Is the country becoming authoritarian?

Kirkstall Blue said:


There is a lot wrong in the UK and we are currently living through a dark age of politics but unless we elect a dominant leader like Putin or Netanyahu I think we are still a parliamentary democracy.
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Well if having a wet fart in charge saves us from authoritarianism then I vote Sir Kier.
 
Yes it is. It is getting worse too. It is enabled by all those people wanting IDs for everyone, or wanting the police to have more excessive powers, or people banned from saying things they dont like.
 
Gorton_Tubster said:
Yes it is. It is getting worse too. It is enabled by all those people wanting IDs for everyone, or wanting the police to have more excessive powers, or people banned from saying things they dont like.
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Such a short but interesting post.

Do you own a passport, driving licence, or any other form of ID?

Policing is by consent, your vote has a say in that. What excessive powers are ‘those people’ asking for?

In this country, you can say whatever you like, and others can counter that. What have you been banned from saying?
 
bluethrunthru said:
I think that using David Icke as your jump off point wasn't the best move.

A lot of people who are against the things you raise are those that bang on about free speech. But they also have bees in their bonnets about other things too. For starters they are anti-i.d. cards but are also anti-migrant. Wouldn't i.d. cards help in locating migrants or indeed anyone who shouldn't be here?

A lot of the monitoring you raise are only there because there are bad actors in the world. People who speed, people who attack people in the street ( or at St, Pancras Station) there's increases in shoplifting and in fraud cases. Now the alternative is to use people - more traffic cops ( more taxes ) - flood the street with uniformed Police Officers ( more taxes ) - security guards in every retails space ( inflationary as you'll be paying more for the goods they are protecting ) - access to bank accounts, well that could help recover money that people have been defrauded out of or allow the Govt to expose all those people "playing the benefits system" that they tell us are out there.

You see we all still want speeders caught rather than having your high street turned into a race track, we quite like the idea that a phone snatcher or assailant can be identified off surveillance footage ( unless you are Mike Amesbury ) we like cheaper goods and we agree fraudsters need to be dealt with. BUT - none of us want to pay. The majority have been fed a line that taxes are bad but we can do stuff more cheaply with less by using monitoring so anyone who doesn't like it has been passively lobbying for it for decades. What they actually want is for everybody else to be monitored but for them to be let out of the system.

As for any law from Europe why worry - we left remember?
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You make common sense, logical points and yes, we do want crime sorted, we don't want speeders etc. But the point that has been made is when rules or systems come in and they JUST SO HAPPEN to bring other things with them. The speed cameras stop some speeding, but as a useful side note, they make millions off little old ladies or guys just trying to make it through the day going 36 in a 30. They also don't provide adequate signage and mix speed limits up from 20 to 60. They make some roads that look pretty dangerous a 60, and others that are quite open and clear a 30. If they were going to tackle speeding correctly, there would be excellent signage, maybe regular limits marked on the road surface, better warning systems, (I always find the signs that display your speed very good). We know fine well there's a big money making aspect to speeding. The ABSOLUTE dicks who speed, usually have a good working knowledge of camera positions and drive like helmets between them. We don't, but we may inadvertently slip over 30 from time to time.

I would suggest the best way to sort crime is to employ more police officers. Robots don't have common sense built in to them, they can't read between lines, they can't decide to offer a friendly reminder or have a quite word, or put the shits up a daft young lad. They are machines. They use the binary code!

My concern about monitoring is, again, brought in with the sensible enough reasons you adumbrated, but as an add on, the entire nation can be tracked, If someone is committing crime then fair enough, but we see what happenned to China (a system which on the quiet, they respect) people monitored for things they shouldn't. Political activists, union members, strikers. Don't think this will happen? It already has. Politicians were tapped, even PMs, as were union leaders, campaigners were infiltrated, some even had relationships and kids with people who turned out to be spooks. More recently Left wing journalists have been snatched off planes, arrested at their homes and whisked away in the night in front of their kids. There is the potential for a very Orwellian society arriving very soon. THEY won't strike the ballance between genuine public safety and authoritarianism, its not in their interest, its up to us!
 
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It is setting up laws that an authoritarian government could use to become such.

now its more a micromanager is in charge and control freak.
 
Earlyriser said:
We are nowhere near an authoritarian state. Our media is not centrally controlled, we are allowed freedom of movement and there is certainly no emphasis of obedience to authority. In fact the latter is what may move us along to a more authoritarian state. Crime is an issue that resonates with far more people than immigration yet we appear to see reduced police numbers, tolerance of certain crimes and a total collapse of our prison system. When offenders are sometimes serving just a third of their sentences people are rightly annoyed.
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I think there are some very big questions to be asked about our media. The way they handled: Corbyn, Covid, Ukraine, Genocide has lead to more questions than answers.
 
