> The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is
It can be, but free speech types like to pretend it's nigh impossible. The UK has had modern hate-speech laws (for want of a better term) since the Public Order Act 1986, which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred. Amendments in 2006 and 2008 expanded that to religious and homophobic hatred respectively. This exists in stark contrast to the common strawman touted by freeze peach types of "are you just going to compile a list of 'bad words'?!" Hate speech is not magic: you're not casting the self-incriminatus spell by saying the bad word.
That said, I wont pretend like that aren't misuses of police powers in regard to speech, and expression more generally. We've seen a crackdown on protests over the past few years which is more than a little frightening. That said, it's become a pattern that anytime I encounter a discussion online about the UK trampling on freedom of speech or whatever, it always comes back to hate speech. It's almost never about protest or expression. I think that's interesting.
EDIT: Correction, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 did not make stirring up or inciting "homophobic" hatred an offence, but rather hatred on the basis of sexual orientation. So one could get prosecuted for being inciting anti-straight hatred.
In the UK the arrests are mostly about "grossly offensive" speech. That's more of a grey area than the clearly defined hate speech. Often there are arrests and investigations but convictions on these are less. Convictions of hate speech also occur but are not news worthy and no one objects. The two different offenses are being confused and so it becomes news. In the US they don't have the grossly offensive category.
It's an issue because people are being investigated because people are offended by some things while others are not, and others (like comments here) see the difference between offensive speech and outright calls for violence. The police in some areas are encouraged to actively investigate reports of offensiveness whether or not they seem to them serious. It's a good idea on paper but the ambiguities and unequal application of their policy is newsworthy. It leads to conspiratorial and political theories.
There is also a related newsworthy issue of the widening of what hate speech means to encompass forms of offensiveness. So some may say it's a direct call to violence to say some things but others may say it's not. This ambiguity leads to an effect and discussions.
"Silence is violence" and "From the river to the sea" are topical example quotes used in this debate.
Yeaaaah, the Communications Act 2003 is not fit for purpose in the modern information age where [seemingly] the vast majority of conversation is taking place in digital spaces. Sidenote, I do think it's amusing how, prior to the Online Safety Act 2023, it was an offence to Cunningham's Law someone (posting a knowingly-false statement online to annoy someone into correcting you). That said, I'm more or less ambivalent about "grossly offensive" speech: most of the examples I find people moaning about are people being gratuitously abhorrent and should have known better. But again, there are examples of police and prosecutors getting it wrong.
But I think the leap from acknowledging that to "speech should never be infringed", as many freeze peachers would advocate, to be infinitely more destructive: just see what it's doing to America. Just look at what the infiltration of American-style freedom of speech principles is doing to this country: we have people defending Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocated for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers, calling her a "political prisoner", that the government is "silencing the right".
One part where I agree with you is "From the river to the sea": there are two versions of this (more than two, but they are variations of the same thing), the first being "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", and the other "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty". Guess which one our government finds objectionable. And guess which one is being used to justify a genocide. It does bother me that the government can chill and punish speech that objects to its foreign policy. But I feel as if (this is just vibes, feel free to correct me) the most harm being done is through anti-protest laws, not grossly offensive digital communications: I personally know of multiple people who regularly post abrasive, if not downright virulent "silence is violence" type content online, but do not go to protests because they fear arrest, detention, and being fired.
> being gratuitously abhorrent and should have known better.
This is an incredibly stupid take, and I would vote for a legislation to penalise incredibly stupid ones before gratuitously abhorrent, and more harshly so. It would be gloriously wonderful, too.
> which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred.
If you point out that one racial demographic is responsible for more crimes than another, would that run afoul of the statute?
If not, what if you additionally point out that the reason these crimes were committed is likely because that behaviour is normalized in their culture? This seems like it would definitely run afoul of the statute, and if this logical deduction were valid, then this sort of criticism would be suppressed despite being legitimate, and could be weaponized against people.
I'm frankly not so convinced that it's possible to define hate speech in a way that does not allow for these failure modes.
