And even if current government is 100% benevolent, just putting the tool in the toolbox means any subsequent govt, that might not be that, can use it.
Yes, but I wouldn't put "independence movements" in that list. Much as I'm relaxed about the Welsh and Scots' independence movements, for Northern Ireland to do whatever it wants including the current kicking-can-down-road approach, and for any future potential from the Cornish and London vague aspirations that nobody currently takes seriously…
… if I was a hostile foreign power, then I would absolutely support all of those campaigns. And more. (Independence for Langstone! :P)
At least one of them, Antifa, worked hard to earn the designation.
How do people in the UK defend this? I consider myself a liberal and to defend this government is a level of hypocrisy so beyond the pale.
Am I being reactionary here? Are things actually not that bad in the UK?
Tories have done approximately nothing, Labour is an old mother lode of speech policing and the Greens with all their postmodern sensitivities plus deference to Islam don't look particularly promising as well.
Once upon a time, Lib Dems were strong on civic freedoms... but I can't remember them doing anything in this regard during the Cameron coalition government.
Does anyone remember them doing anything other than apologising for going against their election pledge about tuition fees and losing the electoral reform referendum?
They also stopped the introduction of compulsory id cards.
Then, mainly because of this, the group Palestinan Action was classified as a terrorist group. Since the thousands of people have been arrested in the UK for support of terrorism, for holding signs that say "I support Palestinian Action" and the like.
As far as I can see is a lie the website has made up. None of their links include the word subversion. Subversion is not part of British law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion#United_Kingdom
Is there some reality to this or is the website just making stuff up to object to some things they dislike?
Is it because I mentioned the entity name?
Here is the comment:
"It’s ironic how the West has long championed democracy, demanded freedom of speech, and called for human rights from everyone. Only to suddenly adopt authoritarian, anti-free speech, anti-human rights, and anti-protest stances the moment free speech began to critique Israel.
It’s truly shameful to see such developments."
The UK doesn't really have much of a good history on the topic of listening to political dissent from within. The Sex Pistols comes to mind, and the Winter of Discontent, and the anti-Iraq-war march, and the Troubles, and police kettling a few decades back, and a bike safety protest a friend attended where a lot of people who couldn't hear a police order got arrested for not following that order, and there's a former partner of mine could give you a whole bunch of stories about protests you've probably never even heard of.
IMO, the UK's led by aristocrats who only mostly deign to play the game of democracy, but the leadership doesn't really seem to think naturally in those terms and is a lot more comfortable at white tie events.
If they are, they're a lot more subtle about it than they are with regard to USA politics.
It is not a suddenly adaptation of authoritarian, anti-free speech, anti-human rights. Die Gedanken sind frei demonstrates that people been fighting for freedom of speech since the middle ages.
Some of them:
* Israel is losing support across the world, because now it can't control the narrative, before it was able, people thought journalism exist, now we see it doesn't, and we are witnessing 2 different narratives in the media vs social networks
* EU and US politicians took money from relevant lobby entities (or as we should call it: bribe)
Only to suddenly adopt authoritarian, anti-free speech, anti-human rights, and anti-protest stances the moment free speech began to critique Israel.
It’s truly shameful to see such developments.
It's not sudden. The West's hate speech laws have been coming for ages. Anyone silly enough to put that much enforcement over speech into play cannot now complain that it's being used against people they like.
And to be clear, US liberalism is largely supportive of right-wing ideology, the US Democratic party would be considered a right-wing party in many other countries. So it's both parties who are to blame here, but the underlying authoritarian fascist current is decidedly right-wing politics
I'm trying to talk ideas; your post is riddled with just identifying which team is the goodies and the baddies. I don't think there's much common ground to be had between discussing ideas vs tribalism.
It's ridiculous to accuse me of peddling tribalism when my post intentionally pushed back against the very tribalism coloring your original post.
Can we get back on topic?
