The UK has never suffered occupation under National Socialism or Soviet Union like most of Europe did so we don't have the same fear of authority creep, which is unfortunate because it absolutely is happening here.
People in the UK are infuriatingly trusting of their rulers.
No, just the readers of the reactionary black-top press.
What's infuriating is erosion of civil liberties that has happened under both Labour and Conservative governments in the past 30+ years - I blame it on the fundamental design of the office of the Home Secretary - whose job-description is seemingly to always put matters of national security (and the reactionaries' opinions...) above such trivial concerns as privacy or liberty. Fortunately this trend can be reversed if an equivalent opposing office, a hypothetical "Secretary of Sensibleness", existed with veto rights over the Home Secretary.
I thought we came close with the new Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport, but it seems like a holding position for unwanted or up-and-coming MPs than a position of any consequence (London Olympics notwithstanding).
Is it really so much to ask for a democratic Socialist party that favours protecting civil liberties? One would think it's in the interest of the proletariat. Oscar Wilde would be in favour of it.
The issue here is that Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were decidedly NOT leftist. They were very much a Tory-lite neoliberal party. Remnants of those priests of a dying religion still plague the PLP today and spent the better part of Corbyn's leadership attempting to undermine him.
My MP is Angela Eagle. A self-described socially progressive lesbian that you would imagine would be on the side of civil liberties and democracy, yet her record speaks for itself;
- Refused to vote against Tory welfare cuts
- Voted in favour of the war in Iraq
- Voted in favour of the bombing of Libya
- Voted three times to block investigations into the decision to go war in Iraq
- Voted in favour of national identity cards
- Voted in favour of Theresa May's Investigatory Powers Bill (legalised mass surveillance of Britain)
She is the kind of 'leftist' that made the Labour party utterly right-wing.
If I lived in England (I don't), I'd be pissed I couldn't vote for the SNP. They seem to be the only sane party there. It would be interesting to see them gain seats south of the border.
It's a real shame what the options have been in terms of electable leftist parties and policies in the past few years, so I'd very much agree with you. As to what Corbyn is going to do about it, I don't know, but I'm not a pessimist in this regard.
These would be drawings of child pornography, just to clarify.
In terms of the principle, the actual content shouldn't matter in the slightest.
From the outside, hilariously, it looks like both sides claim the same ultimate goal.
But then again they might say the same about my wish to remain part of the union.
I value effective regulation, worker protections, considerations of civil liberties and democracy and I made a choice to vote remain in the EU knowing full well that it is far from perfect.
I trust the EU to act in my interests a hell of a lot more than my own country's shit-show of career-politician Eton schoolboys, unelected Lords and sycophantic royalists embodying the very notion of hereditary privilege.
The agitators mostly seemed to come from the second group but were happy enough to stoke the fears of the first.
Neither group appeared to have any coherent arguments to me.
Those on the (far) left in the UK see the EU as a fundamentally a capitalist enterprise as it is about free trade and ensuring supplies of cheap labour to keep wages depressed.
The UK is a mixed economy, we have both Capitalism and Socialism and we like it - our safety-net welfare state and the NHS save lives everyday.
EU membership is a shield for former soviet satellite states to join the West and escape Russian influence.
The main leave "argument" was £350,000,000 was being given to the EU and could save the beloved NHS - this turned out to be a downright lie.
Many of the other popular arguments were equally false and fearmongery about out of control EUrocrats legislating on the curvature of bannanas and attacks on the British sausage and that farmers would be better off outside the common market - all very jingoistic.
It has emerged that there was a lot of carefully crafted individually targeted Facebook adverts that played on voters fears derived from personal data held outside the UK (and outside UK data laws), sadly these went undocumented so we may never know the extent of the falsehoods or their level of influence.
The UK electoral commission has expressed concern over this type of campaigning as no-one knows what is being promised or how much was spent on it.
There has been an effort to try to document these dark ads for the recent election where they seem to have been much less effective.
Many Brits feel conned as the referendum was pitched as being only advisory but is now being taken as iron-clad and a 4% majority of those who offered an opinion is very little mandate to enact such major constitutional change.
As the realities for science funding, farming subsidies have kicked polls are reporting many Brexiters have changed their tune. Goldman Sax's relocation to Europe is a bellweather for the realities for the financial industry which is close enough to Tory hearts that one hopes they'll snap out of their dreams of Empire and Commonwealth.