Does the law explicitly specify that dry facts would be excluded? Or is it sufficiently broad that dry facts could be included if some over-zealous bureaucrats get it in their head that some speech or people are problematic?
I am interested in the letter of the law, because that's what matters, not how it's being applied while the winds are blowing in a particular direction.
Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted under hate speech laws for stating facts in the 40-odd years since its passage? Why is this not just concern trolling?
As to the general question, no, a statement being true does not immunise it from an accusation of it being used to stir up or incite hatred, or at the very least such a defence is not defined within the Public Order Act 1986. We do have the Human Rights Act which protects Freedom of Expression, but whether you could use it or other defences is pure speculation on my part: I would need to see some actual caselaw.
I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk. Please let me know if you find such a case because I genuinely think that would be interesting to debate, but debating over pure speculation and innuendo is very boring.
> Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted
To be clear, I haven't even looked, but being a recent topic of debate, it seems important to clearly establish the letter of the law.
> Why is this not just concern trolling?
Because the law-as-written is what matters, like I said, not the law-as-it-has-been-exercised-so-far. Unless you think people inclined to abuse the law will never be elected.
> I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk
Depending on the specifics, that already seems problematic. There are also chilling effects that are not clearly visible until after the fact. How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?
> How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?
I don't know, perhaps you should give some examples of this actually happening rather than relying solely on implication.
Yeah, I'm failing to see how this is an example of "people [wanting] to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of [hate speech laws]". The article makes no mention of hate speech laws or anyone being prosecuted under them for discussing the representation of various ethnicities in sexual-assault statistics.
What the article does mention is that local officials and other agencies were "wary of identifying ethnic origins for fear of upsetting community cohesion, or being seen as racist", which is mere cowardice. In fact, I am somewhat surprised you are not using this to argue that government officials are too scared of free speech to do their job: that the implied threat of some people using their free speech to call the local government racist is enough to paralyse its function.
No, to me, what this article shows is how unfettered speech actually functions: a foreign billionaire with the loudest megaphone in history is dredging up a decade-old stain in our country's criminal history to aid and abet our domestic right and far-right political parties. And I think the fact that those parties immediately jumped on this in the media shows that it's very much not something that'll get you thrown in the gulag for discussing.
> The article makes no mention of hate speech laws or anyone being prosecuted under them for discussing the representation of various ethnicities in sexual-assault statistics.
Consider the counterfactual: if hate speech laws were not in place, would the probability of a whistleblower in the police, or a journalist picking up the story from one of the victims go up or down?
> What the article does mention is that local officials and other agencies were "wary of identifying ethnic origins for fear of upsetting community cohesion, or being seen as racist", which is mere cowardice.
Yes, not openly resisting improper application of hate speech laws (or any law) is always cowardice, but cowardice is common, and that's exactly what all unscrupulous officials bank on. Most people respond to even subtle incentives, like implications of racism, and hate speech classifications are even less subtle.
Hate speech laws don't have to involve a gulag to have chilling effects and cause real harm, as this case shows quite well I think. That the possibility of being called racist was even remotely effective as a threat is a downstream effect of accepting the legitimacy of hate speech laws IMO.
> And I think the fact that those parties immediately jumped on this in the media shows that it's very much not something that'll get you thrown in the gulag for discussing.
It's hard to be censorious once something has achieved enough public exposure.
In any case, this all seems to be somewhat besides the point, because how a law is applied in practice is less compelling than how broadly it can be interpreted by future officials who may be less compassionate or scrupulous. As I've been saying all along: what does the letter of the law say?
You keep saying that I shouldn't rely on implication, but the law is all about implication. What could possibly matter more than the implications of how the law is written?
With all due respect, all you're doing here is presenting me with even more implication and innuendo. You are making a claim, you should be able to substantiate it, otherwise just be transparent about it being an opinion. You originally replied to me asking about whether stating something factual can run afoul of hate speech laws and now the goalposts have moved to whether in some alternative universe without hate speech laws it'd be more or less likely there would've been a whistleblower in this specific instance. How is anyone supposed to answer that? It's pure innuendo and doesn't merit a response. Unless you have anything substantive to provide, I think I'm going to leave it here.
