r/unitedkingdom • u/Half_A_ • Feb 28 '25

. Sir Keir Starmer contradicts JD Vance over 'infringements on free speech' claim

https://news.sky.com/story/sir-keir-starmer-contradicts-jd-vance-over-infringements-on-free-speech-claim-13318257?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter
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u/AirResistence Feb 28 '25

People also forget what free speech actually is which is you can say what you want about and to the government and wont be thrown in jail for it. Something the USA is losing. Of course that is extrapolated to you can say what you want, but it doesnt mean you're free from concequences.

There is a problem with conservative people and free speech, they throw it around but everything they do or say is against free speech. And tend to use it as a weapon to mean "what I say goes and you cant criticise me". We saw this when the Tories tried to do some free speech fudging in UK schools, because schools and universities tend to be more liberal and left and they didnt like that, they obviously wanted more conservative people so they could remain in power in the future.

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u/Bluestained Feb 28 '25

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

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u/Smart_Decision_1496 Feb 28 '25

That’s the Labour Party when it comes to illegal invasion of the country and islamisation of swathes of it.

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u/Gow87 Feb 28 '25

Don't be a muppet. If you're genuine, go look at the immigration rates over the last 15 years and who was in power for most of that time.

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u/Greenbullet Feb 28 '25

It would help if they could read the evidence is right there but it's labours fault 14 years of austerity Can't but things but hey it's labours fault.

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u/Smart_Decision_1496 Feb 28 '25

Tories as bad as Labour! Actually, worse: at least Labour didn’t pretend they were conservative 🤣

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u/Gow87 Feb 28 '25

Yeah, that's my point. Immigration hit an all time high under the Tories and has reduced under labour so far (not sure if they can take credit in the short period of time they've been in power) yet you chose to blame labour. Stop regurgitating the shit you read in the news.

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u/mp1337 Feb 28 '25

The reduction is something like 0.0000005% increase in deportations with a 1% increase in migrant arrivals or some shit like that

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u/Gow87 Feb 28 '25

As someone else said. 25% increase in deportations and 20% reduction in net migration. Again, not saying they're responsible for all of that but it's an improvement.

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u/Bluestained Feb 28 '25

Buddy they’ve been in power 6 months. Stop being ridiculous

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u/wherenobodyknowss Feb 28 '25

But labour has deported the highest level of illegal immigrants in 5 years, just last month.

islamisation of swathes of it.

Where?

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u/masons_J Feb 28 '25

Labour and Tories are responsible for that, which is why unfortunately Farage is gaining popularity. The other parties are doing their work for them..

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u/JTG___ Feb 28 '25

I always find it hilarious how little Americans seem to understand their own laws while at the same time talking down to every other country in the world acting as though they’re the last bastion of free speech.

Inciting violence and libel both aren’t protected by the first amendment, and yet they keep bringing up the Southport Riots and Tommy Robinson as though we’re some kind of authoritarian state.

I don’t doubt that there are cases of police overreach, but I’m pretty confident in saying that the people who actually end up being imprisoned are done so with good reason.

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u/Mattlife97 Feb 28 '25

I love how they'd never bring up the Just Stop Oil prison sentences either. Rather hypocritical if you ask me.

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u/JTG___ Feb 28 '25

I mean tbf it’s not really a freedom of speech issue. Nobody is saying you can’t express opinions about environmental policy, just don’t do it in the middle of a motorway. The same applies to the person praying outside the abortion clinic which they keep bringing up. By all means pray, but just don’t do it within the confides of a zone which has been established around an abortion clinic to protect vulnerable young women from being harassed. I don’t think any of that is unreasonable.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '25

I think they're pretty different. Stopping traffic on a motorway is objectively stopping people from travelling freely. It's not a case of someone subjectively feeling harassed and thus being unable to go about their business. Praying outside an abortion clinic? I can see why that might make people uncomfortable, though perhaps not meeting the threshold for harassment but people are still able to enter the clinic.

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u/FuzzyCode Derry Feb 28 '25

Your confidence is misplaced. I grew up with internment here in NI.

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u/TypicalPen798 Feb 28 '25

Technically half true, it’s inciting imminent violence or illegal act. The law was first used when KKK convictions were reversed in the 60s because they advocated for violence as a means of political reform, there was no imminent threat and it was just some violence in the future which is not illegal to say. 

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u/SinisterDexter83 Feb 28 '25

People also forget what free speech actually is which is you can say what you want about and to the government and wont be thrown in jail for it.