Just occurred to me, before the free internet both dissemination of opinions and access was restricted. Now we have unprecedented access, and there are obvious strains and regression. Makes you wonder what we missed from the times before the internet.
To be sure, this legislation sounds draconian: “This expansive framing blurs the line between political dissent and subversive threat. Intent becomes a political judgement, inferred from beliefs, causes and associations rather than conduct.”
I still can't believe the UK has arrested people based on their social media posts. Why are people standing for that, over there? (I'm a US citizen.) Meanwhile, one could make direct quotes from the Quran or Hadith and you'd likely remain unchallenged because religion gets a free pass from reasonable critique for some illogical reason. Appeasement will eventually lead to fear...
>Mentions one discrete event
Come on...
What's really remarkable is how completely the illusion that this is what they were doing lasted in those countries. Some authority somewhere is cursing letting plebs on the Internet for destroying this.
Ask a latin american and see if they think that's what has been going on.
He was a well-known and liked figure in Ireland off the back of Father Ted, Black Books and the IT Crowd. He was a huge blogger and early presence on Twitter, with both him and his wife being public feminists and supporters.
He was also - and this is the important bit - a public advocate and supporter for the pro-choice position in our abortion referendum, which gave him some sense of intellectual and moral security in his heartfelt positions, as well as a huge fanbase.
Unfortunately some of his previous advocacies evolved into TERFs, and he with them. This then became a mono-crusade under the guise of standing up for the women in his life and women in general. Slowly but surely his fanbase, his professional connections, and society at large fell out of step with him.
https://metro.co.uk/2021/02/23/graham-linehan-joins-queer-wo...
As his antics became more extreme and problematic in their optics, his friends, his family, and his Wife begged him year after year to stop sabotaging his own existence before eventually having to leave him.
He's dug down so far at this point that he's being courted by Joe Rogan, which is probably the saddest bit of this entire story.
The interviewer is clearly sympathetic to Mr Linehan and their personal views are not opposed.
But nonetheless they end up thinking "I tried to understand why I couldn’t get through, why the piece I’d wanted to write for years would be a failure" - because the guy is an obsessive, unwell crank, that's all. It is a sad story.
Moreover, economic studies show that the profitability was discutable - in the case of France it was a net loss due to the massive infrastructure costs and the subsidies for non-competitive industries.
In 1096AD, while the Mayans were plunging daggers into their sacrifices' chests, England was busy opening Oxford University. What sort of fool would think that somehow all the engineering and scientific advance that would allow England to reach around the world and establish an empire could possibly have been caused by that empire?
History, just like everything else in Nature, is cyclical.
The responses, ranging from political partisanship, ad hominem, to being offended by the choice of words, are certainly a sign of the times.
So is the idea that "history is cyclical". It's literally the bell curve meme, and you're in the middle x)
If anything, history goes the other way around. Fascism ("strong men") comes from good times, as a reaction. They create authoritarianism and discrimination ("bad times"), which slowly liberalizes and equalizes (gives rise to "weak men"). This makes situation better until another fascist takeover.
Anyway, the quoted saying is not about any specific ideology, that's just your own projection. Here's the cycle reformulated without any specific ideology:
Hard times create strong men: hardship breeds discipline
Strong men create good times: discipline breeds prosperity
Good times create weak men: prosperity breeds complacency
weak men create hard times: complacency leads to hardship
I don't believe it. Personally, I think spiritual weakness and religious corruption are more likely culprits -- and not necessarily the type of spirituality or religion that you might be thinking of.
Either way, "good times" is a dangerous place to put the blame. It relieves us of responsibility for our own catastrophes (it was the good times' fault), and it makes us suspicious of prosperity and happiness.
Good times are not evil. We don't need to shun them, provided we keep strengthening the better angels of our nature.
Even while Europe is "Pan Western" it's still heavily differentiated. As [REDACTED TO PREVENT REFLEXT DOWNVOTES] says, "US is the central pillar of Western civilization." This is true in the sense that it embodies values closest to the Western ideal.
