The elected governments of the UK or Canada could choose to pass laws to make anything legal or illegal, but they don't.
That suggests to me that the people and their representatives want these laws to be in place.
Just like the people and their representatives in the USA don't want to change the constitution to remove the first amendment.
The constitution in the US protects so much only because its government is otherwise dysfunctional - nobody ever has a majority large enough to change things. This doesn't happen in other countries - the current UK government has had a sizeable majority since 2019.
Civil rights should never be left up to the whims of the public. That’s what the US constitution gets right.
As for all the Europeans that like to call the world’s oldest democracy dysfunctional - the fact that it’s hard to do things nationally without widespread support is a feature, not a bug.
World’s oldest democracy? I was wondering what Iceland had to do with this discussion. Though, it turns out that there’s no obvious territory, nation, state, federation or other political entity that can decisively make this claim: https://www.history.com/news/what-is-the-worlds-oldest-democ...
Free speech has only really existed for the right wing in the US.
Left wing activists were spied on, imprisoned, and harassed all through the 20th century. With approval from people who otherwise crow on about the constitution.
Pacifism was illegal in WWI and people were jailed for speaking out against the war. Trade unionists were rounded up and beaten by police. Socialists had their phones tapped. Black nationalists and civil rights activists thrown in jail. Communists blacklisted and lost their jobs.
Free speech absolutism is a fantasy from the right. Only for protecting speech emanating from the right. When they are threatened by communism or related ideologies, they are more than willing to toss it out the window and did so constantly over a 100 year period.
Which makes all the current crowing from the right about their feelings of persecution around identity politics and "cultural marxism" twice as ridiculous.
Even here in Canada-- when left wing activists gather in downtown cores and try to disrupt things even a 1/10th of the level that the "freedom convoy" did last winter, they are tear gassed within an inch of their life. I was there in Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas and that's what was done to us. Same at the G20 protests in Toronto, where hundreds were kettled and illegally detained by police within a couple hours of the initiation of protests.
When far rightists did it, they were left to occupy international border crossings (with arms!) and disrupt commerce and traffic in our capital city for four weeks before police finally intervened. And I get to hear from Americans on hackernews about what an oppressive state Canada is. It's preposterous.
Just because someone in your favored tribe had their rights violated doesn’t mean you should argue in favor of violating the rights of another group.
It’s sad people are duped by this bad reasoning. You’re seeing the world through tribal scorekeeping lens.
The obvious solution is to extend the rights more universally. This used to be what the ACLU did in America - fight for everyone’s access to free speech. (Sadly they’ve lost their way and no longer do this.)
I am not arguing in favour of the repression of people's rights. You're misreading me entirely.
But I am arguing about the nature of said rights and where they come from.
People like me on the socialist left have never harboured any illusion that pieces of paper like constitutions protect people from oppression by the state.
Rights come from collective, mass power. People in the streets. When the state and its corporate masters is threatened, it will use force to put it down.
It's not a matter of favoured tribe. It's a matter of pointing out the preposterous nature of libertarian ideology. It tries to refocus the frame out of the actual material conditions of what is happening to the world, onto pieces of paper. But remains blind to the actual physical conflicts in the world. And in the end most so-called constitutionalists will turn a blind eye to repression of the left when it becomes a threat to the order that they benefit from.
That suggests to me that the people and their representatives want these laws to be in place.
Just like the people and their representatives in the USA don't want to change the constitution to remove the first amendment.
The constitution in the US protects so much only because its government is otherwise dysfunctional - nobody ever has a majority large enough to change things. This doesn't happen in other countries - the current UK government has had a sizeable majority since 2019.