethical clinic that doesn't do such cost-cutting, just like I buy ethical food even though it's more expensive.
And yet you're not trying to get those baby murderers classified as baby murderers, are you? You're okay with letting people choose whether they want to murder babies to save money. Why are you okay with it in this context, and not in the context of abortion?
> Factually incorrect. Me, two days ago [1] in reply to you, about killing babies in IVF process: "It's still kinda bad".
Okay, I'll give you that. You paid lip service. Good job!
> The simplest case is that of self-defense and defense of others. If suspect A is threatening to murder victim B, it's largely accepted that killing suspect A to preserve victim B's life is a necessary evil, especially if victim B is a pregnant woman.
Self-defense and defense of others doesn't factor in, because you're not defending anybody against anything. Nobody is in danger, you're just murdering babies because you desire something. Would you mind trying again with some kind of real analogue?
No problem with abortion but protesting outside an abortion clinic isn't doing harm; not in the criminal sense at least unlike all the domestic abuse the MET have failed to prosecute.
A similar argument could be used for environmental protestors blocking a highway (the reason the bill was created) - they're interfering with someone else's right to travel.
Are the abortion protestors blocking access to the clinic? That's not the sentiment I got. They don't interfere with anyone's right to abortion, they are expressing their dissent about it (presumably on grounds of a child's right to be born).
I'm not conflicted at all...I fully stand in support of people I disagree with having the right to voice their minds in public without having to worry about government security forces and patty wagons.
And I stand fully in support of proportionate curbs on freedom of speech for people determined to enforce their religious views on others in a harassing manner.
This is satire, right? You’re not actually saying you’re in favour of free speech and then in the same sentence supporting suppression of speech you dislike.
Yes, I am. Because the world is not black and white and outside of the US, free speech is not absolute.
In some countries, your right to to access abortion trumps someone elses right to stand outside and make you feel bad about it. I'm OK with that. As are the majority of folks in the UK.
How much of an issue is that in the UK? I don't think I've seen a report about it here for years, but that's not to say it doesn't happen. I'd be interested to see facts to back up this.
Somewhat. It's nowhere near the scale of the problem that the US had say ten years ago, but for some individuals it's definitely intimidating.
The laws already on the books made it possible to secure orders to make a group stop for example, congregating outside your clinic harassing patients, but this power is very limited, it's local (so if your local politicians aren't supportive, too bad, even if they aren't actively working against you chances are you'll never get it up the agenda far enough to actually get a legal order without their support) and it expires - and so you end up with a situation where lots of places would like to get an order, but few secure one, and then when they do local budget constraints make it hard to justify keeping it - after all the harassment is gone, and we could use that cash to do something else.
The ideal would be to live in a society where people didn't feel like screaming "murderer" at strangers and lying to as many people as possible was a reasonable social activity.
This feels like a partisan hatchet job. There is a balance. Freedom of protest does not give the right to perpetually block roads and motorways putting protestors and others into danger.
This organisation had no issue with governments imposing multi year lockdowns without any form of criticism.
Are you referring to the couple of months in 2020?
Because we didn't really have any sort of lock down in the UK, the Tories just said the police would need to informally enforce a non-rule. The met responded that they were not going to enforce anything that wasn't an actual rule.
There were words said and a couple of high profile incidents which shows how little any sort of lockdown happened. I know I drove around the country still and no one ever asked why, and all my neighbours had garden parties with social gathers still happening.
You broke the law and got away with it. That doesn't mean millions of people weren't having a thoroughly miserable time of it observing the law, and for a lot longer than "a couple of months in 2020".
There was no law preventing people travelling or doing anything.
Boris said "it would be best if you don't" and then held parties. He got away with it because he didn't break any laws.
I had to travel for work, so I didn't even break guidance as in their advice, people who had to travel still could. No one ever checked which is my point.
No, it was law. Immoral law which deserved to be broken, but that is no consolation to the millions who suffered greatly by going along with it.
To hear one of the most shameful periods in our legal history being brushed off as couple of months of half hearted barely observed lockdown is pretty disturbing.
"15 minute cities" -- you mean, walkable, normal cities? Lord have mercy, I have a case of the vapors. What a silly thing to be upset about, and definitely the weirdest manufactured outrage of 2023. I for one hope they force us to walk at least 45 minutes or take a car!
When even comedian Joe Lycett starts complaining about them, you know you've lost the public:
"Joe Lycett and Sophie Duker take on Croydon Council over the Parsons Mead LTN (Low Traffic Neighbourhood) which has left locals racking up hundreds of pounds in fines."