It's pretty apparent that the arrests are happening to people who explicitly call for violence, eg the woman who called for burning down all hotels housing immigrants. Musk, Rogan, etc are patient zero of the ones amplifying the false idea that you can get in legal trouble "for posting an opinion."
> It's pretty apparent that the arrests are happening to people who explicitly call for violence
Unless the statute specifically makes that distinction, then that's not very compelling. There are already laws against inciting violence. Hate speech laws are specifically understood to be about outlawing speech that contain or incite "hate", whose definition is typically broad.
Do you not think that trying to malign your opposition by putting a comical misspelling in their mouths is a bit infantile as a rhetorical tactic? The same thing being done to you would look something like an insinuation that what is being banned is "hurting someone's widdle fee-fees"; surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.
> surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.
Oh we were already at that level by that time: the comment mine responds to makes the claim that "it is really difficult to define what hate speech is" (untrue); that "more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition" (unsubstantiated); and claims that the UK government's intentions match that of Iran and Russia (untrue).
For some reason, so many people seem to tolerate outright disinformation but draw the line at mild childishness. It's bewildering.
Do you think that the people who made those remarks you cite considered them untrue themselves? If yes, you are suggesting bad faith (which should be grounds to extricate yourself from the discussion and/or call it out, not add fuel to the fire); if not, you are suggesting that factual disagreement is appropriately answered by childishness, which basically is saying that you think every discussion worth the name should devolve into childishness.
Often, it seems like this concept of "disinformation" you invoke just serves as a way people give themselves moral license to suspend normal rules of debate conduct in the face of disagreement. Being charitable to your opponents and having to engage with their claims is tiring and difficult, and sometimes they even come better prepared - how much easier if you can just frame dissent as dangerous enemy action and shut it down.
Do you also insist that we treat with proper decorum those who throw out assertions that jetfuel cannot melt steel beams? I notice you have yet to criticise them for posting what is at best misguided and unsubstantiated misinformation, and at worst disinformation. Hardly decorum on their part, is it? Instead, you are hyperfocusing on my "freeze peach", disregarding everything else I said in my comment. I find this to be a boring distraction from the topic at hand.
Well, I don't see anything obvious to criticise about what your interlocutors posted; their statements seem plausible enough to me, and if there is actually a knockout argument against them, I don't know it, because the person who seemed to disagree (you) was busy making childish noises instead of making it!
> jet fuel/steel beams
This debate was carried out sufficiently publicly that I got the sense people actually ran experiments confirming the pro-beam softening/structural failure/whatever case; certainly the "truther" case should have been taken seriously before that, and with decorum always because there is no situation in which any debate in a moderatable forum benefits from playground behaviour.
The previous law used to control racial hatred was the law of criminal libel; it was successfully used to prosecute antisemitism etc. As a species of libel, it had an absolute defence of of speaking the truth. Now, clearly you can be clever enough to spread hatred by only the use of true statements. But we have reached the point where those speaking the truth about atrocities committed by a foreign government are imprisoned for hate speech, and vastly more self censor. Your implied claim that those criticising the law just want to be free to be racist is not defensible - and indeed, you're not bold enough to defend it, merely "find it interesting".
It's inaccurate to say there's a war against Hamas. We have enough video evidence by now, posted by the people doing the acts so there can be no doubt to its authenticity, to see it's a war against civilians.
Norwood vs UK was about Norwood displaying an "Islam out of Britain" sign.
Samuel Melia was jailed 2 years for publishing downloadable stickers saying "Mass immigration is white genocide," "Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back," and "Labour loves Muslim rpe gangs".
Are those messages controversial? For sure. Should originator of these messages be prosecuted? I don't think so. Are anti-christian, "dead men don't rpe" or "eat the rich" messages treated the same in uk? Absolutely not.
If you want to spell rape on HackerNews you can just spell it. There’s nothing wrong with using the word in its proper context, or in quotations. There’s no algorithm censoring the word, and you’re not shielding someone from “getting triggered” by replacing the vowels with an underscore.