Earlyriser said:
We are nowhere near an authoritarian state. Our media is not centrally controlled, we are allowed freedom of movement and there is certainly no emphasis of obedience to authority. In fact the latter is what may move us along to a more authoritarian state. Crime is an issue that resonates with far more people than immigration yet we appear to see reduced police numbers, tolerance of certain crimes and a total collapse of our prison system. When offenders are sometimes serving just a third of their sentences people are rightly annoyed.
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our media is controlled by a very small group of right wing minded million/billionaires, our national broadaster had several ex tory party members and donors moved into powerful positions and since their political shows have heavily leaned towards pro conservative naratives.

Though not state owned all are on the same page generally.
 
urban genie said:
our media is controlled by a very small group of right wing minded million/billionaires, our national broadaster had several ex tory party members and donors moved into powerful positions and since their political shows have heavily leaned towards pro conservative naratives.

Though not state owned all are on the same page generally.
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Correct. And that's before the blatant foreign influence over editorial decisions that has become so obvious recently
 
philfodenswristsock said:
Correct. And that's before the blatant foreign influence over editorial decisions that has become so obvious recently
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The media have always had a grip on malleable people, but reportage still exists across the entire political spectrum. Editorials are indicative of one group's idealogies, certainly not of an authoritarianism.
 
Blue and true said:
The media have always had a grip on malleable people, but reportage still exists across the entire political spectrum. Editorials are indicative of one group's idealogies, certainly not of an authoritarianism.
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If its happening at the "balanced" tax payer funded, state broadcaster?
 
Unfettered free speech has never existed in this society, or any other recorded society as far as I am aware.

Terms of racial abuse, once not subject to mandate via criminal statute, now are. I think most people would see that erosion of what is ostensibly a freedom of expression as a good thing, so it’s not a straightforward issue. The law needs to evolve to reflect society and laws by their very nature impose restrictions on people. So just because freedom of expression is curtailed in some way, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I think the ease at which people are offended these days, and the way that offence is permitted to be weaponised, is currently a far bigger threat to our civil liberties than any law that has been, or is likely to be passed by politicians.

The way that people can be rounded upon and hounded because of something they have said which others don’t like, with the end result often being professional and/or personal ruin is far a more pernicious attack on our civil liberties than any laws that have been passed in recent years, because the net result will inevitably be that people will feel less able to express themselves, not because the law necessarily forbids it, but because of the consequences that could flow from that from their fellow citizens.

The prevailing viewpoint through my life is that freedom of speech has been, in a way that is unqualified, a good thing - but that paradigm has been twisted because that same freedom of speech, exercised by those who have been offended, has come to be used as a tool to repress freedom of speech itself, so it’s actually now a lot more complicated because of that manifestation - allied to the omnipresence of the malign catalyst of social media, which brings out the very worst in so much of the population.

I’m not sure there’s any answer to this issue, either. Certainly not any straightforward one.
 
The Future’s Blue! said:
Such a short but interesting post.

Do you own a passport, driving licence, or any other form of ID?

Policing is by consent, your vote has a say in that. What excessive powers are ‘those people’ asking for?

In this country, you can say whatever you like, and others can counter that. What have you been banned from saying?
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This has never been the case in Britain. Free speech or freedom of speech has never existed in this country.

You cannot incite violence or vandalism and you cannot slander people. The 1988 Malicious Communications Act, 2003 Communications Act and 2023 Defamation Act all disallowed the spread mis/disinformation and language that causes distress to others when coming from false statements.

Freedom of Expression exists in Britain, which allows every citizen the right to speak, but nobody has ever been allowed to just say whatever the fuck they want.
 
It all stems from people being able to post anything they want anonymously on social media that has no regulation.

Resolve that and we go back to how we were. The genie is out of the bottle though. It’ll need a tough regulator to get to grips with social media platforms.

For me, if they didn’t comply with regulation, they should be switched off until they agree.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
Unfettered free speech has never existed in this society, or any other recorded society as far as I am aware.

Terms of racial abuse, once not subject to mandate via criminal statute, now are. I think most people would see that erosion of what is ostensibly a freedom of expression as a good thing, so it’s not a straightforward issue. The law needs to evolve to reflect society and laws by their very nature impose restrictions on people. So just because freedom of expression is curtailed in some way, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I think the ease at which people are offended these days, and the way that offence is permitted to be weaponised, is currently a far bigger threat to our civil liberties than any law that has been, or is likely to be passed by politicians.

