There seems to be a prevalent notion within UK establishment circles, "we are being attacked from both sides, therefore we must be right/balanced/fair", which is totally not how it works. You see used for example to defend the supposed impartiality of the BBC.
The problem isn’t the balance, it’s the police state. I don’t want an authoritarian Left government any more than I want an authoritarian Right or Center government.
The problem is most Brits, at least on HN, seem to deny what is happening and/or support it. People being arrested for holding up blank signs at Charles' coronation was ridiculous and nothing like it has happened in the US, but anytime that's brought up they pivot to mass shootings in the US or some other whataboutism.
I am convinced that a good bit of this is paid astroturfing and another segment is people who work in government or government contracting. Brits generally seem more open to government intrusion, it’s true, but in my experience they don’t go out of their way to defend things like this. It’s more of a passive acceptance.
I think tribalism is the simpler explanation. One of the worst offenders I saw was a guy on here who wrote one of the new generation shells written in go...went out of his way to say the US had the same behavior as the UK, arresting people holding a blank sign, except his evidence was the disproportionate shooting of black people by police. An entirely unrelated issue. The point was though he was flailing due to feeling defensive, and unable to take a step back and analyze the criticisms objectively. This is super common behavior in pretty much all countries, and I think it's a huge problem.
True, now that you mention it I’ve seen the same sort of thing from people who are definitely not bots. Although, you can’t discount the possibility that they do some government or law enforcement work as a consultant. The full throated defense of police state tactics is unreal. (For what it’s worth, there are plenty of Americans who show up in Palantir/Flock threads doing the same thing, and I have the same suspicions there.)
Because it is massively exaggerated by those with an agenda to distract from the US.
But go on, tell me about how “free speech zones” are meaningfully different to this. You won’t be arrested so long as you stay in your zone down the street and round the corner and out of sight.
The UK has serious problems, but reading Americans catastrophising over this stuff as I have been for a couple of decades now is always incredible. Take the beam from your own eyes. And stop believing lies about the streets of London being a war zone.
> Because it is massively exaggerated by those with an agenda to distract from the US.
I don't think there has to be any negative motive. I'm not from the US or the UK but have lived in both countries, so feel I can be somewhat objective. What's going on in both countries is disturbing to me, but they have differences with what they are doing.
> But go on, tell me about how “free speech zones” are meaningfully different to this. You won’t be arrested so long as you stay in your zone down the street and round the corner and out of sight.
That hasn't been a thing for a long time. There have been nationwide protests the last few days not restricted to any kind of 'free speech zone'.
Consider what you are trying to defend: holding up a blank sign. Are you really OK with that? You really think that is reasonable?
> The UK has serious problems, but reading Americans catastrophising over this stuff
Pointing out a legitimate concern is not catastrophising anything.
> And stop believing lies about the streets of London being a war zone.
It’s still the law, was expanded under Obama and is used widely. It is used to control dissent at events where protest would be unsightly, much as the UK incident you brought up.
> Arresting people for holding up a blank sign is very different and much worse.
On the contrary, it’s no different whatsoever from corralling away protest until it’s out of sight in an approved zone, and arresting anyone who expresses dissent in sight.
It’s exactly the same use of police in concealment of dissent by the state.
> Do you agree it was a problem
Of course, it’s fucking awful. It’s your contention that “nothing like this ever happened in the US” that I took issue with - it does and it’s entirely routine.
This is my very point - the UK is used as some sort of out-there example of Orwellian repression, but the US, often painted in contrast as some sort of bastion, albeit a troubled one, is usually doing exactly the same damn thing.
It’s in this thread. We have your assertions above, and below we have someone decrying how unimaginable it would have been for a government to attempt to wholesale spy on people’s communications two decades ago, seemingly in complete ignorance of the activities of the NSA in AT&T and other companies’ data infrastructure in the US revealed in 2006.
The BBC has never been impartial to internal concerns - domestic politics in particular. Leveson Inquiry recommendations not being implemented is the tip of the iceberg in relation to the extent of client-journalism it engages in with regard to the Conservative party.
When Ivor Caplin, the former Labour MP that, among other things, attacked Musk for talking about Pakistani rape gangs, was arrested for pedophilia [1], this is the article they published - no photo, no name, no party affiliation, and no followup article - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg45y4r0yngo
BBC omits identity of Nigerian murderer from article about how he killed his wife [2,3], making it entirely about "gendered violence" instead. Readers can't make the incorrect inference if you simply withhold information from them.
BBC omits all criticism of Starmer from their reporting on his meeting with Trump [4].
When Farage's private bank account was closed due to his politics, the BBC first simply took the bank's word that this was entirely due to financial considerations. When Farage obtained internal documents of that bank, explicitly saying he met financial criteria for an account, but it was closed despite this due to his politics, the BBC issued a correction article trying to imply his politics were merely "also" considered [5].
[5] "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66288464
I used the BBC just an example. Starmer seems to have the same attitude. If both Farage and Corbyn, and Polanski and whoever is leading the Conservatives and LibDems are attacking me, then I must be super in the middle i.e. I must be so doing it all super right!
I don't think Starmer really knows what he is doing one way or another. The Island of Strangers speech out flaked Farage to the right.
Dominic Cummings had a bunch of interview appearances online. His experience in office when he was working with Johnson (and many Ministers in general) is that they don't actually understand what they can and can't do in the job. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar situation is present under Starmer.
I think we can fairly easily dismiss Cummings' views on anything. He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit, and that the the best team to carry out that out was to be headed by Boris Johnson.
He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.
> He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit, and that the the best team to carry out that out was to be headed by Boris Johnson.
Not exactly. I think you need to listen to the interviews.
Dominic Cummins has solid rationale for why he believes what he believes. I would need to listen to them again to remember what he said, but what you are describing was too simplistic.
Also his opinions on Brexit have nothing to do with some of the things he said about how COVID was handled.
> He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.
> That has never been his opinion. There are many interviews with him on YouTube and I suggest you listen to them.
I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings.
He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.
> He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit
I don't want to start another Brexit debate or even take position on it. However I'd like to point out that the key with Brexit is the plan on what to do afterwards and that is what has been completely lacking.
Whatever one's opinion of Cummings, he did put forward a plan and that plan was never attempted (probably too bold, shall we say, for politicians to touch it). I am not commenting on whether that would have worked or not, but at least he put forward a plan and strategy. On the other hand, Bojo's "plan" for Brexit seemed to have been limited to becoming PM...
I mean where is Sir Humphrey Appleby when you need him!
Johnson's incredibly colourful reaction to Starmers trade deal, in that he was 'acting like an orange-ball chewing manical gimp', speaks volumes about the discourse around Starmer.
Hislop is particularly scathing, albeit cynically pragmatic, since Starmers appointment - "“Keir Starmer is the man who likes to sit on the fence unless you don’t like fences and then maybe he can find a hedge, or if you don’t like hedges he’ll find a wall."
“People have suggested Keir Starmer is very boring, but I think that’s partly his superpower, in that being interesting in the way his predecessor was manages to lose you elections.
“You have to be careful when you dismiss people as boring. Everyone thought John Major was boring, but then you had him for two elections.”
I believe US conservatives have done this since 1980s. I'm not sure it was deliberate at first: there's feedback. Loudly invoking "liberal bias" in 1975 most certainly got the press to reevaluate and attempt to mitigate any bias they might have shown. That was a reward for conservatives, which probably motivated more accusations of liberal bias, another round of press accomodations. It reinforced itself.
Yeah, a lot of this is just .. well, I hesitate to use the over used phrase "deep state", but a lot of it is the work of people in the security institutions who "advise" the government, rather than the changing cast of the thin democratic bit on the front. There's long been authoritarianism in response to the fear of terrorism, from the IRA onwards. Then there's things like the "spycops" scandal, which make you wonder whether certain protest groups are deliberately engaging in really unpopular stunts in order to facilitate a crackdown.
The British public are in an odd place on this. There's a lot of "folk libertarianism", but that mostly consists of not having ID cards, while at the same time supporting all sorts of crackdowns on protest as soon as it's mildly inconvenient.
And then there's immigration. As in the US, it's a magic bullet for discourse that allows any amount of authoritarianism (or headshots to soccer moms) as long as you promise it will be used against immigrants.
Which is even more bizarre given appointing someone as divisive and pig-ignorant as Priti Patel the Home Secretary would have the tabloids crucifying a Labour PM. Johnson and his after-dinner speeches about the Mayor from Jaws forgave a lot of blunders during C19.
Remember also that when Sunak stepped down, Priti was put forward for leader. If she had played off her Zionist aspirations just a few years later she'd be right in the current newscycle re proscribed organisations and 'domestic terrorism' charges in the UK, and possibly in the running for the big chair.
It's a problem with pretty much anyone. Things are bad from a fundamental structural failings for decades, elect new person, don't see immediate turn-around, they're massively unpopular.
The only way out of this is if you successfully blame $marginalised_group for the peoples problems. Or spend decades undoing the damage, but nobody ever gets decades in power.
Most don't want any of the options presented to them. Almost all the parties don't really serve the electorate, so a large number of people are abstaining.
I appreciate this in an anecdotal but I've spoken to quite a few people I know in my family, that saw it as their civil duty to vote and they told all told me some variation of "there is nobody worth voting for", "I don't think it matters who I vote for".
Some of it is deliberately attempting to appeal to Reform voters, in ways which have infuriated Labour supporters while not winning any Reform support.
Yet these laws and general direction have been in place through half a dozen prime ministers, including ones initially very popular (Johnson especially, but Cameron wasn't particularly unpopular until the brexit mess)
Right. When I'm at a counter-protest facing the local† Nazis (who in this incarnation have decided to call themselves "patriots") among all the rhetoric accusing us of supporting terrorists (no matter where brown people may come from they're apparently "ISIS" or "Taliban" these days) or rapists or any number of weird conspiracies, one thing they often yell about is that Keir Starmer is (to quote them) "a Wanker" and I have observed to other protesters that uniquely this is probably a widely shared viewpoint. Yeah, he is, but, why you are you being so racist, why do you want to terrify my neighbours, what does that have to do with Keir?
† Local in the sense of being the ones who turn up, my guess is that a good number of them travel by car from quite some distance, personally I live five minutes walk away.
