277
In Falkirk ~~today~~ saturday aug16
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
277 points (98.3% liked)
UK Politics
4241 readers
515 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're floundering on the is/ought issue.
When you come in insisting that we shouldn't question the legality of waving a flag that says 'Kill The N-rs', you not only sound like you're championing bigotry but you miss the point of the spectacle entirely.
What's at play is a UK government that has empowered itself to proscribe certain types of speech and abstained from regulating other types of speech. The government's ability to regulate speech has already been ceded (even - perhaps especially - in the American surveillance state). What's notable is who ranking leadership uses that power to suppress and who it tacitly supports.
I would go a bit deeper and ask how many members of this protest group are members of or friends with the people charged with regulating their conduct. This isn't merely an incitement to violence. It is a platform of a party that is rapidly gaining support within the country.
What you're looking at is the seeds of an open insurrection, not unlike the J6 riots in the US, the Hinduvista riots in India, or the Israeli settler riots in the West Bank.
J6 rioters were successfully found guilty of numerous things and jailed without needing to make up new offences for them. Incitement to violence is an existing crime. They should be enforcing it.
The fact that some twat who's above the law came along and freed them all doesn't play into this argument.
I don't want to live in a society where the freedom to protest is so eroded that it's worthless. So I don't want them banned from protesting because that's legal. Nail them to the wall on anything they do that's illegal though. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be difficult.
Most of the rioters weren't jailed. Less than one third earned prison sentences. Of the 1500 who were charged, roughly 900 were convicted with 300 ongoing, which is surprisingly low by federal prosecution standards (typically feds convict in excess of 90% of cases).
One individual notably exempt from prosecution was, of course, Donald Trump himself.
Then you need to leave the US asap, because the freedom to protest went out back during the Founding Fathers Era. It has never existed in any practical sense, whether it was the Whiskey Rebellion, the Bonus March, or the Columbia anti-genocide Protests.
I see people regularly bring up the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China, when they want to dab on "Unfree" countries and their illiberal habits. But then I see security services like Anduril and Booz Allen Hamilton vacuuming up the name of every dipshit who posted "I'm going to the No Kings Day March! Join me!" on Facebook or Twitter. And then what?