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Comment by kodoman | Hacker News Reader

From the UK are bill of rights from 1689 has a clause called free speech in it. When you actually look at it's free speech... for parliament and parliamentarians from the king, Citizens get no such right. We have a clause that is the right to bear arms, when you look at it predicated on being the a protestant and parliament allowing you. No one actually reads these things or the history surrounding it here because when you do you quickly realize how pathetic are 'glorious revolution' is how weak the the brave people petitioning a foreign king to come over to overthrow a king they did not like because he was a catholic and wanted more tolerance for Catholics.

Not the biggest fan of where America is at the moment but American founding fathers are some of the most impressive people and the American revolution is incredible, where as are revolution is one of the saddest affairs in human history and it's continuation is a disaster in my opinion.

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I pray there will be a light at the end of the tunnel soon, but I doubt it is possible without major political change.

Not being rude just trying to understand, but when you say 'are' do you mean 'our'?

Yes I also don't like the language of my country, 'are' sounds like 'our' so I mix them up, I apologize, at least you know I am not an LLM!

No need to apologize, just wanted to clarify for understanding :)

Have there been any new laws in the UK since 1689?

Of course that is not my point. Yes we have the humans rights act Etc that provides rights, but much much later and contested. My primary point is that the bill of rights is one of the important parts of are constitution where as human rights or any other documents is not constitutional.

I also think are revolution is not particularly rousing and that freedom of speech and such is still very tenuous.

The UK doesn't have a separate constitution, just a bunch of laws, some of which grant rights.

It's more complicated then that it has written portion making up many documents going back to magna carta (in actual fact basically only 4 clauses barely survive) and the Glorious revolution is the real written document that actually supports the sovereignty of parliament, and a lot of flimflam that makes up supposed ancient rights given to parliament starting with magna carta.

I do not hold said constitution in high esteem.

The basis of the UK system is that parliament has infinite rights. It's allowed to pass a bill saying all police officers must try to murder the king, and then they must. It won't pass that because politicians won't agree to pass it, because they're scared of the extra-parliamentary consequences, but nothing in the law stops them.

The sole check against these infinite rights is not electing morons. Doesn't seem to work very well.

Yes I would disagree with your framing of you hypothetical not least because parliament did kill the king (Charles I), then once the lord protectorate was over and the restoration conspired successfully with a foreign king to over throw the current king and then wrote a document deciding who can and can not be king which has applied to all king and queens so far. Parliament wants the king as a figure head so they can hide behind something, formally it's not Parliaments government by it's self but the monarchs, though the monarch may not raise an army or really have any power outside parliament but still the monarchs government and should things go badly they may simply blame the figure head. Once you see the pattern you will see it lots of time's in are history maybe other histories ;) .

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