I don't agree. The British State has been going in this direction ever since Blair's government and probably before that. I don't remember Blair's government being that unpopular.
I wouldn't like to see all the legal infrastructure they're putting in under a Reform UK government - I'd imagine they'll use it for far more nefarious means.
That being said - the blame lies squarely with Labour here. I have a gut feel a lot of it has to do with donors to the Tony Blair Institute.
Well World Economic Forum (WEF) lists Tony Blair and his institute as one of the top Agenda contributors [1].
It's not even funny that you can trace almost any person responsible for the deterioration of human rights in Western society to one of the WEF alumni or associates.
These supernatural institutions and interest groups should be made illegal if we want to continue as a civilization.
Man, its like everyone is blind to the current state of things.
Here is the truth:
* Everyone with above sentiment always votes for anyone libertarian, which is necessarily conservative, and all conservatives are pretty much liars.
* These same conservatives that champion against government overreach, for law and order, and for personal freedoms do the exact opposite once they get into office. Nor do they give a shit about the law.
So yea, the whole libertarian ideology is pretty much dead. Its pretty obvious that the best course of action is to sacrifice personal freedoms and elect a government that can keep a tight rein over the populace and keep things like Nazi ideology from spreading.
Totalitarianism has the same end state whether it comes from the left or the right. It always results in suppression of the truth, broken feedback loops that lead to poor decisions by government, economic failure, and finally either bloody repression, war, or revolution.
It’s possible to move through this to a place of stability. After all, China only had to kill 15-55 million people in the Great Leap Forward and a couple thousand more in 1989. Today they are fairly stable and prosperous, even with tight controls on information. Perhaps the UK will have a similar path!
The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
>The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
I don't see ICE prowling "the cops don't come serve a warrant here with anything less than a SWAT team" parts of New Orleans or St. Louis.
Stop thinking about this based on indoctrinated emotion and politics. Think about it in terms of an all out war and "how do I force my enemy to expend resources not toward his goals".
Personal ability to credibly threaten lethal violence (note: I did not say "firearms") acts much like an AGTM or MANPADS for an infantry squad. Making any potential target substantially more prickly to a potentially superior force and doing so for little cost is a huge boon for the little guy.
The idea that any cranky old man might just snap and put a bullet in your favorite bespoke enforcer puts a huge damper on your ability to deploy those people. The risk that your informants might get clapped increases the cost of your informants for like results, etc, etc. And when you game it out to it's ends what it comes down to is that the population doing the subjugating might simply not be rich enough or motivated enough to have or be willing to allocate the resources needed to do the job.
This is a large part of why drugs won the war on drugs. There were enough glawk fawtys wit da switch kicking around on the "wrong" side of the law that the cops needed to adopt militarized tactics, the public didn't wanna pay for that shit (monetarily or politically) over weed, and thus drugs won the war on drugs. If they could've rolled up on just about anyone "cheaply" with just a couple cops it would've gone on way longer.
>(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
The semtex wouldn't have gotten anywhere useful if the Brits could just walk into wherever all willy nilly. Bringing enough credible threat of violence to force their enemy to actually behave like a proper occupying force burning money and political credibility as a result limited the Brit's ability engage (at the right price) in the kind of police action they needed to catch the bombs.
If they could've just sent pairs of cops after every lead in an "oi you got a license for that meme" manner they'd have dredged up all the semtex and none of it would've made it to London.
Yes, for the US with their unique historical and cultural differences, but it doesn't make it an international metric.
Everyone in the US agrees with the inequalities and segregation and find it acceptable that an individual has to become a predator to survive because they don't find it acceptable to help each other on a governmental scale.
Some countries have worse inequalities than the US but they don't think they need guns to have freedom in their daily lives.
Most of the murders (homicides) in the USA are committed using illegal weapons. Banning legal weapons wouldn't reduce crime, it would just make it harder for victims to defend themselves.
Besides, USA is not a good example. According to Wikipedia [1], high murder rate statistics in the USA are skewed due to the overrepresentation of one specific part of the population, which is not that common in comparable countries. If that population were to be removed from the statistics, the murder rate in the USA would drop significantly.
> According to the FBI 2019 Uniform Crime Report, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1%, and "Other" 3% in cases where the race was known. Including homicide offenders where the race was unknown, African-Americans accounted for 39.6% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 29.1%, "Other" 2.1%, and "Unknown" 29.3%[48]
As Mao said, political power grows from the barrel of the gun. In the past decade freedom of speech and internet freedom has being dramatically curtailed in pretty much every western country where the citizen are unarmed.
> The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unrest.
Does street crime in fact continue to fall? I keep hearing about bicycles getting stolen, or how in London, mobile phones get snatched. It was also common to hear how police fails to prosecute various kinds of crime (usually mentioned in contrast to how they do prosecute noncrime crimes such as 'hate speech').
Here, for comparison, is a paragraph from an essay by Konstantin Kisin:
> A month earlier, I was walking through a posh part of London when I saw a young man in a balaclava snatch a bag from a tourist. When I told people about what I saw at various meetings, most people were surprised that I was surprised. Phone thefts, muggings and all kinds of petty crime are now considered normal and routine.
Anecdote is not data. It is both true that the police absolutely suck at handling petty crime, and the Met have a fairly terrible reputation; and that more serious violent crime is much, much less of a problem in London than it used to be (and less than US cities, of course).
This is a situation where the data may not be capturing the reality, though.
An increasingly common tactic for decreasing crime statistics is to reduce reporting of crimes. The more difficult you make it to report a crime, the better the crime numbers look.
In one city I’m familiar with, it became so well known that reporting small crimes was a futile endeavor that people just gave up. It was common knowledge that you don’t bother calling the police unless it was a major crime. Not surprisingly, the crime statistics started to look better.
Sure; but the article's premise is that street crime is falling (and as a result, the police, which, presumably, has more free time on their hands, can focus on other things). Assuming petty crime is street crime, and seeing that you agree that the police suck at it, is the article's premise correct?
Yes, it’s correct. Violent crime in London and the UK more generally has been on a long term downward trend. This is not incompatible with there being spikes in some specific categories of crime. But it’s consistent with the trends for homicide, for which the statistics are pretty hard to dispute, and where London has fewer per capita than Berlin, Brussels and Paris (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/london-homic...).
You’re posting an article by someone with eccentric views on a lot of topics and an anti-multiculturalist agenda to advance. (For example, they believe that Rishi Sunak is not English.)
From the link - This is possibly due to better reporting practices by the police as well as an increasing willingness of victims to come forward, including historic victims of sexual violence.
Not definitive, but certainly a possible explanation.
Fine, but also how to explain the crazy claims flying around the internet that London is a warzone and a no-go area? I live here and... seriously, nothing has changed. I feel perfectly safe and always have.
Yeah sure, there's some phone theft, it's not great. This phone theft wave is just a symptom of everyone carrying £500 devices around. Big cities have always had theft, pickpocket and snatching crimes. But it's nothing astonishingly new or different. I know one person who had their phone snatched, never seen it happen myself.
So how to explain this massive wave of social media posts making out that London's unsafe? There is definitely a narrative being pushed, whether by Russian bots or not, I cannot say.
Because everyone that experiences the crime stops tolerating it and leaves. This is why the area around the greenbelt so closely resembles the inner cities of 20 years before. This isn't some new phenomenon - Lee Kuan Yew famously described the newspaper purchasing arrangement at Piccadilly Circus in the 1950s, which was incomprehensible by the 1980s.
I'm old enough to remember when they had posters telling people not to wear iPod white earphones because that will get you mugged (and it would) - pure blaming the victim nonsense.
If London defenders were half as enthusiastic about cleaning up their city as they are about attacking anyone pointing out the all too obvious problems they genuinely would be in utopia.
One of the really boring things about crime stats is that if you insist that "Nobody will do anything" and so you don't bother to report crimes, the crime stats go down -- because you didn't report a crime.
It suits a certain kind of person to have this obvious statistical fact portrayed as some sort of failing of existing institutions. Because it's just how statistics work it won't magically change if you're dumb enough to put them in charge but they can certainly tell gullible people like you that they've fixed it.
Reporting crimes is one of those tedious things citizens have to do to get a nice society to live in, like patiently queueing for things, or putting trash in the bin. You could choose not to do it, but don't blame anybody else if no-one does it and now your society sucks.
I guess it depends on what you mean by English.
England is a country, but you can't have an English passport, you can only get a UK passport.
so, English is a kinda-sorta a non-nationality, but it is very much an ethnic group.
I don't think anyone is claiming that Rishi Sunak isn't a UK citizen, but he certainly isn't a member of the English ethnic group, or any of the Celtic ethnic groups that also make up the UK's native population.
If we go by the explanation from wikipedia [0], Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage would not be considered English, as their families are not part of the English or Celtic ethnic groups. Their ancestors are Turkish and German who came to the UK after 1850. Do you believe they are not English? I mean even the current King of the UK would not be considered English by your definition! He is descended from Greek, Danish and German people [1].
The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry.
No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).
You know how the NHS reduced waiting lists a few years back? If you had waiting lists of say 100 for a surgery, they basically said - the list is maximum 15 people, after that it's whoever books first who gets the surgery. So basically you had to be lucky and be the number 15 on the list once a spot was open.
But! Magically NHS waiting lists got shorter! The government could say this on Question Time on the BBC, woohoo!
I imagine this is the kind of thing that's happening now with petty crime reports.
Claims about certain categories of crime rising or falling in England are usually based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is not based on police reports, but on surveying a random sample of people to see if they have been self-reported victims of various kinds of crime.
I'm aware this is a cultural difference, government betrayal and overreach are hotbutton and mainstay topics in the common culture of the UK and related states (e.g. the US).
It is nevertheless so weird to me that rather than trying to monitor and mitigate the abuses of legal instruments like the ones proposed, people are trying to prevent and abolish things wholesale.
Everything is depicted as a slippery slope to abuse or as an excuse for abuse, and perhaps because people actually believe in it, they do materialize as one too. Presents as a vicious cycle to me, and as if people were disallowing themselves from recovering of it.