The way that people can be rounded upon and hounded because of something they have said which others don’t like, with the end result often being professional and/or personal ruin is far a more pernicious attack on our civil liberties than any laws that have been passed in recent years, because the net result will inevitably be that people will feel less able to express themselves, not because the law necessarily forbids it, but because of the consequences that could flow from that from their fellow citizens.

The prevailing viewpoint through my life is that freedom of speech has been, in a way that is unqualified, a good thing - but that paradigm has been twisted because that same freedom of speech, exercised by those who have been offended, has come to be used as a tool to repress freedom of speech itself, so it’s actually now a lot more complicated because of that manifestation - allied to the omnipresence of the malign catalyst of social media, which brings out the very worst in so much of the population.

I’m not sure there’s any answer to this issue, either. Certainly not any straightforward one.
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Nice. All good points. I think this is a slightly different issue to my original post, but it is by no means unimportant. I agree fully, 'free speech' has never been a thing, we could never shout fire in a cinema and not be held to account. I think many issues in an around free speech come down to a old fashioned concept called manners! I also think we certainly have become too cry baby over comments. Like most issues, I guess a middle ground needs to be reestablished. Stop being quite so horrid on one side and stop being so easily offended on the other. The free speech issue in and around my original post probably is more connected to freedom to critique power. I suspect, certainly the laws and policy we are starting to see, are actually more about curtailing dissent than the protection of the vulnerable. When have Governments actually cared about the vulnerable! The youngsters they are 'protecting' from online smut, will happily be sent off to war in a few months time.
 
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urban genie said:
our media is controlled by a very small group of right wing minded million/billionaires, our national broadaster had several ex tory party members and donors moved into powerful positions and since their political shows have heavily leaned towards pro conservative naratives.

Though not state owned all are on the same page generally.
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Our media has always been controlled by an elite but it has never been state controlled. There is a difference. Part of the problem is that the printed media is no longer the force it was and has allowed wealthy individuals to buy them up at a relative low cost
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
Unfettered free speech has never existed in this society, or any other recorded society as far as I am aware.

Terms of racial abuse, once not subject to mandate via criminal statute, now are. I think most people would see that erosion of what is ostensibly a freedom of expression as a good thing, so it’s not a straightforward issue. The law needs to evolve to reflect society and laws by their very nature impose restrictions on people. So just because freedom of expression is curtailed in some way, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I think the ease at which people are offended these days, and the way that offence is permitted to be weaponised, is currently a far bigger threat to our civil liberties than any law that has been, or is likely to be passed by politicians.

The way that people can be rounded upon and hounded because of something they have said which others don’t like, with the end result often being professional and/or personal ruin is far a more pernicious attack on our civil liberties than any laws that have been passed in recent years, because the net result will inevitably be that people will feel less able to express themselves, not because the law necessarily forbids it, but because of the consequences that could flow from that from their fellow citizens.

The prevailing viewpoint through my life is that freedom of speech has been, in a way that is unqualified, a good thing - but that paradigm has been twisted because that same freedom of speech, exercised by those who have been offended, has come to be used as a tool to repress freedom of speech itself, so it’s actually now a lot more complicated because of that manifestation - allied to the omnipresence of the malign catalyst of social media, which brings out the very worst in so much of the population.

I’m not sure there’s any answer to this issue, either. Certainly not any straightforward one.
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Very well said.

Free speech shouldn't really exist with legal parameters, because that's a cause of immeasurable confusion and a waste of judicial time and resources. What it should exist within are moral parameters. Most people in this country are good-natured and compassionate enough to understand the spirit of free speech, and differentiate between it and hate speech; and yes, there is a definable difference. It's why most (save for a few on here) recognise a debate on income tax brackets is exercising your right to free speech, and that Tommy Robinson is a violent fascist abusing the privilege that is free speech.

What you find, generally, is that those who profess loudly to exercising free speech are the ones who hold the most abhorrent views, views that lie outside the moral parameters.
 
philfodenswristsock said:
If its happening at the "balanced" tax payer funded, state broadcaster?
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The BBC is still the best we've got for impartiality; and I say that as a proponent of the licence fee being ended. What makes me laugh are the ones who moan about the BBC are often the ones that will happily lap up what the likes of GB News feed them.

Jeremy Bowen is a world class reporter and has covered Middle Eastern politics for decades, the BBC gave him the platform to do this. Of course that's just one example, but in a more restrictive, partisan organisation, he wouldn't have been able to do this.
 
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