>This law is very clearly being selectively enforced, as lots of people have "express[ed] an opinion or belief that is supportive of" Hamas in recent days, but the police aren't knocking at their doors. (Yet.)

Every law in the UK is selectively enforced. Except maybe laws regarding speeding if they have evidence.

The laws in this country are so vague that I am certain that every adult has broken some of them.

If the Police don't like you, they just pick something vaguely relevant which you have probably broken and hassle you for it.

> The laws in this country are so vague that I am certain that every adult has broken some of them.

Sounds like India learnt a thing or two from the British, here.

It's just always been the case, everywhere. The history of Law is effectively about the powerless (or rather the less-powerful) slowly carving out all circumstances in which they cannot be thrown in prison on a whim.

Well, not necessarily everywhere. In the lens of history, new countries with a new constitution don't have that problem. Over time, they create layers of new laws, then cruft when those laws make little sense to enforce, then they can crack down on the letter of that law when enforcement is socially acceptable.

The thing about these types of laws is that they can show up years later - so a positive opinion of Hamas gets prosecuted in 3-5 years later.

Thanks for posting the official position of the UK state. I was curious how many far right, non-Islamic organisations are listed as proscribed organisations so I counted them:

* Atomwaffen Division (AWD)

* Feuerkrieg Division (FKD)

* Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD)

* National Action

* The Base

Out of all these, I’d only heard of National Action.

It’s not clear (to me) that all the proscribed groups are actually active in the UK though, with the Internet, I guess they can be recruiting people to their cause.

I also wasn’t too surprised to see that the most recent addition to the list is the Wagner Group (proscribed in September 2023).

On the other hand, I was surprised to see that Basque separatists, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) are still listed – despite the fact that they renounced the armed struggle over a decade ago and dissolved their organisation five years ago.

Curiously, their “List of proscribed groups linked to Northern Ireland related terrorism” is even more out-of-date. Since the second-wave of feminism, Cumann na mBan is essentially an historical relic. Some of the organisations (e.g. Saor Éire) haven’t been active since the 70s. The IPLO were (violently) eliminated in the early 90s. The Irish Republican Army is listed but there’s no distinction made between the multiple different groups that refer to themselves as the “Irish Republican Army”; the largest of these (by far), the Provisional IRA abandoned the armed struggle two decades ago and committed themselves to constitutional means of achieving their political aims (as per the 1998 Belfast Agreement aka the Good Friday Agreement) – though splinter IRAs remain opposed to the Peace Process.

Isn't "The Base" == Al Qaeda?

According to this list, this particular group is described as:

> The Base is a predominantly US based militant white supremacist group, formed in 2018. It draws influence from a collection of essays by prominent National Socialist, James Mason, which advocate the use of violence to initiate the collapse of modern society through a ‘race war’ and the subsequent creation of a white ethno-state. This ideology is known as ‘accelerationism’.

Al Qa’ida (AQ) are listed separately:

> Inspired and led by Usama Bin Laden, its aims are the expulsion of Western forces from Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Israel and the end of Western influence in the Muslim world.

No, although the name was likely picked to cause exactly such confusion. 'Al Qaeda' is commonly translated as 'the base' but there's no connection between the two. AQ was a pretty elaborate and complex organization in its heyday though it seems mostly moribund now. The Base existed mostly virtually and was more focused on promoting stochastic terrorism by disseminating incitement and instructional materials, but without any real infrastructure/finance.