The UK is not a free society and has not been for a long time. We long since sacrificed our civil rights at the altar of various boogiemen: criminals, terrorists, immigrants, nonces, rapists.
The one thing that the two major parties have consistently agreed over the years is that our rights are a danger to ourselves.
This kind of thing is just par for the course in our performative democracy where the media holds the true power and the politicians’ only way to get ahead is to prostitute themselves to the media, particularly Murdoch. This letter to Twitter is one such performance.
The parent you're replying to does not appear to have read the letter in question. Have you?
1. The letter was sent by the Select Committee responsible for overseeing the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
2. This Select Committee is not the government. It is in fact a bipartisan oversight committee comprised of Conservative, Labour, and SNP members of parliament.
3. The Select Committee has a responsibility to provide oversight for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, to influence its priorities, and to understand the people, communities, and entities (companies, sports teams, arts galleries) to whom the Department has a responsibility.
4. One way that Select Committees do this is to request testimony and insight from relevant people/communities/entities -- particularly where they are at the forefront of something new or newsworthy which is within the Department/Committee's wheelhouse.
5. The remit of the Department is highly relevant to the Brand allegations. Most directly, the Department is largely responsible for the government's relationship and enthusiasm for funding the BBC, where Brand was employed at the time one victim alleges he abused her.
6. It is specifically part of the job of departments like DCMS, and their oversight committees, to promote the positions of government in areas outside of policy and law.
7. Nobody here is sacrificing any rights. You do not need to acquiesce to a parliamentary request. Zuckerberg has refused multiple requests for testimony both live and via Zoom. X refused to provide any information beyond what is publicly available. Brand did not have a right to due process with YouTube before he was de-monetised. Zuckerberg, X, Rumble, Brand, etc. have experienced zero change in their rights and legal protection within the United Kingdom before, during, or after they were asked for testimony.
On to the rest:
> The UK is not a free society
I find myself writing this more and more frequently on HN: I know that you're just trying to be emphatic, but it's not generally helpful to make extremely exaggerated statements for effect. There is clearly a plurality of thought on what constitutes freedom and a free society, but it is utterly uncontroversial to say that the United Kingdom, like all modern developed nations operating something which looks and smells a bit like democratically-elected officials, is as free as it gets in the world.
What specifically is your special standard of "freedom" which is not being met by the UK at the moment?
> We long since sacrificed our civil rights
I must have missed this! Which rights in particular?
> at the altar of various boogiemen
Unless we forewent our civil rights because of a dance troupe I think you mean "bogeymen"!
All intentional communities - companies, countries, camping trips, whatever - evolve and iterate on their values and protocols as time goes by. For example: prior to 9/11, it was perfectly logical that cockpit doors be open during flights and made of unremarkable materials. As soon as somebody decided to start flying planes into buildings, we began closing and locking cockpit doors, and reenforcing them.
So hopefully you agree that societies and their leaders get new information from time to time which requires them to change things?
I'd love to know, and I mean this in a spirit of genuine curiosity, which specific civil rights were afforded to you in your lifetime but which were then stripped due to your list of bogey/boogie-men.
For example, what are you legally prohibited from doing today which you once were not, as a result of pedophiles (nonces to non-UK readers)?
> The one thing that the two major parties have consistently agreed over the years is that our rights are a danger to ourselves.
Again I know this is a rhetorical device, but no major UK party or member of a major UK party has made the claim that "our rights are a danger to ourselves". For one thing it's such a facile thing to say that they would probably be mocked for saying it, but even if you pretend it isn't lowest common denominator conspiratorial nonsense, there are very few examples of orchestrated bipartisan efforts to curtail civil rights at all – let alone any which do not have widespread public support or a plausible public good as their intended outcome.
> This kind of thing is just par for the course in our performative democracy where the media holds the true power
Oh brother.
> and the politicians' only way to get ahead is to prostitute themselves to the media, particularly Murdoch.
Ah yes, of course! Who can forget Joe Biden's cozy relationship with FOX News in the run-up to the 2020 election? And of course Keir Starmer's seemingly-unassailable lead in the polls is black magic from Labour's propaganda arm, News International.
I'm being facetious but you see my point: say what you mean. I would consider the two examples I provided to be disproof of your claim that "the politicians' only way to get ahead is to prostitute themselves to the media", which is the kind of bubblegum thing people say unchallenged, but which really doesn't appear to be the case. Trump is the GOP frontrunner and he openly derides the entire mainstream media including FOX News.
tl;dr: if you understand the responsibility of this committee, then you understand that this is an entirely appropriate and necessary letter for them to write. If you read the letter, then you understand that it is benign. And finally, I'm guessing here, if you try to enumerate specific civil rights you have lost down the years, you'll fall some way short of what I, a reasonable person (hehe) would consider sufficient to say "the UK is not a free society".
I have nothing to add, but to say thank you for a highly detailed and well thought-out/written response. This isn't the place for wildly misleading opinions masquerading as facts (such as the one you rebutted).