I really have to wonder how much of it is the available options always being just two parties in these territories, and the electoral systems supporting that convergence. In such a scheme, I can indeed definitely imagine people being compelled to vote further and further from their own interests and values, and the slippery slope rhetoric being finding a manifestation.
The UK faces real structural problems with the inflating cost of living regardless of government, roughly halfway attributable to failing the lower-level challenge of continuing to import adequate quantities of diesel at affordable prices and the rest mostly coming from an aging population. Spot diesel has come down from the price spike of covid to approximately 1.3x the 2019 price.
Almost all physical goods have diesel prices contribute to their sticker price in a significant way. The diesel exporting countries are all incrementally increasing their domestic consumption, leaving less for the world market year on year.
The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
Tens of millions of people, held hostage by a clique of crabs in a bucket.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms
It doesn't know what it wants, nor how to prioritise between conflicts from vague pre (and post) election statements. It certainly doesn't want to make the hard compromises that are actually required.
That said...
I wouldn't want the job of trying to balance the books, fix the housing backlog, modernise our energy infrastructure, integrate social and medical care, address social cohesion, manage persistent inequality, improve our global competitiveness etc etc etc
I would say "so diesel uses should be encouraged to transition to electric where feasible", except the government has also dropped the ball on electricity prices and is now looking at increasing taxes on EVs.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
This is spot on, though. I joke that instead of state controlled media we have a media controlled state.
I don't really know why the government is doing it. It's not for grand headline reasons, as it's all pretty quiet, for this and for prior changes.
I also really don't think the UK is in the grips of some kind of authoritarian nightmare. If anything, my experience is that it's impossible to convince the police to do anything. These days, surveillance state or not, when your car or phone get stolen, the police write you a crime number to take to the insurers and consider their job done. Even if it's all done for nefarious reasons, this would be an easy sidekick to running a surveillance state that earns the state some cash, and every autocrat likes money. The UK democracy is flawed in many ways, but I really don't think a spy state is currently the problem.
What’s unsettling here isn’t any single policy, but the convergence: predictive policing, protest restrictions, and administrative punishments all justified as “risk management.” Even if each tool seems narrow, together they normalize acting on suspicion rather than action, which quietly lowers the bar for dissent.
In the UK what you are going to need to do going forward is essentially have an official and a non-official presence online. You are also going to need to use the cockroach strategy (at least tech wise), until this stuff gets unpopular enough amongst enough people that there is large push back that can't be ignored.
> The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.
That is why they are so keen to backdoor any popular encrypted messaging platform. They can't monitor communications. Unfortunately most people seem to supportive of this. I was quite surprised when my Father (who is a layman) told me he supported this, this is a person that doesn't vote largely for the same reasons that I don't (I think all politicians are awful)..
Additionally. I was listening to someone that engaged at essentially Red Teaming for UK authorities (I forget who it was now). They stated that if you were a dissident, if you kept your activities offline and organise in person the authorities wouldn't be aware of this activity. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible.
In China, the social contract at least is "you give up some individual freedoms and some privacy, never dissent against the government, and in exchange the government promises you prosperity"
I wonder what the Brits get in exchange for their giving up of personal freedoms?
Walking down the street and hearing 4 different languages and understanding nobody is soo amazing and heart warming and demonstrates how well everyone has integrated really well
It is important to note that this is a deal struck for just some ethnic groups of the citizenry. It does not apply fairly across the board to all people under Chinese governments' control so it's not even as good as it sounds for the average Chinese citizen.
In the case of Black Mirror, it was a set of studies on the dangers of current and near technologies. That some of those fears are materialising not long after the episodes, is in my opinion more damning than Orwell's fears of the state which didn't really come to pass in the same way, even decades later.
I don't disagree that Nineteen Eighty-Four is essential reading however. ( I'd also add Brave New World to that list ).
Not a word on Palantir. Is this because of the adept wording by the ministry of justice? I highly doubt they are developing this in a vacuum.
As re reminder, In the UK Palantir holds extensive contracts across defense (multi-billion MoD deals for AI-driven battlefield and intelligence systems) and healthcare (7y £330m+ NHS Data Platform). In France, its involvement is narrower but concentrated on *domestic* intelligence.
It isn't precrime or "dissent management" that is the problem, but the engineering of behavior and thought in society where such concepts are acceptable to people.
I don't think we can discuss it in detail here, but with this , chat control, and all sorts of other controversial laws, you'll notice the people of the country actually support that stuff. There is an interesting conversation there about democracy, and the priority of the working class people. Naturally, a person living paycheck-to-paycheck and fighting for healthcare and keeping their job (or getting one) does not care about this stuff. So who does? Not the ruling class. A lot of people (including on HN) who think this stuff is important (rightfully) are not poor people, perhaps middle-class?
Is democracy itself something that can survive, if it is left entirely up to popular vote? Power has gravity, it always wants more. Ideally, there would be institutions that are democratically established and managed that would be trusted to safeguard the people's interests. In the US, there are executive department agencies for example like the FCC, FTC, FDA and more, but they are subject to those in power who are elected by the people.
My "food for thought" here is that similar to supreme courts, there needs to be a regulatory and oversight branch of the government, whose chiefs are apolitical (like actually, not like the US supreme court), well compensated, long-tenured (but not lifetime, more like 20 years), and appointed by confirmation of all other branches of government.
We need to address the problem of power, influence to wield power and incentives for those entrusted with power to act in good faith, but also with good competence. The last part is important, because I have no doubt, a lot of the politicians that come up with this Orwellian nonsense have good intentions, the outcome they seek are noble, just not the means. they just happen to be incompetent when it comes to the subject matter.
A lot of these attacks on the UK regarding free speech are coming from the American Right, an obsession which I can't quite understand the motive for.
Notably, stories on HN about the very severe repression on civil liberties in the US (get shot in the face for protesting about ICE...) get flagged for closure, but putting the boot into the UK for much more wishy-washy issues like this seem to be fair game.
I'm not saying there aren't genuine issues with civil liberties (for example, things like the Online Safety Act are ridiculous) but they are magnified out of all proportion by the US media / social media disinformation megaphone.
This particular article is an opinion piece from last April by "the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication" (apparently). I'm not sure why it deserves front page HN status.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)
100%. Unfortunately, rather than rebut the substance of your argument, people are voting you down (and the same for my own similar comment). It is convenient for certain parts of the US right (Fox and also Musk come to mind) to present a narrative about the UK which distracts from the actual hard realities of recent events in the US itself.
It's been a while since I watched it, but doesn't it falsely imprison people because they disregarded some of the data that went contrary to other data?
There are 3 Precogs in the film, but in reality the female one is the most powerful and the twins seem to only function as amplifiers. It's revealed that there is sometimes/often a disagreement between their visions and that they do a 2/3 selection or something like that and discard the disagreeing vision (the 'minority report'). I believe this is what happened to the main character when he is framed, the stronger female's dissenting vision is ignored in favor of the two amplifiers. In the film it is ambiguous if he even commits the murder at all, the guy he kills was paid to die and more or less forces him to kill him in the struggle.
There's also the echos of visions that occur which is how the villain manages to get away with a murder, he uses his inside knowledge to copy cat another murder method which allows him to have it written off as an echo.
The wilder question in the movie is how the precogs are randomly created mutations in response to the mother taking a weird street drug during pregnancy. They'd have to dose pregnant women and hope they gave birth to more mutants if they ever want to replace the set they have, and I believe they're planning to roll it out nationwide. But given how crappy the precogs' lives seem to be maybe that is just a cost they consider worth paying.
I mean technically a lot of countries already have laws against conspiracy to murder, without doing the actual murder bit. And we are broadly ok with this because it makes a lot of sense.
I feel like "conspiracy to murder" means "we found a plan of you murdering someone and a baseball bat in your car" rather than "The algorithm has decided you are evil"
As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.
The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist. 'Precrime' in the sense described is performed routinely by all intelligence agencies and police networks in the West.
Criticisms from across the pond reflect a spectacular lack of perspective. The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.
As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that you're a Brit and that your method of drawing superficial conclusions about the other participants is sound. Perhaps we are both bots here.
Instead of attacking the other participants for not being as enlightened as you may be and the source of the information, a more appreciated approach would've been to address the substance of the article.
For example, what are some "intelligence agencies and police networks in the West" that are routinely performing those kind of programmes, and why should we conclude that all of them are doing that? Are those programmes identical to the UK's "homicide prediction project", as it was originally called? Are there better legal frameworks for such programmes in other countries (say, a Constitution), or at least more democratic oversight than in the UK? Perhaps some sources that document such a conclusion would help.
You speak of lack of perspective from the commenters here, but haven't yet provided an informed one either.
> The UK is far more free than the US
Trump and his oligarchs aside, why do you believe that the UK is "far more free" than the US? And how exactly do you define that freedom? I'm no big fan of the US in general (mainly due to their neoliberal and religious culture), but to deny that they've enjoyed a variety of freedoms would be provably wrong. Different organisations measure these differently and the UK is generally not "far more free" in that sense, only marginally so - again, it depends on the frameworks employed. [0] [1]
If the definition of freedom includes democratic accountability + equal political power + civil liberties in practice: neither country is doing that great; the UK's unelected Lords/sovereignty/executive dominance and First Past the Post voting system are undeniable flaws - many if not most European countries don't have that. It's also entirely true that US has deeper structural distortions (malapportionment + Electoral College + gerrymandering + life-tenured apex judiciary).
Overall, the UK tends to score higher on broad civil-liberty/democracy assessments, but not by as far as you seem to imply. And judging by the recent developments, one wouldn't be entirely wrong to conclude that these freedoms are actively being eroded (which is what the article says). Let's not forget the deep drive of successive governments to privatise key public services which objectively gave the UK an advantage in terms of freedoms compared to US - for example universal healthcare, which works as a social safety net and effectively offering higher practical freedom of life choices for most citizens.
> levels of inequality
The UK has one of the highest levels of income inequality in Europe. [2]
"OECD figures suggest that the UK has among the highest levels of income inequality in the European Union (as measured by the Gini coefficient), although income inequality is slightly lower than in the United States." [3]
"The UK spends more than anywhere else in Europe subsidising the cost of structural inequality in favour of the rich, according to an analysis of 23 OECD countries." [4]
"The key findings are that the UK has high levels of income inequality compared with similar developed economies, with a (pre-pandemic) Gini coefficient that is the second highest in the G7 (after the US), and is more unequal than all the countries in the EU other than Lithuania and Latvia." [5]
Between arresting grannies for saying they support Palestinian Action and using armed officers to apprehend comedy writers I doubt they'll have the time.
