I decided I will block signups to my web platform for UK users as well. Just because I don’t understand any of the requirements.
There was a lot of "vote splitting" and spoiler effect going on due to FPTP.
Labour have a very weak mandate.
There's a certain irony in our politics right now that FPTP has been maintained by two dominant political parties because it has served their purposes to have little real challenge from smaller parties despite those parties collectively having quite a lot of popular support. That same system has now all but ended one of those two dominant parties as a force in British politics and at the next election it might well do the same for the other. The scariest question is who we might then get instead if Labour don't force through a radical change to our voting system while they still have the (possibly last) chance.
Towards the end of the last Labour government in the UK, in the lead up to the election that ended it, I heard a Labour MP on the radio being asked about bringing in PR and transferrable vote systems (like we have here in Aus). His attitude was that PR is for losers. FPTP puts the winner in place. Anyone disputing this, or trying to bring up ideas about systems which give power to candidates representing a wider slice of the electorate - they're just losers who couldn't get the votes they needed to win. It was sickening to listen to.
The problem, of course, is that any party that gets into power gets in via the existing system, and asking them to change it is like asking someone to train their replacement and fire themselves.
Indeed. But Labour might be facing an electoral wipe out next time anyway like the Tories last year. Even if they do a decent job they're starting from such a bad position that it will be tough to rebuild enough public support for another election victory. Unfortunately that becomes tougher if they actually try to fix some of our long-term problems by doing sensible things that won't pay off in time for the next election.
If they realise that their current strategy of giving the vote to 16 and 17 year olds isn't going to be enough to stay in power and Reform (populist right-wingers) look like they're going to win big instead then there will be a lot of soul searching going on at Labour HQ. Making a change that will at least see them avoiding the fate of the Tories last time might be a bit more palatable for them even if it would still be a bitter pill to swallow for the many Labour MPs who were going to lose their positions either way.
Can but hope I suppose, perhaps when they're staring down the barrel of a Farage government... but I'm not seeing it.
It's not a manifesto policy but then they're probably going to implement a lot of things that aren't manifesto policies between now and then. At least this one would have cross-party support in Parliament and probably broad public support as well.
thats literally all there is to it.
Also I don't know what sort of weight "guidance" from a reg agency vs statute carries there, how much of a defense it is, etc.
The UK doesn't have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights other than the European Convention on Human Rights, that leading parties campaign of abolishing (if a bill of rights can be abolished by the legislature, it's not worth the paper it's printed on). Heck it doesn't even have a proper written constitution, it doesn't have separation of powers or an independent judiciary (the previous Parliament considered passing a law saying "Rwanda is a safe country to deport inconvenient asylum seekers to" in response to a court ruling (correctly) saying it manifestly isn't.
The UK and Australia are in a race to the bottom to see which one is going to be the worst enemy of the Internet. The only check against these authoritarian powers is popular juries, and they are trying to get rid of these as well.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-06-23/debates/250...
"with its members demonstrating a willingness to use violence"
As far as I am aware, have only damaged property. Have they actually committed any acts of violence or advocated violence?
It is embarassing for the UK military that they were able to get into a base and spray paint military planes.
Also, the group has directly harmed people too:
> A police officer was taken to hospital after being hit with a sledgehammer while responding to reports of criminal damage.
That seems a stretch.
>A police officer was taken to hospital after being hit with a sledgehammer
I wasn't aware of that incident.
It smells like a jumped up "assaulted a police officer" charge because you shield your face from their punches. Hitting someone with a sledge hammer is a suitably scary tabloid headline but physically unlikely and entirely out of character for the accused group.
Note that Avon Police have form as lying pieces of shit.
They attacked protestors and claimed 21 injured officers specifically: "officers got broken bones, had punctured lungs, were very seriously injured" in the national media.
Journalists contacted local hospitals and found no police were treated that night. They had to retract those claims and their list of the claimed injuries included staff who never attended the scene, a bee sting and a twisted ankle getting out of a car.
I expect similar will happen here but only after this claim has been used for years to demonise protestors.
people have literally been jailed for "hate speech" here because they clicked like on a tweet. labour is currently debating an official definition of "islamophobia" which would criminalize stating historical facts like "islam was spread by the sword" and "the grooming gangs are mostly pakistani". the govt put out a superinjunction forbidding anyone (including MPs) from mentioning they spent £7B bringing over afghans allegedly at risk from the taliban, and also criminalizing mention of the gag order itself, and so on recursively. nobody (other than judges and senior ministers) knows how many other such superinjunctions there are.
all this and more is covered by those 17 categories.
on top of this, britain claims global jurisdiction here. think a minute how absurd that is -- any website anywhere that any briton might access is in scope, according to ofcom. and they claim the power to prosecute foreigners for these "crimes" ...
I am aware that someone was jailed for encouraging people via social media to burn down a hotel with refugees in ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3wkzgpjxvo ). But not because they clicked like on a Tweet. Reference please.
This has to be the most uncharitable reading of that situation I've ever seen. Have you been watching GBNews?
The Ministry of Defence messed up under the last government, a junior operative leaked a list of names of Afghan people who had helped the UK armed forces during the years of British and American presence. Not only that, but the list also contained the names of UK special forces and a few secret agents. This is bad and at that point they had a duty to protect the people they'd exposed.
So yeah, they got a "super injunction" to prevent reporting of the list to do further damage, and that does prevent prevent reporting of the injunction. I personally think such things are dodgy as fuck and shouldn't be available in law, but compared to using them to block discussion of (for example) a rich footballer or a journalist being caught having an affair, it seems like this was comparatively reasonable.
To paint this as purely an exercise hiding the spending of money on bringing afghans into the UK 'allegedly at risk' seems... well, uncharitable.
> on top of this, britain claims global jurisdiction here...
As do the EU (and UK) for the GDPR, and lots of other countries for lots of other things. If you're offering services to people in the UK you have to abide by UK laws.
We can talk about the laws being bad (and it seems this one is) but it's hard to see that principle as wrong, unless you're still in love with the old wild-west, no-rules-followed internet. I think those days are behind us.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/10/2/locked-out-why-i...