Thanks for taking the time to say this. I'm trying to get better at explicitly encouraging positive behaviours (instead of just wading into arguments like this!), and you've inspired me to recommit.
If you dismissed my post as 'bullshit' and think that Brand not having been convicted somehow diminishes my argument, then I suspect you have not read it.
If you have read it and truly believe that it is somehow undone by the fact that Brand is innocent until proven guilty in court, I would love to understand where I could be expressing myself more clearly, because, again, no part of my argument is contingent on Brand being convicted or not. It is entirely immaterial to my position.
1. Right to freedom of speech: violated by the Communications Act 2003 which makes it a criminal offence to post communications that are "grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". Notably used in such classics as the Twitter Joke trial, and the Hitler Dog Salute trial.
2. Right to silence: violated by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which repealed the right to "plead the fifth" so to speak, to allow juries to take adverse inferences if the accused refuses to provide the police with details of their defence as soon as possible. Also violated by RIPA which allows a person to be imprisoned for years for refusing to disclose a password.
3. Right to freedom of assembly: violated by various laws passed in recent years adding more and more restrictions on protests. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 allows the police to shut down protests that cause a "nuisance", in the Government's own words: "The Act will allow police to place conditions on public processions, public assemblies and one-person protests where it is reasonably believed that the noise they generated may result it serious disruption to the activities of an organisation carried on in the vicinity or have a significant impact on people in the vicinity of the protest."
4. Right to privacy: violated by many internet laws, predominantly RIPA: "In April 2008, it became known that local government officials in Poole put three children and their parents under surveillance, at home and in their daily movements, to check whether they lived in a particular school catchment area". The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 went further and imposed mandatory logging of internet activity in the UK by ISPs.
5. Right to not be subjected to facial recognition: facial recognition is rife, the police are permitted to use facial recognition vans in public places.
6. Right to vote: violated by the Voter Identification Regulations 2022 which were created for the express purpose of disenfranchising voters (as admitted by Jacob Rees-Mogg that it might have backfired and caused a disenfranchisement of older voters instead of younger), especially given the almost non-existent level of in-person voter fraud, and the non-possession of photo ID by a much larger number of people.
7. Right to a fair trial. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 drastically cut funding and availability of legal aid.
8. Right to nationality: thanks to the Begum case, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 substantially weakened the already quite weak protections for natural-born British citizens who are entitled to another nationality. The minister can withdraw the nationality of any dual national, without any due process or even notifying them about it.
Governments have also attempted to do several things which failed or are in the process of failing:
1. The Home Secretary wishes to leave the ECHR, and there have been repeated unsuccessful attempts to repeal and water-down the Human Rights Act.
2. Successive governments have attempted to restrict the availability of end-to-end encrypted communications apps such as WhatsApp, despite relying on WhatsApp to keep ministerial communications secret from the public, and refusing to submit WhatsApp messages to public inquiries.
3. Successive governments have attempted to institute mandatory age verification to access the internet, although they have been mostly foiled by the IETF's improvements to internet privacy post-Snowden (thanks guys).
You've got some good ones and some crazy ones there, probably more good than crazy. Certainly a lot I'm sympathetic to.
I'll just make one observation. Very few rights are absolute. Take the right to privacy in the HRA for example:
> There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
You really could drive a cart and horses through that.
I cherrypicked two to illustrate my point, but if you think there are especially strong examples here which you'd like me to address, do feel free and I'm happy to go into detail on any of them!
> 1. Right to freedom of speech: violated by the Communications Act 2003
Freedom of Expression is most obviously defined in the UK in the 1998 Human Rights Act, which goes on to specifically state that the right can "be subject to formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society".
The 1986 Public Order Act had already made it an offence to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviours that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress”.
Oh, and the 2003 Communications Act was a fairly benign modernisation of the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, which includes this language: "[it is an offence to send a letter] which is, in whole or part, of an indecent or grossly offensive nature[…]"
It is a mistake to believe that your right to freedom of expression has meaningfully changed since 2003.
> 3. Right to freedom of assembly
Again, there are a wide range of longstanding limitations and conditions surrounding this right which are occasionally revised and refined to keep them current (and to avoid a situation where we govern using something akin to constitutional originalism, which is a clusterfuck). It is not possible to avoid refining laws in this manner, and it is not a right being taken away from you.
Specifically in this case, there are multiple provisions in the Public Order Act of 1986 (actually maybe a 1991 revision glancing at it now) to allow the police to forbid, restrict, and dissolve public processions and gatherings at their discretion, including for a failure to notify the police of the intent to gather. Police have long been able to use these as the basis to dissolve nuisance gatherings and protests which cause significant disruption or noise. Your right to peacefully gather and protest has never afforded you the right to cause a significant or sustained nuisance to others who also enjoy rights which the government must protect.
The one thing that the two major parties have consistently agreed over the years is that our rights are a danger to ourselves.
This kind of thing is just par for the course in our performative democracy where the media holds the true power and the politicians’ only way to get ahead is to prostitute themselves to the media, particularly Murdoch. This letter to Twitter is one such performance.