Hopefully the staggering level of incompetence so far demonstrated by David Davis' negotiating team will be the rope that hangs them and we'll get a second real referendum.
The alternative Red White and Blue Hard Brexit promised by Teresa May is not good for anyone in the UK unless they are shorting the pound.
This is not really accurate.
Firstly, the majority that initially voted to leave was 37% of the population. As far as I am aware that number has slightly decreased in terms of supporters, but even if the opposite were true it is still less than half of the population that actively support leaving.
Secondly, these MP's are only 'pro-Brexit' insofar as they know it has to happen regardless of their own beliefs and coming out against it now would be political suicide. No matter what you think here, in this last General Election people did not vote for parties based on their Brexit stance. They voted based on whether they wanted 5 more years of Tory rule. Tht issue was a far higher priority than Brexit.
I'd have voted LibDem but you only get one vote and my main concern was "try to halt NHS privatisation" leaving me to vote against the Tories and so for whoever has most chance of winning against them.
There's no scope in General Elections for any nuance in voting.
LibDems openly supported this line, "vote against the Tory party".
Meanwhile in Scotland it seems SNP lost votes not because of their governance, per se, but because people were using it as a proxy for voting against a further Scottish referendum.
This doesn't work so well under the UK's First Past The Post system.
If you wanted to get the Tories out then feeling one was throwing away a vote for the Lib-Dems in a seat were they are too far behind is one argument for proportional representation.
Also the Lib-Dems lost a lot of trust with the coalition with the Tories, many left the Lib Dems as they felt betrayed by this.
That last assumption may end up not to hold water in the longer term.
Homegrown oppression over foreign freedom.
The only repeat referenda seem to be ones where: 1) a motion was denied 2) ammendments were made to change or garuantee parts of the motion 3) the motion was subsequently passed
In the anti-EU crowd, this has morphed into "repeatedly re-run a referendum until they get the result they want"
I'd be interested to see what authority creep you think is happening in the UK right now. I can see no evidence of it.
A large portion of the UK has no idea how encryption helps them and believe that criminals and terrorists should "have nowehere to hide".
But what about dumb criminals? From what I read both the London Bridge attackers and Manchester bomber are dumb as dogs__t. They'd probably use whatsapp even if it wasn't private simply because it's popular.
(I support private communication, and think not being able to catch some criminals is a reasonable price, but many others do not)
As is, many government agencies databases seem to be filled to the brim with false-positives, making it impossible to spot the actual dangerous people among the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of "suspects".
Maybe they believe that more data will make it easier to figure out who the really dangerous people are? But that whole idea is still based on concepts which pretty much boil down to precognition of how individual humans gonna act, an impossibility.
Guess a few people took Minority Report a tad bit too seriously and didn't get the message at all.
The reason you make it illegal is that then you can, with Rule of Law, take action against it.
You're (extremely naively) correct in saying making Terrorism (and associated activities) illegal is likely to have little direct effect, but if it isn't illegal then authorities subservient to the Rule of Law are impotent to act against it.
Assuming your comment is not that naive, what's the purpose of the comment? Unless you're advocating return to feudalism I can't see anything positive in your thinking here.
What am I missing?
You're right to contend that simply adding more laws doesn't help further in general. But that's a considerable climbdown from the position implicit in your post upthread.
The jaded tone is likely due to laws being created for the 'drug war' and 'terrorism' quickly impacting ordinary citizens, while having relatively little effect on the groups they were purportedly created for.
But I guess it's "racist" to take action on that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
This was a long running set of crimes that had severe impact on the victims, and there were very many victims.
Investigating people before they are terrorists is complicated by things like human rights. But raping children is always, unambiguously, wrong.
Those decisions not to investigate or prosecute were also made by police in Rotherham. Police were well aware of the extent of the criminality, and chose not to investigate or prosecute.
http://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent_...
> Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of coverup. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them
[...]
> Some at a senior level in the Police and children's social care continued to think the extent of the problem, as described by youth workers, was exaggerated, and seemed intent on reducing the official numbers of children categorised as CSE
etc etc.
It was lack of authorisation to act, and even that does not come from any "austerity cuts". It comes from the difficult balance of citizen's rights to "freedom of expression" and "privacy" and "right to family life" and so on.
The silly part is simply that foreign citizens can preach violence but they can't be deported.