This is one of those conversations that in 2025 entering will get you on a GB border control blacklist, so I'm going to shut up now.
It was coming anyway, and it could have been any event that triggered it. The right event at the right time?
But as others here mention, the powers that be are unhappy that the population isn't siding with their position. The government is fine with dissent against Russia because they are "the enemy" in the narrative.
At the same time, there seemed to be a much larger group of people in the normal population who disagreed with those in power than most other issues (when at least some representatives in a major party might roughly align with the people)
Did it happen when people protested China for the treatment of Uyghurs? No
Did it happen when people speak up (no protests, yet) about UAE involvement in Sudan? No
I made my own conclusions based on these and other similar data points.
After the 2024 riots there were mass arrests and prosecution, but only talk about reviewing groups as to whether they should be proscribed.
Why does a member throwing a can of paint get you classed as a terrorist organisation, while organising riots that involve throwing molotov's and causing serious injury not?
"disabled aircraft using paint and crowbars"
Is that "terror"?
Besides, why not prosecute them for their actions, why proscribe the organisation as a terrorist one, while at the same time ignoring groups who commit much more violent offenses (such as the one given) and concentrate on prosecuting "personal responsibility"?
While most of the individual members of the state are just rallying around the flag, the core ideological group inside the state has the belief that the public must never be allowed to dictate the choice of geopolitical ingroup and outgroup. The repression they are enacting isn't about lsreaI per se, it's about the principle of the thing.
See Roger and Me, Michael Moore's first film. Economic downturn, workers facing uncertainty as the already opulent thrive.
Coincidentally GenXers that would have come of age at the time are middle managers and decision makers in corporate land.
CEO that jacked up Epipen prices. Insurance CEO that got got. Musk and Thiel. The original emo Smashing Pumpkins generation that grew up in a cocaine fueled era of news full of desperation and despair. Easy for them to tolerate and accept then as their brains nursed on it.
Good luck getting them to feel bad: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di...
People speak as though Farage would be any different but fail to acknowledge that he is as much a grifter as any of the others running, if not more so.
Maybe the Greens would provide some change but, at this point, they’re no more than a protest vote which is why I personally stopped my membership.
The fact that consecutive governments all used phrases like ‘all pulling our weight’ in reference to the cost of living crisis while taking pay rises for themselves should say it all but, sadly, people are too busy chasing headlines and internet points to extrapolate and assess a situation logically.
The UK and its allies will very much be on the wrong side of history should humanity live to see the next century through.
While Germany is not an advocate of genocide in any sense, it is a major arms exporter to Israel and has also barely been re-admitted into the human race as a result of their egregious human rights violations and war crimes in the previous century. This over-erring on the side of caution for their previous victims can thus be explained, if not excused.
The UK, however, have distinguished themselves instead by trying to prosecute Irish Rappers for Terrorism, and proscribing Palestine Action a terrorist organisation - putting it alongside Al Qaeda and ISIS, and making support of the group a criminal offense punishable by up to 14 years in prison. It seems that to protect democracy under the current newspeak you have to arrest Placard wielding Pensioners.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/uk-arresting-pe...
British police have made over 1,300 arrests using terrorism legislation at Palestine Action protests this summer — five times more than the total number of arrests for terrorism-related activity in the U.K. in all of 2024. From a retired British colonel to a Catholic priest, half of the 532 people arrested in the Parliament Square protest alone were 60 or older.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/16...
Those participating in anything akin to the Coal Miner's Strikes of the 80s under Thatcher would no doubt find themselves charged with 'domestic terrorism' and put on no-fly lists alongside other societally chilling measures. In short, this is to distract from the economic black-hole they find themselves in post-Brexit, with incitement to hatred spurred on by paid agitators like Tommy Robinson who is in turn backed by Elon Musk/Russia, or Nathan Gill the former MEP who was jailed for accepting around £40,000 in bribes from a Russian-linked individual to support pro-Russian politicians.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/world/europe/uk-far-right...