Cities are responsible for directing the flow of traffic. Traffic sucks and cars suck. I really don't see the problem with dissuading their use.
Again, manufactured outrage.
Having everything around you is great, it's why people live in cities. There's no dystopian undertone to having a grocery store and other amenities around the corner and easily accessible, lol. Why would you intentionally want things further away from you?
Absolutely, the idea of having everything within 15 minutes walking distance is great. But actively restricting people's movements in this way is not, at least to me.
Public highways are really the people's property. In a democratic society if the majority of the public dislike the roadblocks, the local government should remove them.
I think it's valid for the public to get upset about attempts by the government to micromanage their lives in this way. Such micromanagement may sound trivial, but the underlying motivation for doing so is not. As it is an attempt to exercise power and control over the population. Often it starts with very trivial matters, and later expands to greater ones, as we have seen over the years.
And it's not just this particular issue, it's many other things which are restricting our freedoms in general, all together. Which are increasing the level of outrage against the state.
That's good because at least the public is pushing back against it. There may be a point where people can't take it anymore and might start protesting en masse.
I'm really waiting for that to happen, we might find ourselves getting our civil liberties back eventually.
If the majority of the public want to drive through towns not built for ever widening roads to accomoadte what the public wants, we should knock down the historic town centres for wide streets for larger traffic jams, remove pedestrian crossings so we don;t slow the crawling traffic, remove bus lanes so we can fill them up with crawling cars close down the railways and force everyone to buy a car
The majority of us don't dislike them. That's a right wing narrative that ties to conspiracy theories. (Speaking as someone who doesn't have a block on my road, but have had to adjust my driving habits when visiting local family).
It's a public safety issue as well, so far 240 ambulances have been delayed due to the blockades. I wonder if a local authority can be successfully prosecuted if a patient were to die as a result of the delay?
Same if someone were to die in a house fire, because the fire brigade could not get there on time? I personally believe that those responsible for implementing this scheme should see time behind bars, possibly for criminal negligence, should that happen.
By the way, in the comments section of that Daily Mail article, the majority of the readers disagree with the blockades. I'm not sure if that's representative of the whole of the general public or not.
Daily Mail readers appear to place the blame on the World Economic Forum as the cause, I'm not sure if that's conspiracy theory terrority or not?
However it's likely to be the work of environmental pressure groups, who generally do not represent the will of the people. They are a minority dictating the rules to the majority.
Note Google search is biased heavily in favor of these schemes, I had to use Bing to get any results that were against them.
No conspiracy here, just people in power trying to increase their control over people's lives, as usual. It's a distributed phenomenon that arises from human nature.
" Pundits continue to sneer, dismissing critics of 15 minute cities (a critique, as the great Simon Cooke points out, that it’s perfectly reasonable to make) as “conspiracy theorists”. "
"In this explanation we begin to see just how authoritarian the urban green agenda has become - not a surprise given that Moreno is an advocate of ‘smart cities’ and literally profits from authoritarian smart city technology:"
Yes, polling indicates the majority would like to live in a 15 minute city, however that poll does not mention restricting vehicles. And of course I agree with it personally, minus the roadblocks.
People are not opposed to the concept, they are opposed to the vehicle restrictions, and the latter is what's riling up conspiracy theorists.
> Yes, polling indicates the majority would like to live in a 15 minute city, however that poll does not mention restricting vehicles.
So what? That's what cities do. They balance needs.
They weren't told that it would expand the quantity, scope or role vehicles either, so there's nothing deceptive here.
They're selling the vision, people like the vision, so they'll execute on it assuming conspiratorial nuts don't get in the way :)
The future doesn't need to involve having exactly the same role and scope for personal-use vehicles. Change is okay! We've way over-indexed towards the needs of cars and under-indexed on the needs of human beings. It's time to revisit that contract. And look, if people don't like it, the roadblocks can come down after we give it the ol' college try. Remember the status quo is the result of arbitrary decisions and compromise, it doesn't represent a local or global optima.
Why don't you consider an alternate option - allow people to stay in a 15-minute city if they want and walk to shops etc as they desire but allow others to take a vehicle and go elsewhere if they want?
The problem only arises if you remove that option or if you penalise that action in some way.
People are still free to drive to other areas, just not on all roads.
You could just as well be saying "why not let people drive drunk and at 100mph on residential roads, and let others can choose not to?"
Sure we could say that... or we could say it's legal to drive your car onto historically pedestrian-only paths.
But we elect people to try to make decisions that benefit the most people as best as possible, and it turns out that most people don't think that "any road that currently allows cars must always allow cars" is an inalienable rule that must be followed.