This is a thousand times as concerning in the context of London than in the context of Baltimore. It addresses a concern that doesn't exist for the UK public, in a way that appears intended to oppress from the start, against a backdrop of arresting thousands of pensioners for disagreeing about a genocide.
The only people being arrested in the Uk are for supporting a proscribed group.
A group that broke a police officers back with sledge hammers, committed multiple acts of vandalism against our military, and have tons of links to Hamas
They can oppose Israel action in Palestine, they just can’t support terrorists
De facto, arresting 80 year old women for holding signs is always going to look authoritarian. They're not exactly the type to strap on a vest but we have to pretend we dont know what a terrorist looks like.
This is a jury trial in progress, there are rules against prejudicing such. Genuinely interested readers can read a trial report here: https://realmedia.press/the-filton-trial-4/
"We detected that you are about to commit a crime. Here is provisional 2-years sentence shall you decide to go ahead with the plans. It includes free single room, 3 meals a day, gym, library, daily walks and company of people like yourself. You will also receive counselling and you could take up a free course to advance your skills in desired field and post-release support for a year."
I wonder at what point these countries will loose any moral ground against the likes of Russia, China etc.
Up until this point it was mostly that they would gladly fuck the other countries up but treated their own people way better than the other camp. But this difference is disappearing.
Of course there is always North Korea and other totally fucked up regimes they could use to compare and look white and fluffy
Two prominent Boeing whistleblowers, John Barnett (died March 2024) and Joshua Dean (died April 2024), have died in recent times, raising significant concerns about retaliation and safety at the aerospace giant; Barnett died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after battling Boeing in a retaliation lawsuit, while Dean died from a sudden infection after raising quality concerns, with his family suspecting foul play despite official rulings. Barnett's death was ruled a suicide, though his family's wrongful death suit claims Boeing's harassment caused his distress, while Dean's death followed rapid illness, with his family also alleging misconduct by his employer, Spirit Aerosystems, and Boeing.
As far as it is known, Kelly walked a mile (1.6 km) from his house to Harrowdown Hill. It appears he ingested up to 29 tablets of co-proxamol, an analgesic drug; he also cut his left wrist with a pruning knife he had owned since his youth, severing his ulnar artery. Forensic analysis established that neither the knife nor the blister packs showed Kelly's fingerprints on their surfaces [0].
and a letter to the editor:
As specialist medical professionals, we do not consider the evidence given at the Hutton inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed suicide.
Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry, concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. We view this as highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss. Dr Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - had been completely transected. Complete transection causes the artery to quickly retract and close down, and this promotes clotting of the blood.
The ambulance team reported that the quantity of blood at the scene was minimal and surprisingly small. It is extremely difficult to lose significant amounts of blood at a pressure below 50-60 systolic in a subject who is compensating by vasoconstricting. To have died from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood - it is unlikely that he would have lost more than a pint.
Alexander Allan, the forensic toxicologist at the inquiry, considered the amount ingested of Co-Proxamol insufficient to have caused death. Allan could not show that Dr Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of Co-Proxamol in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels, Allan conceded that the blood level of each of the drug's two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
We dispute that Dr Kelly could have died from haemorrhage or from Co-Proxamol ingestion or from both. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, has spoken recently of resuming the inquest into his death. If it re-opens, as in our opinion it should, a clear need exists to scrutinise more closely Dr Hunt's conclusions as to the cause of death.
David Halpin - Specialist in trauma and orthopaedic surgery
C Stephen Frost - Specialist in diagnostic radiology Searle Sennett [1]
While you have a point, you are looking at this the wrong way.
20 years ago if you had told someone you needed to get a face scan or upload your ID to view certain websites or that you might get your messages and emails scanned in case you send something that the government deems suspicious to someone else, people would have laughed at you.
Yet as we are seeing currently this is what is happening slowly but surely.
Yes, the UK government is not gunning down protesters in the street but can you say with certainty that the screws are not being tightened and that the so called western values of freedom of speech are not being eroded systematically year after year under the pretense of safety?
It seems to me that every western government is looking at what China and Russia are doing and instead of staying true to their values, they are actually trying to figure out how to roll out the same exact measures in the west.
Will we see Gulags in the west make a comeback? Most likely not but in terms of freedom of speech and online privacy rights, we are seeing clearly a rollback and if we do nothing to stop it, we will end up like China with governments looking at everything we say and write on our phone and computer and that is unacceptable especially when these measures are cowardly disguised as 'safety" measures.
> 20 years ago if you had told someone … you might get your messages and emails scanned in case you send something that the government deems suspicious to someone else, people would have laughed at you.
20 years ago we already knew the US government was watching everything.
The US is rounding up and murdering people like cattle. And also managing dissent with bot farms and deliberate suppression of bad think on social media and also normalising a president who is not just senile, but likely also a psychopath, and very possibly - and this is, sadly, not exaggeration, given recent revelations - not just a sexual predator, but a serial killer.
Compared to Rest of World, the UK is barely making a dent on the Authoritarian Leaderboard.
Which is not to say things are great, because they really aren't, and the deals with Palantir are especially suspect.
But so far at least, the death toll is still pretty low.
Social movements don’t just happen from grassroots these days. They’re seeded by foreign states. A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting. If you don’t provide an id you get a limited number of views.
And I don’t see anything wrong with a preventative system in principle, we should be able to join up social services information with policing, because we have had cases where a mass murderer has been known to multiple services.
Edit: probably not ids but a token that verifies my nationality would be enough.
> A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting
It’s strange times when even the comments on posts about government overreach are calling for more government overreach and limitations on speech and privacy.
Do you really want to have to verify your ID to post anything online, including HN?
And I am willing to bet that on top of the chilling effect on regular people, it will only act as an inconvenience for the bad actors as they will find ways to circumvent it. Controlling the online discourse is far too valuable, they are not going to just shrug and give up because the government puts up a barrier.
This is how you govern from a position of unpopularity.
The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an open debate.
So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.
There seems to be a prevalent notion within UK establishment circles, "we are being attacked from both sides, therefore we must be right/balanced/fair", which is totally not how it works. You see used for example to defend the supposed impartiality of the BBC.
The problem isn’t the balance, it’s the police state. I don’t want an authoritarian Left government any more than I want an authoritarian Right or Center government.
The problem is most Brits, at least on HN, seem to deny what is happening and/or support it. People being arrested for holding up blank signs at Charles' coronation was ridiculous and nothing like it has happened in the US, but anytime that's brought up they pivot to mass shootings in the US or some other whataboutism.
I am convinced that a good bit of this is paid astroturfing and another segment is people who work in government or government contracting. Brits generally seem more open to government intrusion, it’s true, but in my experience they don’t go out of their way to defend things like this. It’s more of a passive acceptance.
I think tribalism is the simpler explanation. One of the worst offenders I saw was a guy on here who wrote one of the new generation shells written in go...went out of his way to say the US had the same behavior as the UK, arresting people holding a blank sign, except his evidence was the disproportionate shooting of black people by police. An entirely unrelated issue. The point was though he was flailing due to feeling defensive, and unable to take a step back and analyze the criticisms objectively. This is super common behavior in pretty much all countries, and I think it's a huge problem.
True, now that you mention it I’ve seen the same sort of thing from people who are definitely not bots. Although, you can’t discount the possibility that they do some government or law enforcement work as a consultant. The full throated defense of police state tactics is unreal. (For what it’s worth, there are plenty of Americans who show up in Palantir/Flock threads doing the same thing, and I have the same suspicions there.)
Because it is massively exaggerated by those with an agenda to distract from the US.
But go on, tell me about how “free speech zones” are meaningfully different to this. You won’t be arrested so long as you stay in your zone down the street and round the corner and out of sight.
The UK has serious problems, but reading Americans catastrophising over this stuff as I have been for a couple of decades now is always incredible. Take the beam from your own eyes. And stop believing lies about the streets of London being a war zone.
> Because it is massively exaggerated by those with an agenda to distract from the US.
I don't think there has to be any negative motive. I'm not from the US or the UK but have lived in both countries, so feel I can be somewhat objective. What's going on in both countries is disturbing to me, but they have differences with what they are doing.
> But go on, tell me about how “free speech zones” are meaningfully different to this. You won’t be arrested so long as you stay in your zone down the street and round the corner and out of sight.
That hasn't been a thing for a long time. There have been nationwide protests the last few days not restricted to any kind of 'free speech zone'.
Consider what you are trying to defend: holding up a blank sign. Are you really OK with that? You really think that is reasonable?
> The UK has serious problems, but reading Americans catastrophising over this stuff
Pointing out a legitimate concern is not catastrophising anything.
> And stop believing lies about the streets of London being a war zone.
I never mentioned anything like that.
> That hasn't been a thing for a long time
It’s still the law, was expanded under Obama and is used widely. It is used to control dissent at events where protest would be unsightly, much as the UK incident you brought up.
> Consider what you are trying to defend:
Consider that I didn’t defend it.
> It is used to control dissent at events where protest would be unsightly, much as the UK incident you brought up.
Arresting people for holding up a blank sign is very different and much worse.
> Consider that I didn’t defend it.
Do you agree it was a problem?
> Arresting people for holding up a blank sign is very different and much worse.
On the contrary, it’s no different whatsoever from corralling away protest until it’s out of sight in an approved zone, and arresting anyone who expresses dissent in sight.
It’s exactly the same use of police in concealment of dissent by the state.
> Do you agree it was a problem
Of course, it’s fucking awful. It’s your contention that “nothing like this ever happened in the US” that I took issue with - it does and it’s entirely routine.
This is my very point - the UK is used as some sort of out-there example of Orwellian repression, but the US, often painted in contrast as some sort of bastion, albeit a troubled one, is usually doing exactly the same damn thing.
It’s in this thread. We have your assertions above, and below we have someone decrying how unimaginable it would have been for a government to attempt to wholesale spy on people’s communications two decades ago, seemingly in complete ignorance of the activities of the NSA in AT&T and other companies’ data infrastructure in the US revealed in 2006.