France has its own particularly xenophobic issues - but they are focused on Islamic migration from North Africa as a follow-on from France's appalling history of Colonial abuse in the region. Thus the French far-right, typified historically by their anti-semitism, end up as uneasy bedfellows and proxy Zionists by virtue of Marine Le Pen's stance since kicking her father out of their far-right party over his persistent refutation of the Holocaust.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/world/europe/france-jews-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/06/marine-le-pens...
Our colonial legacy in Ireland, as the oppressed, however, grants us a special insight and advocacy for those in analogous circumstances - be it historically re: refusing to handle goods from Apartheid South Africa, or contemporarily with our Occupied Territories Bill (or whatever watered down version passes American MNC muster).
https://mandate.ie/2024/07/the-day-10-workers-changed-the-wo...
The people being visited by police for creating content that other people say they find offensive are generally anti-immigration or anti gender ideology rather than anti-Israel.
Please stop doing this. If someone wants to read LLM-generated hooey of some variety, they can submit a prompt somewhere and read the resulting text themselves.
I have a feeling that Israeli interference is exempt from such labels though.
Not because of being afraid of government censorship, but because of the sheer futility of fighting peoples faith and outmoded ideas of how our market place of ideas works.
Counter speech, is NOT working. "the best ideas rise to the top" is untrue. We don't have an information economy, we have a content economy. Its the equivalent of the junk food era, just for content.
Governments around the world are going to enact speech controls. Voters are clamoring for it. Its going to eventually be a disaster.
I also do not think that there is going to be any effective opposition, if people keep showing up to battle lines drawn in the 90s and 2000s.
If you want a market place of ideas, you have to figure out how to ensure its a FAIR market place. Not a place where you pit regular folk against corporate PR teams, information teams, and behemoths of all kinds.
And for those holding out hope for decentralized solutions (Mastodon, Bluesky): These have a chance, but there is no solution to moderation labour and costs.
We actually seem to have attention economy, that is the really valuable thing, not content. Mostly it's important what catches our attention first. This is also why counter speech does not work - it does not come first.
> If you want a market place of ideas, you have to figure out how to ensure its a FAIR market place.
Yes and that is obviously not possible at this time.
Low social credit score? Oh you cannot have those ice creams. You said something bad about the party online? No oranges for you. Etc.
People should wholesale reject this.
It really does feel like a hopeless situation. In one camp the woolly liberals being fuzzy as ever thinking if only everyone could sing happily together everything will be great (again?), and on the other those wanting to open pandora's box of fascist delights, without any sight of quite what is inside before you get to the bottom, somehow believing nothing in there will turn on them in the process.
> Yet, another way to view ‘cumulative’ or repeated protests is as sustained public action for justice, solidarity and freedom.
So yes, if you interpret some random bill amendment in whatever way favors your side, you can argue against or for anything (the logical principle of explosion[3]). The problem is that some protests were actually quite disruptive and some people think we should curb this. This isn't some insane authoritarian anti-free-speech power-grab that the original article hints at.
It's sad to see folks lacking any kind of media literacy or critical eye. Also, the source itself is biased (it's a left-wing think tank), but that's a whole 'nother thing.
[1] https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3938/stages/20237/amendmen...
[2] https://netpol.org/2025/10/28/resist-new-laws-restricting-cu...
[3] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dnp/frege/paradoxes-of-material-i...
In fact, perhaps most progress toward justice required "disruption," and that's a bargain price to pay.
That is how laws often get interpreted. It gives the decision to a police officer. Do you think the police officer will ever make a decision which does not favour their side?
1. We have had various highly disruptive repeated "climate" protests (Just stop Oil, etc)
2. We have had over a year of "pro Palestinian" hate marches, more or less every weekend.
3. We have had repeated protests outside various hotels repurposed as hostels for housing illegal migrants.
Of these the latter is the most recent, least disruptive, but most embarrassing for the regime. The regime seems to be complicit with the second.
