> I understand my neighbors across the pond may not feel that way and I'd be curious about their thoughts. Is this just an abuse of that law? Does that law also feel undemocratic? Other more nuanced position?

I'm from Europe, though not from the UK. That law feels abhorrent.

You'll often hear the claim that "other countries have a more nuanced view of free speech". It's certainly true free speech protections are weaker elsewhere, but using that to imply all the citizens agree with that is extremely misleading. Plenty of us subscribe to a more 1st Amendment style view on free speech.

I think article 19 of the universal declaration of human rights is much more like the first amendment that what the UK has. How they can have the laws they do while still pretending to follow them makes me wonder though.

>Article 19.

>Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The public order act is extremely abusable, but it's intended to be that way. Note the date; it was right in the middle of the Thatcherite war on demonstrators, just after the Orgreave battles with striking miners and a few years after the Bloody Sunday firing on demonstrators and subsequent whitewash.

The British public (and especially press) is quite conservative, and prefer the maintenance of "order" to the extent of cheering on violence against demonstrators.

The practical use of S5POA is not for criminalising random swearing, but specifically to give police a pretext for arresting people who haven't committed a crime but are otherwise upset at being stopped by the police.

Peak silliness may have been the 1994 attempt to ban raves, characterised by "repetitive beats": http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/enacted (s63). Peak violence may have been the "kettling" of thousands of demonstrators in Oxford circus for hours in the early 2000s.

Judges tend to push back a bit if people are being arrested for merely swearing, especially if it's only at police officers.

Judges will say if you're in the job as a police officer that you need to be a bit robust about the language you hear.

They also say that we're not a nation of nuns and schoolgirls and so the everyday "man in the street" won't be aghast at the occasional swear word.

The public order act is problematic, and it does need to be reformed, but it's not as catastrophic as it appears.

We've just had a popular musician leading a chant of "Fuck off Boris" [Johnson], and that was broadcast on BBC tv. There are no arrests.

The other thing that causes real confusion on HN is that police and crown prosecution service have discretion about when to arrest and when to prosecute and they're too busy dealing with criminals to go around arresting people who've only sworn.

In some ways the discretion makes it worse: it becomes a general purpose offense of "annoying a police officer". They're not enforcing that against EDL marches or the Orange Order, for example.