Yes we should debate these things - I assume very few people would support removing all speed limits or lowering speed limits to 2mph on all roads, though there's bound to be some variance in views about what goes too far or not enough.
But in this topic of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, you've got one side saying "wouldn't it be nice if residential side roads stopped being hugely used (thanks to GPS routing apps) by through-traffic, and therefore made much better for the people living there, and for pedestrians and cyclists" while the other side instead of engaging on that actual debate instead jumps to "they want to lock us into 15min areas we won't ever be allowed to leave! It's climate fascism!"
Your comparison makes no sense. A person is banned from driving drunk because it can result in people getting killed.
There is nothing preventing 15-minute cities from having both pedestrian walkways as well as roads.. as most cities ALREADY do.
And oh, by the way, even a 15-minute city will have to make space for roads for vehicles. When you change houses, you aren't carrying your furniture on foot between houses, are you? or for that matter, when you call emergency (911), the cops and emergency workers are not arriving by foot. Or when you make a house, the construction equipment, material etc are not being carried in by foot either. Also, the shops in your neighbourhood are not been replenished by suppliers carrying in products on their back.
So this idea that you can suddenly replace all roads with pedestrian paths is just completely unworkable.
Please find one example of roads being replaced by pedestrian paths? LTNs put a block at one point in the road, so people who live there can drive from whichever side of the block they live on if they're moving house (or even if they want to use their car for any reason!) They're Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, not Zero traffic.
The block is to prevent people using the small residential street as a through-path for motorists from other areas, not to prevent any vehicle from ever using the roads.
Because you know it doesn't work already - if you live in a city that is trying this.
And because you know the reality is no new stores/shops etc are being "created" to facilitate any such goal. The reality is people simply order everything on Amazon instead.
Perhaps you can point to how these schemes are funding shops?
20 years ago when I moved to London, this was called "blocking off rat-runs" and had widespread support from most local residents.
The article mentions Hammersmith and Fulham. That has plenty of these roadblocks dating from around that time. I'm not sure if it was a Labour or Conservative initiative, but the Conservatives certainly had plenty of time to remove them.
The roadblocks in the 15 minute cities have been imposed to control the residents, to reduce their freedom and autonomy, to satisfy environmental goals. That is the difference.
Instead of being a left vs. right issue, instead I think it's an authoritarian vs. libertarian issue. On one side we have those advocating for more state control, in the name of the greater good. And on the other side we have those for personal freedom.
The effect on local residents is pretty much the same: on those roads in Fulham they have had to drive the long way around for decades, but can walk or cycle on a direct route.
I can just as easily argue that the blocks increase freedom and autonomy (especially of children and elderly) since they can now use their local roads safely and/or independently.
Whatever binary classification you choose, I don't want to shape a debate around it. It is too simple. Great for bad headlines, +1s on Facebook and so on, but detrimental to public discourse and society.
why was one situation for the benefit of the residents and the other for control of the residents? It seems you're putting your own spin on things here. Both were enacted by councils which are elected by the people.
There are increasing feelings of alienation from elected officials across the west, I imagine you somehow feel that whoever did this doesn't represent the people. Maybe thats what you should be adressing. It's not some election stealing or whatever, its just bubbles between political class and everyone else, we need good communication imo. Some way for elected officials to have to spend time in their communities
I most certainly have the right to put my "own spin" on it, because I am expressing my personal opinions and values here. My own personal interpretation of the situation, which most of us here are also doing too.
And I do feel that the actions of authorities here might not represent the values of the people. That it's a typical power grab by authorities, in many cases those "small minded" bureaucrats who micromanage and want to police the minutiae of daily lives. Not that different to the "bin police" here in the UK who hand out fines and warnings for not recycling.
That's making people angry. And conspiracy theorists are latching on to it too. But ordinary people are right to be upset about it.
With the "15 minute city" roadblocks and the "bin police" the overall benefit to the community from the measures is far outweighed by the inconvenience and control. In particular the feeling that you are being "ordered about" by the local government. It's micromanagement, and almost a form of bullying.
Yes, the alienation we are feeling is because the government is implementing the agenda of activist pressure groups and prioritizing that over the people's will.
Those pressure groups having minority opinions. And we are seeing that play out in multiple areas of society, including the restriction of freedom of speech here in the UK in order to prevent offense to minorities, such as transgender or LGBT people. Something the general public strongly opposes.
we live in a democracy. Authorities serve us. We shouldn't be rolling our eyes and saying "oh I guess that's just what they do". Imo that kind of cynicism's going to lead to our society crumbling - it's the reason democracy falls in undeveloped countries, because everyone assumes the elites are just corrupt to the core and so dont engage. Personally I don't think it's a "power grab" or whatever, the person who did it won't be serving after their term is done anyway.