I suspect most folks expect this power to be used against '2', but I'd not be surprised if it was used against '3' instead.
This is ALREADY in play with the proscribing of Palestine Action, and subsequent arrest of protestors on Terrorism charges. They are absolutely spot-on in their conclusion that, "These developments reveal a state increasingly concerned with defending its own legitimacy that is weaponising security itself to shield power from accountability."
The potted history of Shabana Mahmood is a grotesquely cynical exemplar of this relatively new phenomenon.
In 2014, a backbench Labour MP named Shabana Mahmood lay on the floor of her local Sainsbury’s in protest against the sale of products made in illegal Israeli settlements. A week later, she spoke to crowds at a Free Palestine protest in Hyde Park, of the “compassion and humanity expressed for the people of Gaza … from every race and every religion.”
Mahmood is now the UK Home Secretary, and gets to decide if the more than 2,000 people arrested for alleged support of Palestine Action – mostly for holding placards stating: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” – will face criminal trial.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/26/ban-on-pales...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-police-powers-to-prot...
The changes to the law would allow police officers to consider the cumulative impact of protest when deciding whether or not they are lawful, meaning they could potentially re-route or totally shut down protest they believe could cause serious disruption to local communities.
The Netpol argument suggests that the upcoming annual review of national security legislation is likely to expand the protest-related clauses of the National Security Act in a similar fashion - providing the groundwork for a legal definition of ‘subversion’ that could prioritise ideology over conduct.
This seems to be mainly based on Hall’s ‘Independent Review of State Threats and Terrorism‘, published in May 2025, and his his recent review of the Sentencing Bill, published in late October 2025.
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/wp-c...
https://terrorismlegislationreviewer.independent.gov.uk/wp-c...
He has been sabre-rattling in the UK media since May in an effort to drum up support - whilst simutaneously playing up to the far-right agitators by supporting 'anti-woke' figureheads like Graham Linehan and his anti-trans agitation.
""I am thinking about the measures that may one day be needed to save democracy from itself. What do I mean? I am referring to counter-subversion"
https://news.sky.com/story/britain-may-have-to-resort-to-ant...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/21/jonathan-hall-kc...
So HN is having an entire discussion on the basis of one journalist’s irresponsibly sloppy headline writing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You may think that the journalist’s hunch is justified in this case, but to report that the government is planning something, when that is merely a somewhat informed guess at what the government may eventually do, is just bad journalism.
- Broad discretionary powers
- Vague thresholds
- Pre-emptive justification
- Lack of neutral limits (time, geography, number of events)
- Expansion of police control over public assembly
Your post to waive away concerns as partisan or alarmist is either an intentionally bad act or, sorry, naive.
There is a trial in progress at the moment relating to an attack on Elbit Systems where one of the "protestors" seemed to attack a WPC with a sledgehammer. Apparently having caused serious harm to her spine.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79727zeqyvo
So the folks holding signs expressing their support for the group once it has been proscribed (I believe under the TA 2000) are somewhat ill advised.
If they disagree with the proscription, what they should probably be doing it assisting in the Judicial Review of that proscription which is currently ongoing. Certainly they should be waiting until after the review before expressing any support.
As even if the proscription is overturned, those who expressed support for what is currently viewed as a terrorist org may not have the personal consequences of their support undone.
But knowing the UK, they'll probably use it to jail people who post mean things on twitter.
> was then interrogated over the picture and another photo of a house he shared on social media – which he told police he had never been to and was taken by someone else.
> The allegations about stalking and illegal possession of a firearm were dropped, but he was then charged with a public order offence for a different social media post.
Either the police is exaggerating, either this guy is exaggerating... or a little bit of both?
https://metro.co.uk/2025/11/29/british-man-arrested-posing-g...
Funny that nobody mentions that these things are not actually coming from government, but were lobbied by asset managers and big corporations.
This is text book fascism (marriage of big corporations and government).
Nobody voted for this.