> Norwood, a member of an extreme right-wing political party [the British National Party], placed a poster on his apartment window that called for the removal of all Muslims from Britain.
> the poster in question contained a photograph of the Twin Towers in flame, the words “Islam out of Britain – Protect the British People” and a symbol of a crescent and star in a prohibition sign. The assessment made by the domestic courts was that the words and the images amounted to an attack on all Muslims in the UK. The ECtHR largely agreed with the assessment, and stated that such a general, vehement attack against a religious group, implying the group as a whole was guilty of a grave act of terrorism, is incompatible with the values proclaimed and guaranteed by the Convention, notably tolerance, social peace and non-discrimination
> Melia was the head of the Telegram Messenger group Hundred Handers, a social media channel that generated racist and anti-immigration stickers that were printed off and displayed in public places.
> The stickers contained "ethnic slurs" about minority communities which displayed a "deep-seated antipathy to those groups", the court heard.
> The judge told Melia: "I am quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist.
> "You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an antisemite."
> Melia, who was also found guilty of encouraging racially-aggravated criminal damage, was sentenced to two years for each charge to run concurrently.
It is really difficult to define what hate speech is, it certainly can be used as a cudgel to silence the opposition though I'm not sure about "more often than not" and bluntly everything can be used that way: my previous commute took me across the lines of what was officially known as (translated) an "anti-fascist protection rampart"* to keep people from leaving a country that put "Demokratische" in its name.
For the UK, it's not even clear what Starmer doesn't want to hear, he's got the charisma of the 10th-worst-in-class GCSE-level presentation on a topic not of his own choice. This can be observed in the poll ratings which are both amusing and the kind of thing that should only be found in a farce and not reality.
I'd instead point to Musk, who has openly said that "cis" is "hate speech" on Twitter now he owns the site. Starmer may or may not have such examples, but it's just too hard to figure out what they even are 'cause he lacks presence even as PM with all the cameras pointed at him.
More precisely, an Egyptian citizen who was given British citizenship recently without having visited the country, and his views (about Jews, killing police) clearly not being factored in when granting said citizenship. Whether right or wrong, your comment omits improtant details.
Do you have any evidence for that claim or is it a gut feeling?
> in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition.
In a figurative sense, that's likely true. As a democratically elected representative of the people, what he wants censored reflects what the people want censored, so is in alignment with a democratic society. If the people change their mind or realize it's not actually what they wanted, they elect somebody else next time. Good luck trying that with Putin or Khamenei.
> In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition.
Well it might if people systematically vote for politicians who promise to change the hate speech definition.
Just read the damn law before spouting nonsense. There have been hate speech laws since the 1980s. There are simply just more and more insane neonazis groyper-types online to which it is applicable.
I don't think groyper speech is (or should be) automatically banned, though. It's a point of view that many find abhorrent, but it should be possible to express it. Same for far left messages encouraging the public to "eat the rich".
Please do not equate demands for more taxations with calls to do more genocides of jewish people. The far right is uniquely problematic in our modern political landscape.
And I disagree, free speech is a liberal value, you don't get to say nazi shit and hide behind free speech. Being a groyper is not a crime, but calling for genocide is and should be punished. Else we run the risk of normalizing these abhorrent ideas and repeating the worst times of our history, like the US seems on a course to doing.
It means defending Nazi shit by claiming you're allowed to say anything you want.
Timmy: "I think it should be legal to kill Jews."
Moderator: (bans Timmy)
Timmy (elsewhere): "Help, I'm being persecuted for expressing my beliefs!" / "Moderator X is a fascist oppressing people based on their opinions!" / "Platform X hates free speech!"
You can see it even in the comments on this post about the UK. Most complaints about UK censorship don't say what was being censored. If Timmy said why the moderators banned him, his argument wouldn't even survive a cursory glance.
Well, censorship has been recentky applied to Palestine Action supporters too (they're routinely arrested in the UK, and they're normally far leftists), so it's not only nazis. The thing that makes hate speech laws safe and fuzzy is that they're initially applied to restrict the speech of your enemies. Then the tide changes, and the same laws get applied against you and your friends.