I find it unusual to even frame it in that regard - if you talk to politicians, they aren't out for themselves, they're trying to make everyone's lives better. They might have a different idea of how to do it, because their experience doesn't match most people's, and endless lobbying organisations try to target them with information to influence what they think needs solving.
However, I suggest you try to find statistics about what the public believes, as well as read the actual text of laws and find out about how they are actually enforced. Because there is a lot of misinformation about the government targeted to people you (and separately to people like me)
A lot of said misinformation paints the government in a caricatured light, as though they believe everything you stand against. The government of the UK has been Conservative for many years, and I find it hard to believe they would restrict free speech for the benefit of LGBT people.
How do walkable cities lead to roadblocks? Aren't they completely separate issues, especially considering you literally admit the reason for roadblocks is reducing pollution?
Car ownership = freedom is the real conspiracy, talking about controlling people, you have millions locked up in little mobile prisons getting to and from work.
In a time of increasing idleness and voluntary economic non participation by wider and wider sections of society, as their existence is subsidised by the state, by other tax payers, by ex husbands... and in the case of XR&JSO, by donations there might be a need for change.
They have discovered that a handful of people can cause misery to thousands by blocking roads, already an offence, but one selectively enforced when it intersects with so called protest due to court precedent set in recent years.
These groups often have no particular goals that they articulate, no achievable ones in particular and it cannot be assumed that their stated goals are their goals. I believe i have insight as to their motivations and goals and they don't align with the ephemeral nonsense they claim they want to happen. It wouldn't make sense to do so. On that basis this isn't legitimate protest - it's low level terrorism.
If you have to live in proximity to this near endless lunacy it is obvious how ridiculous it has become. How much of society will you allow to be interrupted before enough is enough?
XR/JSO ran for election in London very recently for Mayor - the city they attack the most - and got fewer votes than a comedy candidate called Count Binface.
> XR/JSO ran for election in London very recently for Mayor - the city they attack the most
I looked to see if this was true and couldn't find any joint extinction rebellion/ just stop oil candidates, nor any for either of them split.
> and it cannot be assumed that their stated goals are their goals
I think you are verging into conspiratory theories here, but I'll humor you. What are these goals you have an insight to?
> On that basis this isn't legitimate protest
It doesn't matter why you're protesting, you can do it for any reason. That's a cornerstone of a free and democratic society
I have to hope you aren't one of those people who believe everything is secretly funded by Bildeberg group for some nefarious agenda and that protestors dont really believe what theyre protesting about or whatever . If you are, try talking to some people under 30 about politics, or really just getting outside of your bubble.
> I have to hope you aren't one of those people who believe everything is secretly funded by Bildeberg group for some nefarious agenda etc etc
What does it tell you about yourself that to engage in a discussion you have to assume, despite me making some pretty clear points which I will clarify below, that you immediately label it as a conspiracy?
> doesn't matter why you're protesting, you can do it for any reason. That's a cornerstone of a free and democratic society
They can protest without blocking roads. Blocking a road is not inherently protesting. It's blocking a road. You could be holding a Bible quote or a big orange banner. The end goal of these protests is the act of performative protest, little more. *The end is nigh*
> What are these goals you have an insight to?
The same thing the edgy far left has wanted for 150 years. The absolute destruction of western society, and by proxy capitalism. Except they know that won't happen so the actual outcome they expect is beyond me. You can find plenty of evidence of such thinking from anyone involved. It's why you will find SWP banners handed out at any number of dozens of "protests". The climate stuff is just the latest hook of social injustice they've adopted. I'd love to see this refuted.
> I looked to see if this was true and couldn't find any joint extinction rebellion/ just stop oil candidates, nor any for either of them split.
They are both not an organisation and the same organisation so as individuals involved can say they are not involved. For the purposes of British law when they are tried they don't want to be tried as an organisation or members of one
> looked to see if this was true and couldn't find any joint extinction rebellion/ just stop oil candidates, nor any for either of them split
> Bring Down the Government, replace it with Citizen Decision Making.
You will find a press release on there where 12 members of their party - maybe that's the whole party - were taken to court for criminal damage etc during an XR "protest"
> Police accused of ‘alarming’ attack on protest rights after anti-monarchist leader arrested
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/06/head-of-uks-...
Prior to the coronation the Met Police tweeted:
> Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low.
> We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration.
https://twitter.com/metpoliceuk/status/1653745710724968448
Again, this has been seen as further moves by the Met to quash the right of protest in the UK.