It’s a weird mix of jingoism and ignorance.
The BBC has never been impartial to internal concerns - domestic politics in particular. Leveson Inquiry recommendations not being implemented is the tip of the iceberg in relation to the extent of client-journalism it engages in with regard to the Conservative party.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-under-sc...
> client-journalism it engages in with regard to the Conservative party.
BBC Caught Altering Budget Article to Be More Favourable to Labour - https://order-order.com/2024/11/01/bbc-caught-altering-budge...
When Ivor Caplin, the former Labour MP that, among other things, attacked Musk for talking about Pakistani rape gangs, was arrested for pedophilia [1], this is the article they published - no photo, no name, no party affiliation, and no followup article - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg45y4r0yngo
BBC omits identity of Nigerian murderer from article about how he killed his wife [2,3], making it entirely about "gendered violence" instead. Readers can't make the incorrect inference if you simply withhold information from them.
BBC omits all criticism of Starmer from their reporting on his meeting with Trump [4].
The famous Trump capitol speech splicing: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/03/bbc-report-revea...
When Farage's private bank account was closed due to his politics, the BBC first simply took the bank's word that this was entirely due to financial considerations. When Farage obtained internal documents of that bank, explicitly saying he met financial criteria for an account, but it was closed despite this due to his politics, the BBC issued a correction article trying to imply his politics were merely "also" considered [5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Caplin
[2] https://www.surinenglish.com/malaga/benalmadena-torremolinos...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyw7g4zxwzo
[4] https://x.com/chrismid/status/1950163250852540547 (contains links to full Trump-Starmer meeting and the BBC articles, on the off chance you don't trust a random tweet)
[5] "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66288464
I used the BBC just an example. Starmer seems to have the same attitude. If both Farage and Corbyn, and Polanski and whoever is leading the Conservatives and LibDems are attacking me, then I must be super in the middle i.e. I must be so doing it all super right!
I don't think Starmer really knows what he is doing one way or another. The Island of Strangers speech out flaked Farage to the right.
Dominic Cummings had a bunch of interview appearances online. His experience in office when he was working with Johnson (and many Ministers in general) is that they don't actually understand what they can and can't do in the job. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar situation is present under Starmer.
I think we can fairly easily dismiss Cummings' views on anything. He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit, and that the the best team to carry out that out was to be headed by Boris Johnson.
He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.
> He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit, and that the the best team to carry out that out was to be headed by Boris Johnson.
Not exactly. I think you need to listen to the interviews.
Dominic Cummins has solid rationale for why he believes what he believes. I would need to listen to them again to remember what he said, but what you are describing was too simplistic.
Also his opinions on Brexit have nothing to do with some of the things he said about how COVID was handled.
> He changed his mind on Johnson, but he seems to be of the view that nothing works and that there is nothing for it but to burn everything down and start again according to the Dominic Cummings vision.
I don't remember him saying that exactly.
> That has never been his opinion. There are many interviews with him on YouTube and I suggest you listen to them.
I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings.
He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.
> He was of the opinion that the best thing for the UK economy was Brexit
I don't want to start another Brexit debate or even take position on it. However I'd like to point out that the key with Brexit is the plan on what to do afterwards and that is what has been completely lacking.
Whatever one's opinion of Cummings, he did put forward a plan and that plan was never attempted (probably too bold, shall we say, for politicians to touch it). I am not commenting on whether that would have worked or not, but at least he put forward a plan and strategy. On the other hand, Bojo's "plan" for Brexit seemed to have been limited to becoming PM...
I mean where is Sir Humphrey Appleby when you need him!
Johnson's incredibly colourful reaction to Starmers trade deal, in that he was 'acting like an orange-ball chewing manical gimp', speaks volumes about the discourse around Starmer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ld3qkz
Hislop is particularly scathing, albeit cynically pragmatic, since Starmers appointment - "“Keir Starmer is the man who likes to sit on the fence unless you don’t like fences and then maybe he can find a hedge, or if you don’t like hedges he’ll find a wall."
“People have suggested Keir Starmer is very boring, but I think that’s partly his superpower, in that being interesting in the way his predecessor was manages to lose you elections.
“You have to be careful when you dismiss people as boring. Everyone thought John Major was boring, but then you had him for two elections.”
> attacked from both sides, therefore we must be right/balanced/fair", which is totally not how it works
Exactly. Also because this is easily gamed by attacking the media that is already biased in your favour to get an even more favourable treatment.
Indeed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45990786
I believe US conservatives have done this since 1980s. I'm not sure it was deliberate at first: there's feedback. Loudly invoking "liberal bias" in 1975 most certainly got the press to reevaluate and attempt to mitigate any bias they might have shown. That was a reward for conservatives, which probably motivated more accusations of liberal bias, another round of press accomodations. It reinforced itself.
This has been ongoing for a long time, its not at all specific to this government.
Yeah, a lot of this is just .. well, I hesitate to use the over used phrase "deep state", but a lot of it is the work of people in the security institutions who "advise" the government, rather than the changing cast of the thin democratic bit on the front. There's long been authoritarianism in response to the fear of terrorism, from the IRA onwards. Then there's things like the "spycops" scandal, which make you wonder whether certain protest groups are deliberately engaging in really unpopular stunts in order to facilitate a crackdown.
The British public are in an odd place on this. There's a lot of "folk libertarianism", but that mostly consists of not having ID cards, while at the same time supporting all sorts of crackdowns on protest as soon as it's mildly inconvenient.
And then there's immigration. As in the US, it's a magic bullet for discourse that allows any amount of authoritarianism (or headshots to soccer moms) as long as you promise it will be used against immigrants.
Huh? Starmer is the least popular Prime Minister, I believe, ever.
Which is even more bizarre given appointing someone as divisive and pig-ignorant as Priti Patel the Home Secretary would have the tabloids crucifying a Labour PM. Johnson and his after-dinner speeches about the Mayor from Jaws forgave a lot of blunders during C19.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2021/0526/12239...
Remember also that when Sunak stepped down, Priti was put forward for leader. If she had played off her Zionist aspirations just a few years later she'd be right in the current newscycle re proscribed organisations and 'domestic terrorism' charges in the UK, and possibly in the running for the big chair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel#Meetings_with_Isra...
He wins or draws on every measure of unpopularity, other than YouGov net satisfaction where Liz Truss still beats him.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/28/keir-s... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/30/uk/keir-starmer-labour-pa...
I've come across various sources that lean center-left, note, CENTER-left, saying this. I think there might be something to it.
It's a problem with pretty much anyone. Things are bad from a fundamental structural failings for decades, elect new person, don't see immediate turn-around, they're massively unpopular.
The only way out of this is if you successfully blame $marginalised_group for the peoples problems. Or spend decades undoing the damage, but nobody ever gets decades in power.
It's because he was elected with a historically low % of the vote. Few wanted him at the election, few want him now.
Most don't want any of the options presented to them. Almost all the parties don't really serve the electorate, so a large number of people are abstaining.
I appreciate this in an anecdotal but I've spoken to quite a few people I know in my family, that saw it as their civil duty to vote and they told all told me some variation of "there is nobody worth voting for", "I don't think it matters who I vote for".
The UK is FPTP. Reform split the previously unified conservative vote so labour won with a historically low %.
Total Reform + Conservative vote was at historical lows as a percentage of the electorate.
Some of it is deliberately attempting to appeal to Reform voters, in ways which have infuriated Labour supporters while not winning any Reform support.
Yet these laws and general direction have been in place through half a dozen prime ministers, including ones initially very popular (Johnson especially, but Cameron wasn't particularly unpopular until the brexit mess)
Right. When I'm at a counter-protest facing the local† Nazis (who in this incarnation have decided to call themselves "patriots") among all the rhetoric accusing us of supporting terrorists (no matter where brown people may come from they're apparently "ISIS" or "Taliban" these days) or rapists or any number of weird conspiracies, one thing they often yell about is that Keir Starmer is (to quote them) "a Wanker" and I have observed to other protesters that uniquely this is probably a widely shared viewpoint. Yeah, he is, but, why you are you being so racist, why do you want to terrify my neighbours, what does that have to do with Keir?
† Local in the sense of being the ones who turn up, my guess is that a good number of them travel by car from quite some distance, personally I live five minutes walk away.
I don't agree. The British State has been going in this direction ever since Blair's government and probably before that. I don't remember Blair's government being that unpopular.
Also never look at what current government is going to do with the framework, but what future much worse government could use it for.
They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019
Which can be undone by another single act of your “sovereign” Parliament. Acts like this must be understood in that context.
Does it get worse? They are making a benchmark that is hard to beat.
I wouldn't like to see all the legal infrastructure they're putting in under a Reform UK government - I'd imagine they'll use it for far more nefarious means.
That being said - the blame lies squarely with Labour here. I have a gut feel a lot of it has to do with donors to the Tony Blair Institute.
Well World Economic Forum (WEF) lists Tony Blair and his institute as one of the top Agenda contributors [1].
It's not even funny that you can trace almost any person responsible for the deterioration of human rights in Western society to one of the WEF alumni or associates.
These supernatural institutions and interest groups should be made illegal if we want to continue as a civilization.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/tony-blair-2/
They need to, at the very least, obey the prevailing laws of physics.
Man, its like everyone is blind to the current state of things.
Here is the truth:
* Everyone with above sentiment always votes for anyone libertarian, which is necessarily conservative, and all conservatives are pretty much liars.
* These same conservatives that champion against government overreach, for law and order, and for personal freedoms do the exact opposite once they get into office. Nor do they give a shit about the law.
So yea, the whole libertarian ideology is pretty much dead. Its pretty obvious that the best course of action is to sacrifice personal freedoms and elect a government that can keep a tight rein over the populace and keep things like Nazi ideology from spreading.
Totalitarianism has the same end state whether it comes from the left or the right. It always results in suppression of the truth, broken feedback loops that lead to poor decisions by government, economic failure, and finally either bloody repression, war, or revolution.
It’s possible to move through this to a place of stability. After all, China only had to kill 15-55 million people in the Great Leap Forward and a couple thousand more in 1989. Today they are fairly stable and prosperous, even with tight controls on information. Perhaps the UK will have a similar path!
