UK Government plans new powers to label dissenting movements as 'subversion'

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)

> 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.

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.

In the US it is currently very likely that every crime that involves money also involve wire fraud, unless people only use physical cash and never transfer them. They usually also involve tax fraud since illegal money is rarely declared. That makes statistics involving tax and wire fraud in the US a bit difficult to parse into meaningful data.

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.

incidentally...

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.

> 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...

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

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.

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.”

History, just like everything else in Nature, is cyclical.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.