The UK is a country where it's illegal to offend people. It really isn't surprising that those people would get arrested but actual perpetrators of the Grenfell tragedy get off scot-free.

I remember not too long ago Ireland had blasphemy laws. Does anyone remember what happened to the guy who was criminally charged for mocking God on TV?

Context. I assume you left it out for good reason from your throwaway account? The video alone doesn't explain.

Grenfell tower housed mostly non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths 70 injured (mostly non-Brits) and the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark met with laughter. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire.

He got away lightly for something hateful. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).

Tasteless and offensive? Sure. But why should it be illegal to do such a thing?

Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence often encoded in political systems and then you get violence + state. E.g Nazis started with "remove Jews from Germany" then shockingly when a lot of Jewish people don't want to leave their homes then it escalates as the bigotry whipped up at first runs into the reality of how to make it real. By the time they seized the full state machinery then it was too late.

No one can or will ever agree on what is and isn’t bigotry and the views of those who do agree are constantly changing. It’s a ridiculous thing to attempt to make illegal. Those who try are destined to find themselves jailed for bigotry.

Has this ever actually happened?

> Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence

Completely agreed. So long as I get to define what is bigotry, and what is valid grievance.

Why not established political mechanisms and democratic pressure?

> Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence often encoded in political systems and then you get violence + state.

I don’t think this is a causal relationship. Just think about the trillions of acts of bigotry that take place each year and how few of them result in genocide. Bigotry is bad, genocide is super duper bad. But saying one leads to the other needs to be qualified that it’s like a one in a billion chance. Equating bigotry with genocide debases the severity of genocide and is like saying unkindness leads to genocide. Or that not saying “bless you” leads to a feedback loop that ends in murder.

If we say "ah but think about the causal relationship anti semitism has a low risk of turning into a pogrom" that doesn't really carry a lot of water for the majority of Jewish people considering the amount of times it has happened in history.

For the sakes of what are nearly always incredibly low value and tedious "debates" I'm fairly ambivalent on defaulting towards removing hate speech. We can get enough of it from our government and media in the UK anyway so it's clearly not under any real threat.