> So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.
You forgot gun control. That's the first thing they took away. Thereafter, freedom after freedom has been made optional by the government [1].
When government becomes overreaching, and you don't have the means to protect yourself and your rights, that's where it goes.
[1] I said "government", but probably "regime" would be a more suitable term here.
The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
>The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
I don't see ICE prowling "the cops don't come serve a warrant here with anything less than a SWAT team" parts of New Orleans or St. Louis.
Stop thinking about this based on indoctrinated emotion and politics. Think about it in terms of an all out war and "how do I force my enemy to expend resources not toward his goals".
Personal ability to credibly threaten lethal violence (note: I did not say "firearms") acts much like an AGTM or MANPADS for an infantry squad. Making any potential target substantially more prickly to a potentially superior force and doing so for little cost is a huge boon for the little guy.
The idea that any cranky old man might just snap and put a bullet in your favorite bespoke enforcer puts a huge damper on your ability to deploy those people. The risk that your informants might get clapped increases the cost of your informants for like results, etc, etc. And when you game it out to it's ends what it comes down to is that the population doing the subjugating might simply not be rich enough or motivated enough to have or be willing to allocate the resources needed to do the job.
This is a large part of why drugs won the war on drugs. There were enough glawk fawtys wit da switch kicking around on the "wrong" side of the law that the cops needed to adopt militarized tactics, the public didn't wanna pay for that shit (monetarily or politically) over weed, and thus drugs won the war on drugs. If they could've rolled up on just about anyone "cheaply" with just a couple cops it would've gone on way longer.
>(to the extent that armed revolution worked in the UK, the IRA were helped only slightly by US-backed supplies of Armalite rifles, and much more by a large supply of Libyan high explosives. Guns are a much less effective political weapon than the car or truck or hotel bomb)
The semtex wouldn't have gotten anywhere useful if the Brits could just walk into wherever all willy nilly. Bringing enough credible threat of violence to force their enemy to actually behave like a proper occupying force burning money and political credibility as a result limited the Brit's ability engage (at the right price) in the kind of police action they needed to catch the bombs.
If they could've just sent pairs of cops after every lead in an "oi you got a license for that meme" manner they'd have dredged up all the semtex and none of it would've made it to London.
>The guns in the US don't seem to be helping people avoid getting shot by ICE.
The woman who was shot was a democrat without any guns, maybe if she'd had a gun she wouldn't have been shot.
I still don't know what's so important about guns and how it's a metric for freedom.
Predators are less likely to attack someone who can defend themselves, it's quite simple.
Yes, for the US with their unique historical and cultural differences, but it doesn't make it an international metric.
Everyone in the US agrees with the inequalities and segregation and find it acceptable that an individual has to become a predator to survive because they don't find it acceptable to help each other on a governmental scale.
Some countries have worse inequalities than the US but they don't think they need guns to have freedom in their daily lives.
The empirical evidence from the US does not bear that out. Compare murder rates between the US and any peer country with more gun control.
Most of the murders (homicides) in the USA are committed using illegal weapons. Banning legal weapons wouldn't reduce crime, it would just make it harder for victims to defend themselves.
Besides, USA is not a good example. According to Wikipedia [1], high murder rate statistics in the USA are skewed due to the overrepresentation of one specific part of the population, which is not that common in comparable countries. If that population were to be removed from the statistics, the murder rate in the USA would drop significantly.
> According to the FBI 2019 Uniform Crime Report, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1%, and "Other" 3% in cases where the race was known. Including homicide offenders where the race was unknown, African-Americans accounted for 39.6% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 29.1%, "Other" 2.1%, and "Unknown" 29.3%[48]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
As Mao said, political power grows from the barrel of the gun. In the past decade freedom of speech and internet freedom has being dramatically curtailed in pretty much every western country where the citizen are unarmed.
These guns didn't stop the CLOUD act.
i’m absolutely, concretely and overwhelmingly fine with the concept of gun control here as a uk citizen.
i say this as someone who did target rifle shooting as a kid. so, i’ve been around weapons in a positive way.
the controls are a good thing.
> i’m absolutely, concretely and overwhelmingly fine with the concept of gun control here as a uk citizen.
That... speaks volumes of the citizens of the said country.
> The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unrest.
Does street crime in fact continue to fall? I keep hearing about bicycles getting stolen, or how in London, mobile phones get snatched. It was also common to hear how police fails to prosecute various kinds of crime (usually mentioned in contrast to how they do prosecute noncrime crimes such as 'hate speech').
Here, for comparison, is a paragraph from an essay by Konstantin Kisin:
> A month earlier, I was walking through a posh part of London when I saw a young man in a balaclava snatch a bag from a tourist. When I told people about what I saw at various meetings, most people were surprised that I was surprised. Phone thefts, muggings and all kinds of petty crime are now considered normal and routine.
Which story is correct?
[0] -https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/theres-good-news-for-brita...
Anecdote is not data. It is both true that the police absolutely suck at handling petty crime, and the Met have a fairly terrible reputation; and that more serious violent crime is much, much less of a problem in London than it used to be (and less than US cities, of course).
> Anecdote is not data.
This is a situation where the data may not be capturing the reality, though.
An increasingly common tactic for decreasing crime statistics is to reduce reporting of crimes. The more difficult you make it to report a crime, the better the crime numbers look.
In one city I’m familiar with, it became so well known that reporting small crimes was a futile endeavor that people just gave up. It was common knowledge that you don’t bother calling the police unless it was a major crime. Not surprisingly, the crime statistics started to look better.
Sure; but the article's premise is that street crime is falling (and as a result, the police, which, presumably, has more free time on their hands, can focus on other things). Assuming petty crime is street crime, and seeing that you agree that the police suck at it, is the article's premise correct?
Yes, it’s correct. Violent crime in London and the UK more generally has been on a long term downward trend. This is not incompatible with there being spikes in some specific categories of crime. But it’s consistent with the trends for homicide, for which the statistics are pretty hard to dispute, and where London has fewer per capita than Berlin, Brussels and Paris (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/london-homic...).
You’re posting an article by someone with eccentric views on a lot of topics and an anti-multiculturalist agenda to advance. (For example, they believe that Rishi Sunak is not English.)
Rape rates in the UK have more than tripled over the past two decades, why doesn't that count as serious violent crime? https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...
From the link - This is possibly due to better reporting practices by the police as well as an increasing willingness of victims to come forward, including historic victims of sexual violence.
Not definitive, but certainly a possible explanation.
Everyone in London knows what happens if you try to report "minor" street crime.
Obviously everyone saying the UK isn't a utopia is a Russian bot, and we should be censoring them.
Fine, but also how to explain the crazy claims flying around the internet that London is a warzone and a no-go area? I live here and... seriously, nothing has changed. I feel perfectly safe and always have.
Yeah sure, there's some phone theft, it's not great. This phone theft wave is just a symptom of everyone carrying £500 devices around. Big cities have always had theft, pickpocket and snatching crimes. But it's nothing astonishingly new or different. I know one person who had their phone snatched, never seen it happen myself.
So how to explain this massive wave of social media posts making out that London's unsafe? There is definitely a narrative being pushed, whether by Russian bots or not, I cannot say.
Because everyone that experiences the crime stops tolerating it and leaves. This is why the area around the greenbelt so closely resembles the inner cities of 20 years before. This isn't some new phenomenon - Lee Kuan Yew famously described the newspaper purchasing arrangement at Piccadilly Circus in the 1950s, which was incomprehensible by the 1980s.
I'm old enough to remember when they had posters telling people not to wear iPod white earphones because that will get you mugged (and it would) - pure blaming the victim nonsense.
If London defenders were half as enthusiastic about cleaning up their city as they are about attacking anyone pointing out the all too obvious problems they genuinely would be in utopia.
Do you even go here?
> Do you even go here?
Is that authentic vernacular?
One of the really boring things about crime stats is that if you insist that "Nobody will do anything" and so you don't bother to report crimes, the crime stats go down -- because you didn't report a crime.
It suits a certain kind of person to have this obvious statistical fact portrayed as some sort of failing of existing institutions. Because it's just how statistics work it won't magically change if you're dumb enough to put them in charge but they can certainly tell gullible people like you that they've fixed it.
Reporting crimes is one of those tedious things citizens have to do to get a nice society to live in, like patiently queueing for things, or putting trash in the bin. You could choose not to do it, but don't blame anybody else if no-one does it and now your society sucks.
The man who says Rishi Sunak is not English [0] might be lying? Thats crazy.
[0] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2025/02/of-cou...
I guess it depends on what you mean by English. England is a country, but you can't have an English passport, you can only get a UK passport. so, English is a kinda-sorta a non-nationality, but it is very much an ethnic group.
I don't think anyone is claiming that Rishi Sunak isn't a UK citizen, but he certainly isn't a member of the English ethnic group, or any of the Celtic ethnic groups that also make up the UK's native population.
If we go by the explanation from wikipedia [0], Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage would not be considered English, as their families are not part of the English or Celtic ethnic groups. Their ancestors are Turkish and German who came to the UK after 1850. Do you believe they are not English? I mean even the current King of the UK would not be considered English by your definition! He is descended from Greek, Danish and German people [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_monarchy_of_the...
The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry.
No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).
You know how the NHS reduced waiting lists a few years back? If you had waiting lists of say 100 for a surgery, they basically said - the list is maximum 15 people, after that it's whoever books first who gets the surgery. So basically you had to be lucky and be the number 15 on the list once a spot was open.
But! Magically NHS waiting lists got shorter! The government could say this on Question Time on the BBC, woohoo!
I imagine this is the kind of thing that's happening now with petty crime reports.
Claims about certain categories of crime rising or falling in England are usually based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is not based on police reports, but on surveying a random sample of people to see if they have been self-reported victims of various kinds of crime.
I'm aware this is a cultural difference, government betrayal and overreach are hotbutton and mainstay topics in the common culture of the UK and related states (e.g. the US).
It is nevertheless so weird to me that rather than trying to monitor and mitigate the abuses of legal instruments like the ones proposed, people are trying to prevent and abolish things wholesale.
