UK Government Plans New Powers to Label Dissenting Movements as 'subversion'

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/british-man-arr...

> 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...

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.

> The risk is magnified by the racist and colonial legacy of Britain’s intelligence and policing institutions, whereby ‘loyalties’ and ‘foreign influence’ are racially coded terms. It is clear who the state thinks may constitute an agent of ‘foreign power’. Hall acknowledges the risk of “putting certain nationalities under the spotlight or appearing to question their loyalties”, but this is brushed over by the alleged extraordinary threat of national security risk.

This type of abuse of powers is already becoming normalized in America. For example, Governor Abbott of Texas and other politicians from right-leaning states have explicitly condemned Sharia Law and Islam, and are taking various actions to marginalize those communities. The recent incident with an Afghan national has further radicalized the right.

I can see how Sharia Law has no place in a democratic constitutional republic, but Christianity shares many of the same issues as Islam in terms of supremacist tendencies. And many on the right have no issue openly claiming that America is a Christian nation, and advocate for puritanical integration of their religion into law. This gets no condemnation from the right, and I doubt they’ll use their powers to stop the push for theocracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is power.

incidentally...

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.

It is essentially down to our institutions being captured by a Marxist ideology, and legislation like our Public Order Act 1986.

Currently, we happen to have a Marxist government. Amongst other things, they now want to abolish trial by jury in most cases. They can't allow the proletariat to get too uppity.

We're mainly just waiting to see if we can get to 2029 (the next General Election) without the regime having an excuse to trigger the Civil Contingencies Act; and hopefully we can chuck this lot out on their ear.

One problem though being that the anticipated replacement government (assuming it is Reform) will be quite incompetent, but at least not malicious like the current one.

In this case there is an news article for that (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...).

To summarize the article, the data is highly unreliable and aren't comparable, nor is it normalized to the population. A person in UK can be charged under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 if they voice a death threat over the phone, while the Belarus case can be a person criticizing the government on twitter. It can also be a person in the UK who sent a unsolicited sexual image. As a legal analyze of Section 127 frames it, most thing it makes illegal is already illegal under other laws which makes it difficult to analyze the scope. A person who sends a death threat is breaking the law both by sending a death threat, but also by using (abusing) a telecom service for the purpose of sending a death threat. It is a bit of an catch all clause.