They're not excusing themselves with "I can say whatever I want to" and "arrests for speech are invalid", are they? - they're not hiding behind free speech. They're excusing themselves with reasons like "You're arresting me for terrorism but I didn't do any terrorism" and "The UK is helping Israel do the next Holocaust, and it's important that we talk about that and hopefully stop doing it"
That would be "eat the rich"? It looks like more demand for homicide and cannibalism, at least at a face value.
> free speech is a liberal value
That is a really nice definition that allows your side to say whatever they want, but the other side to have their speech restricted. It looks like "free speech" because you say it is, but of course it is not.
> but calling for genocide is and should be punished
And that is the usual strawman. "Calling for genocide" is incredibly vague. Is repatriation of immigrants genocide? Is CECOT genocide? Is advocating bombing Gaza genocide? Is "from the river to the sea" a coded call for genocide? Is, God help us, saying that trans women are men advocating for "trans genocide"? (apparently that's a thing)
I have this feeling you don't want to establish a line in the sand for free speech to be free - you just want to pick and choose the examples that you deem acceptable.
> That would be "eat the rich"? It looks like more demand for homicide and cannibalism, at least at a face value.
Very bad faith interpretation. You know full well that's not what is meant when this phrase is employed.
> That is a really nice definition that allows your side to say whatever they want, but the other side to have their speech restricted. It looks like "free speech" because you say it is, but of course it is not.
Free speech is a liberal value. Don't take liberal as meaning "american left", take it as meaning pro-freedom. Nazis famously don't believe in it. The Trump administration only believes in it when they're making themselves to be the victims of supposedly unfair censorship, but then use the full power of the state to silence media, or individuals.
Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it? That's the paradox of intolerance: "if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance". Example of this to be found in the US.
> And that is the usual strawman. "Calling for genocide" is incredibly vague. Is repatriation of immigrants genocide? Is CECOT genocide? Is advocating bombing Gaza genocide? Is "from the river to the sea" a coded call for genocide? Is, God help us, saying that trans women are men advocating for "trans genocide"? (apparently that's a thing)
You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons, because your side is literally obsessed with making their lives as miserable as possible.
> Very bad faith interpretation. You know full well that's not what is meant when this phrase is employed.
I hope you're willing to extend this charitable way of interpreting intentions to the hyperboles made by the far right in their slogans. What if a anti-immigration group came out with the "eat the aliens" slogan? Should they be allowed to chant that? Make signs?
> Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it
Again, it cuts two ways. Should we extend free speech to groups trying to suppress public discourse by deplatformimg, cancelling and banning people they don't like from speaking in campuses?
> You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons
I only mentioned trans people because not believing their self appointed sexual identity was famously equated to erasing and genociding them. As you see, the waters are indeed very muddy. You see them clear just because you already made up your mind about what kind of speech you want to allow and what kind of speech you want to ruthlessly ban.
It's a quote that justifies homicide of the wealthy class, popularised during the French revolution: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich"
Law is always subject to interpretation and as imperfect as it sounds it is better than no law at all. And I'm not talking about hate speech specifically. Using this as a tool to silence opposition is possible and made easy in countries that do not value and nurture independence of institutions and have rampant corruption, often countries with authoritarian leadership.
UK is not exempt of criticism, it would be unhealthy not to, but comparing Russia/Putin with UK/Starmer makes it evident that you are more concerned by pushing a political agenda that by facts and reason.
That comparison is not only highly inaccurate, it’s also harmful in that it distracts from the real problem at hand.
Putin and Khamenei are ruthless, brutal dictators. You don’t need to like Starmer, but he’s none of that. He’s a proper democrat. The implication that they’re all somewhat the same delegitimises democracies and legitimises these dictators. That’s how they win.
I personally don’t think UK’s age verification thing is a good idea. I like Germany‘s idea of mandating PC and smartphone manufacturers to put simple parental controls in thar parents, not the central government, can enable for their kids.
I love Australia‘s banning of Social media for kids. Let’s see where that leads. I don’t live there but am very excited for rhe outcome of that experiment.