Everything is depicted as a slippery slope to abuse or as an excuse for abuse, and perhaps because people actually believe in it, they do materialize as one too. Presents as a vicious cycle to me, and as if people were disallowing themselves from recovering of it.
I really have to wonder how much of it is the available options always being just two parties in these territories, and the electoral systems supporting that convergence. In such a scheme, I can indeed definitely imagine people being compelled to vote further and further from their own interests and values, and the slippery slope rhetoric being finding a manifestation.
The UK faces real structural problems with the inflating cost of living regardless of government, roughly halfway attributable to failing the lower-level challenge of continuing to import adequate quantities of diesel at affordable prices and the rest mostly coming from an aging population. Spot diesel has come down from the price spike of covid to approximately 1.3x the 2019 price.
Almost all physical goods have diesel prices contribute to their sticker price in a significant way. The diesel exporting countries are all incrementally increasing their domestic consumption, leaving less for the world market year on year.
The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
Tens of millions of people, held hostage by a clique of crabs in a bucket.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms
It doesn't know what it wants, nor how to prioritise between conflicts from vague pre (and post) election statements. It certainly doesn't want to make the hard compromises that are actually required.
That said...
I wouldn't want the job of trying to balance the books, fix the housing backlog, modernise our energy infrastructure, integrate social and medical care, address social cohesion, manage persistent inequality, improve our global competitiveness etc etc etc
I would say "so diesel uses should be encouraged to transition to electric where feasible", except the government has also dropped the ball on electricity prices and is now looking at increasing taxes on EVs.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
This is spot on, though. I joke that instead of state controlled media we have a media controlled state.
I'm very confused by this, on many fronts.
I don't really know why the government is doing it. It's not for grand headline reasons, as it's all pretty quiet, for this and for prior changes.
I also really don't think the UK is in the grips of some kind of authoritarian nightmare. If anything, my experience is that it's impossible to convince the police to do anything. These days, surveillance state or not, when your car or phone get stolen, the police write you a crime number to take to the insurers and consider their job done. Even if it's all done for nefarious reasons, this would be an easy sidekick to running a surveillance state that earns the state some cash, and every autocrat likes money. The UK democracy is flawed in many ways, but I really don't think a spy state is currently the problem.
So... Why?
What’s unsettling here isn’t any single policy, but the convergence: predictive policing, protest restrictions, and administrative punishments all justified as “risk management.” Even if each tool seems narrow, together they normalize acting on suspicion rather than action, which quietly lowers the bar for dissent.
In the UK what you are going to need to do going forward is essentially have an official and a non-official presence online. You are also going to need to use the cockroach strategy (at least tech wise), until this stuff gets unpopular enough amongst enough people that there is large push back that can't be ignored.
> The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.
That is why they are so keen to backdoor any popular encrypted messaging platform. They can't monitor communications. Unfortunately most people seem to supportive of this. I was quite surprised when my Father (who is a layman) told me he supported this, this is a person that doesn't vote largely for the same reasons that I don't (I think all politicians are awful)..
Additionally. I was listening to someone that engaged at essentially Red Teaming for UK authorities (I forget who it was now). They stated that if you were a dissident, if you kept your activities offline and organise in person the authorities wouldn't be aware of this activity. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible.
In China, the social contract at least is "you give up some individual freedoms and some privacy, never dissent against the government, and in exchange the government promises you prosperity"
I wonder what the Brits get in exchange for their giving up of personal freedoms?
Brits already have more prosperity (=> median wages) even after adjusting for purchasing power.
Some stagnation is to be expected from high energy prices and trade disruption (brexit).
British surveillance state tolerance has always been pretty high for Europe, and is typically "sold" to the average citizen as anti-crime.
The people who talk pretty get to keep buying nice houses for their kids. It seems like a pretty good deal.
diversity :)
Walking down the street and hearing 4 different languages and understanding nobody is soo amazing and heart warming and demonstrates how well everyone has integrated really well
> I wonder what the Brits get in exchange for their giving up of personal freedoms?
Well, at least little girls get protected from the grooming / rape gangs.
It is important to note that this is a deal struck for just some ethnic groups of the citizenry. It does not apply fairly across the board to all people under Chinese governments' control so it's not even as good as it sounds for the average Chinese citizen.
Black Mirror continues to be a 5-7yr leading indicator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror
'Years and years' disturbing as well.
Orwell predates Black Mirror by decades. 1984 should be a must read for everyone.
I'd argue that makes Black Mirror more prescient.
In the case of Black Mirror, it was a set of studies on the dangers of current and near technologies. That some of those fears are materialising not long after the episodes, is in my opinion more damning than Orwell's fears of the state which didn't really come to pass in the same way, even decades later.
I don't disagree that Nineteen Eighty-Four is essential reading however. ( I'd also add Brave New World to that list ).
We are one renaming cycle away from renaming Department of War to Department of Love.
Here is a good book on how pre-crime society is created, who is driving more "management" and who benefits
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
God bless Managed Democracy.
Not a word on Palantir. Is this because of the adept wording by the ministry of justice? I highly doubt they are developing this in a vacuum.
As re reminder, In the UK Palantir holds extensive contracts across defense (multi-billion MoD deals for AI-driven battlefield and intelligence systems) and healthcare (7y £330m+ NHS Data Platform). In France, its involvement is narrower but concentrated on *domestic* intelligence.
Day by day these things sound more like Sci-Fi series announcments.
UK dystopia: accelerating (Precrime)
EU dystopia: accelerating (Chat Control)
US dystopia: probably accelerating?
What a time to be alive!
I think Orwell was prescient and attuned to this sort of thinking in England at his time. Perhaps, it never really went away? e.g.: "crimestop"
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/725596-crimestop-means-the-...
It isn't precrime or "dissent management" that is the problem, but the engineering of behavior and thought in society where such concepts are acceptable to people.
I don't think we can discuss it in detail here, but with this , chat control, and all sorts of other controversial laws, you'll notice the people of the country actually support that stuff. There is an interesting conversation there about democracy, and the priority of the working class people. Naturally, a person living paycheck-to-paycheck and fighting for healthcare and keeping their job (or getting one) does not care about this stuff. So who does? Not the ruling class. A lot of people (including on HN) who think this stuff is important (rightfully) are not poor people, perhaps middle-class?
Is democracy itself something that can survive, if it is left entirely up to popular vote? Power has gravity, it always wants more. Ideally, there would be institutions that are democratically established and managed that would be trusted to safeguard the people's interests. In the US, there are executive department agencies for example like the FCC, FTC, FDA and more, but they are subject to those in power who are elected by the people.
My "food for thought" here is that similar to supreme courts, there needs to be a regulatory and oversight branch of the government, whose chiefs are apolitical (like actually, not like the US supreme court), well compensated, long-tenured (but not lifetime, more like 20 years), and appointed by confirmation of all other branches of government.
We need to address the problem of power, influence to wield power and incentives for those entrusted with power to act in good faith, but also with good competence. The last part is important, because I have no doubt, a lot of the politicians that come up with this Orwellian nonsense have good intentions, the outcome they seek are noble, just not the means. they just happen to be incompetent when it comes to the subject matter.
A lot of these attacks on the UK regarding free speech are coming from the American Right, an obsession which I can't quite understand the motive for.
Notably, stories on HN about the very severe repression on civil liberties in the US (get shot in the face for protesting about ICE...) get flagged for closure, but putting the boot into the UK for much more wishy-washy issues like this seem to be fair game.
I'm not saying there aren't genuine issues with civil liberties (for example, things like the Online Safety Act are ridiculous) but they are magnified out of all proportion by the US media / social media disinformation megaphone.
This particular article is an opinion piece from last April by "the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication" (apparently). I'm not sure why it deserves front page HN status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)
100%. Unfortunately, rather than rebut the substance of your argument, people are voting you down (and the same for my own similar comment). It is convenient for certain parts of the US right (Fox and also Musk come to mind) to present a narrative about the UK which distracts from the actual hard realities of recent events in the US itself.
Isn't Minority Report a documentary about why this doesn't work?
What do you mean by "doesn't work"?
Doesn't work to prevent crime? Or doesn't work too suppress dissent?
It's been a while since I watched it, but doesn't it falsely imprison people because they disregarded some of the data that went contrary to other data?
There are 3 Precogs in the film, but in reality the female one is the most powerful and the twins seem to only function as amplifiers. It's revealed that there is sometimes/often a disagreement between their visions and that they do a 2/3 selection or something like that and discard the disagreeing vision (the 'minority report'). I believe this is what happened to the main character when he is framed, the stronger female's dissenting vision is ignored in favor of the two amplifiers. In the film it is ambiguous if he even commits the murder at all, the guy he kills was paid to die and more or less forces him to kill him in the struggle.
There's also the echos of visions that occur which is how the villain manages to get away with a murder, he uses his inside knowledge to copy cat another murder method which allows him to have it written off as an echo.
The wilder question in the movie is how the precogs are randomly created mutations in response to the mother taking a weird street drug during pregnancy. They'd have to dose pregnant women and hope they gave birth to more mutants if they ever want to replace the set they have, and I believe they're planning to roll it out nationwide. But given how crappy the precogs' lives seem to be maybe that is just a cost they consider worth paying.
I mean technically a lot of countries already have laws against conspiracy to murder, without doing the actual murder bit. And we are broadly ok with this because it makes a lot of sense.
I feel like "conspiracy to murder" means "we found a plan of you murdering someone and a baseball bat in your car" rather than "The algorithm has decided you are evil"
That generally still takes the person taking some sort of action in furtherance of that plan, not just thinking it.
Yeah because prosecution requires evidence. Not because we don't agree with the principal.
Orwell worked in Spain for about a year, 1936-37, his work on BBC during WWII was twice as long.
In my opinion, 1984 was shaped by his work in Britain.
And the brilliant MI6 / BBC propaganda made it as if 1984 were about the Soviet Union :)
As if it was not enough that the author himself put it in Britain.
If you want Soviet Style distopia, better read "We" from Zamyatin.
who chooses who chooses who watches the watchers ?
They all believe to be morally infallible. I don't think they would even be able to function as politicians without such cognitive dissonance.
Corporate. Google, Meta, TikTok. All governmental entities or tied to.
What's the harm if your data is "lost" along the way. /s
As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.
The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist. 'Precrime' in the sense described is performed routinely by all intelligence agencies and police networks in the West.
Criticisms from across the pond reflect a spectacular lack of perspective. The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.
As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that you're a Brit and that your method of drawing superficial conclusions about the other participants is sound. Perhaps we are both bots here.
Instead of attacking the other participants for not being as enlightened as you may be and the source of the information, a more appreciated approach would've been to address the substance of the article.
For example, what are some "intelligence agencies and police networks in the West" that are routinely performing those kind of programmes, and why should we conclude that all of them are doing that? Are those programmes identical to the UK's "homicide prediction project", as it was originally called? Are there better legal frameworks for such programmes in other countries (say, a Constitution), or at least more democratic oversight than in the UK? Perhaps some sources that document such a conclusion would help.
You speak of lack of perspective from the commenters here, but haven't yet provided an informed one either.
> The UK is far more free than the US
Trump and his oligarchs aside, why do you believe that the UK is "far more free" than the US? And how exactly do you define that freedom? I'm no big fan of the US in general (mainly due to their neoliberal and religious culture), but to deny that they've enjoyed a variety of freedoms would be provably wrong. Different organisations measure these differently and the UK is generally not "far more free" in that sense, only marginally so - again, it depends on the frameworks employed. [0] [1]
If the definition of freedom includes democratic accountability + equal political power + civil liberties in practice: neither country is doing that great; the UK's unelected Lords/sovereignty/executive dominance and First Past the Post voting system are undeniable flaws - many if not most European countries don't have that. It's also entirely true that US has deeper structural distortions (malapportionment + Electoral College + gerrymandering + life-tenured apex judiciary).
Overall, the UK tends to score higher on broad civil-liberty/democracy assessments, but not by as far as you seem to imply. And judging by the recent developments, one wouldn't be entirely wrong to conclude that these freedoms are actively being eroded (which is what the article says). Let's not forget the deep drive of successive governments to privatise key public services which objectively gave the UK an advantage in terms of freedoms compared to US - for example universal healthcare, which works as a social safety net and effectively offering higher practical freedom of life choices for most citizens.
> levels of inequality
The UK has one of the highest levels of income inequality in Europe. [2]
"OECD figures suggest that the UK has among the highest levels of income inequality in the European Union (as measured by the Gini coefficient), although income inequality is slightly lower than in the United States." [3] "The UK spends more than anywhere else in Europe subsidising the cost of structural inequality in favour of the rich, according to an analysis of 23 OECD countries." [4]
"The key findings are that the UK has high levels of income inequality compared with similar developed economies, with a (pre-pandemic) Gini coefficient that is the second highest in the G7 (after the US), and is more unequal than all the countries in the EU other than Lithuania and Latvia." [5]
[0] https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=all&year=2025
[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/United-Kingdom/liberal_demo...
[2] https://www.understandingglasgow.com/glasgow-indicators/econ...
[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/nov/27/uk-spends...
[5] https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Tre...
I hope they name it Pickles
Between arresting grannies for saying they support Palestinian Action and using armed officers to apprehend comedy writers I doubt they'll have the time.
This is a thousand times as concerning in the context of London than in the context of Baltimore. It addresses a concern that doesn't exist for the UK public, in a way that appears intended to oppress from the start, against a backdrop of arresting thousands of pensioners for disagreeing about a genocide.
The only people being arrested in the Uk are for supporting a proscribed group.
A group that broke a police officers back with sledge hammers, committed multiple acts of vandalism against our military, and have tons of links to Hamas
They can oppose Israel action in Palestine, they just can’t support terrorists
De facto, arresting 80 year old women for holding signs is always going to look authoritarian. They're not exactly the type to strap on a vest but we have to pretend we dont know what a terrorist looks like.
They are the type to sledgehammer police officers though apparently
I find that physically unlikely.
This is a jury trial in progress, there are rules against prejudicing such. Genuinely interested readers can read a trial report here: https://realmedia.press/the-filton-trial-4/
where is my minority report?
Dobleplusgood.
"We detected that you are about to commit a crime. Here is provisional 2-years sentence shall you decide to go ahead with the plans. It includes free single room, 3 meals a day, gym, library, daily walks and company of people like yourself. You will also receive counselling and you could take up a free course to advance your skills in desired field and post-release support for a year."
I wonder at what point these countries will loose any moral ground against the likes of Russia, China etc.
Up until this point it was mostly that they would gladly fuck the other countries up but treated their own people way better than the other camp. But this difference is disappearing.
Of course there is always North Korea and other totally fucked up regimes they could use to compare and look white and fluffy
> I wonder at what point these countries will loose any moral ground against the likes of Russia, China etc.
When arbitrary extrajudicial killings happen at some scale on a regular basis?
I heard Boeing whistleblowers died unexpectedly.
Two prominent Boeing whistleblowers, John Barnett (died March 2024) and Joshua Dean (died April 2024), have died in recent times, raising significant concerns about retaliation and safety at the aerospace giant; Barnett died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after battling Boeing in a retaliation lawsuit, while Dean died from a sudden infection after raising quality concerns, with his family suspecting foul play despite official rulings. Barnett's death was ruled a suicide, though his family's wrongful death suit claims Boeing's harassment caused his distress, while Dean's death followed rapid illness, with his family also alleging misconduct by his employer, Spirit Aerosystems, and Boeing.
Also Suchir Balaji. And if you’re willing to go back further, Michael Hastings and Gary Webb.
But that’s all the US. For the UK you need Gareth Williams, the GHCQ analyst who was found dead inside a padlocked duffel bag.
Another suspicious death was David Kelly, who was involved in weapons inspections in Iraq and disputed the casus belli for the Iraq war.
think its important to leave some context here:
As far as it is known, Kelly walked a mile (1.6 km) from his house to Harrowdown Hill. It appears he ingested up to 29 tablets of co-proxamol, an analgesic drug; he also cut his left wrist with a pruning knife he had owned since his youth, severing his ulnar artery. Forensic analysis established that neither the knife nor the blister packs showed Kelly's fingerprints on their surfaces [0].
and a letter to the editor:
As specialist medical professionals, we do not consider the evidence given at the Hutton inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed suicide.
Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry, concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. We view this as highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss. Dr Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - had been completely transected. Complete transection causes the artery to quickly retract and close down, and this promotes clotting of the blood.
The ambulance team reported that the quantity of blood at the scene was minimal and surprisingly small. It is extremely difficult to lose significant amounts of blood at a pressure below 50-60 systolic in a subject who is compensating by vasoconstricting. To have died from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood - it is unlikely that he would have lost more than a pint.
Alexander Allan, the forensic toxicologist at the inquiry, considered the amount ingested of Co-Proxamol insufficient to have caused death. Allan could not show that Dr Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of Co-Proxamol in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels, Allan conceded that the blood level of each of the drug's two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
We dispute that Dr Kelly could have died from haemorrhage or from Co-Proxamol ingestion or from both. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, has spoken recently of resuming the inquest into his death. If it re-opens, as in our opinion it should, a clear need exists to scrutinise more closely Dr Hunt's conclusions as to the cause of death.
David Halpin - Specialist in trauma and orthopaedic surgery C Stephen Frost - Specialist in diagnostic radiology Searle Sennett [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)#D... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2004/jan/27/guardian...
> For the UK you need Gareth Williams, the GHCQ analyst who was found dead inside a padlocked duffel bag.
And whose death was "probably an accident" according to the Met Police...
Iran used machine guns in protesters
China used tanks against students
Russia still has gulags for people who criticise the government
You’re incredibly naive if you think they’re the same as us
While you have a point, you are looking at this the wrong way.
20 years ago if you had told someone you needed to get a face scan or upload your ID to view certain websites or that you might get your messages and emails scanned in case you send something that the government deems suspicious to someone else, people would have laughed at you.
Yet as we are seeing currently this is what is happening slowly but surely.
Yes, the UK government is not gunning down protesters in the street but can you say with certainty that the screws are not being tightened and that the so called western values of freedom of speech are not being eroded systematically year after year under the pretense of safety?
It seems to me that every western government is looking at what China and Russia are doing and instead of staying true to their values, they are actually trying to figure out how to roll out the same exact measures in the west.
Will we see Gulags in the west make a comeback? Most likely not but in terms of freedom of speech and online privacy rights, we are seeing clearly a rollback and if we do nothing to stop it, we will end up like China with governments looking at everything we say and write on our phone and computer and that is unacceptable especially when these measures are cowardly disguised as 'safety" measures.
> 20 years ago if you had told someone … you might get your messages and emails scanned in case you send something that the government deems suspicious to someone else, people would have laughed at you.
20 years ago we already knew the US government was watching everything.
You haven’t been paying attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
'Moral ground' was the product of a controlled media environment.
The US is rounding up and murdering people like cattle. And also managing dissent with bot farms and deliberate suppression of bad think on social media and also normalising a president who is not just senile, but likely also a psychopath, and very possibly - and this is, sadly, not exaggeration, given recent revelations - not just a sexual predator, but a serial killer.
Compared to Rest of World, the UK is barely making a dent on the Authoritarian Leaderboard.
Which is not to say things are great, because they really aren't, and the deals with Palantir are especially suspect.
But so far at least, the death toll is still pretty low.
That’s just the way “freedom news” is framing it.
Social movements don’t just happen from grassroots these days. They’re seeded by foreign states. A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting. If you don’t provide an id you get a limited number of views.
And I don’t see anything wrong with a preventative system in principle, we should be able to join up social services information with policing, because we have had cases where a mass murderer has been known to multiple services.
Edit: probably not ids but a token that verifies my nationality would be enough.
> A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting
It’s strange times when even the comments on posts about government overreach are calling for more government overreach and limitations on speech and privacy.
Do you really want to have to verify your ID to post anything online, including HN?
And I am willing to bet that on top of the chilling effect on regular people, it will only act as an inconvenience for the bad actors as they will find ways to circumvent it. Controlling the online discourse is far too valuable, they are not going to just shrug and give up because the government puts up a barrier.
What chilling effect? Have you seen what people post on facebook under their own name.
Yeah it might be just be a verified token to say I’m citizen of the country. Doesn’t have to be my actual id. The OSA is a crappy implementation.