We can’t just sit here and simplify everything to black and white while Russian troll farms polarise our societies. We bear some responsibility here to have a nuanced debate about these things.
The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? The same Starmer who said no rise in NI in the manifesto, only to increase NI? The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
He's no proper democrat. People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
> The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
From 10% of the MPs to 20% of the MPs. As challengers would have to, you know, get more MPs than him to win, the only thing going from 10% to 20% is to have less pointless drama.
> People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
First I've heard of that. Would be exceptionally dumb for a UK politician to do on purpose for the same reason that it would be correct to cancel elections in the event of such a war: the UK is not even remotely close to being ready to battle Russia. UK armed forces are just about big enough to keep the nuclear weapons safe, not much more besides that.
It only becomes false to say they've been cancelled if they happen. They're planning on postponing them again, and if that continues to happen indefinitely, they've been cancelled.
Starmer doesn't just have negative approval ratings. His are through the floor. The last voting intention poll from YouGov (which has been relatively favourable for Labour) would have given them just 69 seats - fewer than the Lib Dems currently have.
2. "Postponed" is entirely normal within British politics. For most of my life, even the timing of general elections were at the whim of the government.
3. Given how Starmer polls, the delay is almost certainly going to make things un-favourable for him. Also unfavourable for Labour, unless they kick him out first.
Not that it would matter much if your conspiracy theory held water, given that one of the many constitutional problems the UK has is that local councils have negligible power (options are tied all over the place) and therefore local elections are functionally little more than opinion polls done in a voting booth.
"My conspiracy theory" is a set of facts that you and the source you cited (whose so-called "fact check" was mostly attempting to put into context) find really inconvenient. Fact 1: Starmer and his party are polling badly. Fact 2: Starmer and his party delayed several local elections, many of which were in constituencies where they currently hold power and won't afterward. This is not a good set of facts, regardless of how little those elections matter.
Your conspiracy theory is that Starmer got anything out of delaying, which you overstated as "cancelled", a thing commonly delayed in British politics.
I literally agreed with you in my original post (i.e. before you replied to me, unless you're both accounts) that he's not popular.
Banning children from accessing things proven to be harmful to children does not a dictator make. Or else you'd be rallying just as hard to allow children to drink alcohol.
> Or else you'd be rallying just as hard to allow children to drink alcohol
Why? I don't have a threshold at 127 in my luminance channel.
Just a reminder - what children are allowed or not is not any government's business, it's parents' one. Which requires tearing their asses off from sofas and their eyes from screens and actually talk to their children and be in the know of their circles and activities.
I'm glad you agree that if a child happens to be born to parents who aren't very good at parenting, they deserve to suffer. Basically if a child's parents smoke around them and give them lung cancer, all we should do is yell at them and moan on the internet, not actually do anything (via the government) to prevent it.
Nothing you've said contradicts that you think the government should not forbid children from buying alcohol.
Social media appears to be more harmful to a child than low quantities of alcohol, but less harmful than lung cancer.
I recommend you studying some history, especially that of Germany since 1920 till 1945, to help yourself part with the illusion that the government's overreaching care has anything to do with actual care, and to finally grok the essense of the saying:
> Putin and Khamenei are ruthless, brutal dictators. You don’t need to like Starmer, but he’s none of that. He’s a proper democrat. The implication that they’re all somewhat the same delegitimises democracies and legitimises these dictators. That’s how they win.
Someone who is a citizen of the UK who has no connection to Iran or Russia is legitimately much more concerned with the ways in which Starmer governs the UK, than in whether Putin or Khamenei "win". I don't even disagree with you that Putin and Khamenei are ruthless dictators, and certainly plenty of people in Russia or Iran or countries in the Russian or Iranians sphere of influence have plenty of good reasons to politically oppose both those dictators. But a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can, and people in the UK who oppose Starmer and his party shouldn't let up in that opposition just because it makes Starmer seem closer to Putin or Khamenei than Starmer's supporters would like.
> a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can
Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.
It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.
For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear,
in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.