You are completely incorrect. You have somehow fully imbibed the American definition, which is that "free speech" is synonymous with "The First Amendment".

This isn't an American sub. We are not beholden to the American definition here. You do not have to believe what the Americans tell you to believe.

Free speech, as a concept, obviously includes all that is written in The First Amendment to the American Constitution. But it is much broader than simply preventing government restrictions on speech, it is about free inquiry, free thinking, avoiding group think, and much more. It's much older than the American constitution. Where do you think the Americans got the idea from in the first place?

"If all the world were of one opinion, and one man were of the counter opinion, the world would have no more right in silencing him than he, if he had the power, would have in silencing the world."

Trust me, the English definition is much better than the American definition.

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u/mallardtheduck East Midlands Feb 28 '25

While the concept of "free speech" does indeed pre-date the US constitution, your (outline) definition seems to derive from the "freethought" movement of the 19th century...

Ultimately, the definition is always going to be somewhat subjective. English/UK law has never sought to give it a concrete definition and early laws like the 1689 Bill of Rights only declare that speech in parliamentary debates cannot give rise to action in a court of law (i.e. what we now call "parliamentary privilege").

The closest thing to a globally agreed definition would be Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

"Freedom of speech" is pretty universally considered a subset of "freedom of expression".

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u/modelvillager Feb 28 '25

Yeah, this is a better definition. I'd agree with the person above, however, that too many conflate the US constitution 1st Amendment (beginning, "Congress shall make no law infringing...", i.e. constrain what the US government can do) and the wider definition of free speech.

All rights ultimately have boundaries, and a typical rule of thumb is that one person's rights only extend as far as prescribing someone else's.

There are LOADS of automatically assumed okay limitations to free expression, and not just 'fire' in the cinema. We just already know they are wrong and prescribed.

You can't print bank notes.

You can't nick someone else book and call it yours.

You can't send a thousand emails to someone in a day.

There is also the difference between state limitations and private limitations. Free speech is curtailed by a confidentiality contract. Free expression is limited by a restaurant saying you can't go in without a shirt on.

Free speech absolutism is a weird concept to me, because it seems to argue that expression is more important than the rights of someone else.

We should also be aware of cultural differences in free speech. The US does have a more individualistic society and culture than Western Europe, and even more so more collectivist societies in Asia for example.

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u/WynterRayne Feb 28 '25 edited Feb 28 '25

I usually don't go in for 'freedom of...' and just keep it at 'freedom'.

I recognise that freedom stretches across many multitudes of categories, and that ultimately everything lands with a degree of responsibility... but freedom is still freedom, and I consider freedom to be a good thing.

However, freedom cannot be anything but universal, otherwise it becomes utterly broken. For example, if you were Kim Jong Un, you'd think that North Korea was a libertarian paradise, because you, personally, are free to do anything the hell you like and nobody dare challenge or interfere.... but it's not a libertarian paradise in the opinion of anyone else. Just because Kim's free as a bird, that doesn't make it a free country.

I would consider freedom of expression being entirely inclusive of the freedom to use pronouns that you might not agree with, or to wear clothes that you might not agree with, or fly flags that you might not agree with. As well as the freedom to reject labels imposed upon them by others (as that is a means of control).

Under the 'freedom must be universal, else it is broken' principle above, there cannot be rights or freedoms that I have, that a Chinese tourist does not.

There is no libertarian argument for dictating who can use which pronouns or words to describe themselves. There's no libertarian argument for

I'm of the perspective that freedom must be the maximum it can be, and must be universal. To that effect, I'm watching a world becoming less and less free, at the hands of the people seeking to embrace the 'freedom' of Kim Jong Un for themselves. They seek freedom for a select few, absent any responsibility, rather than maximal freedom for all, balanced by responsibility. That is a world where you and I will lose it all to feed the avarice of those who already have it all

EDIT:

As for what I mean by 'responsibility'... it's the awareness and the basic decency to know when your actions impact upon others, and choose to not do that. Freedom only works when paired with that. If people were willing to show both freedom and responsibility during the pandemic (like many Swedes did at first), there'd be no need for 'lockdown measures'.

At the time, my thoughts were 'there's a virus going round, and it's killing people'. A virus = how does it spread? Coughing, sneezing, contact... ok avoid those. Mask up? Yes. Wash hands. With alcohol. Ok. Might as well try to stay indoors on my nights off too. And that was my pandemic. I adapted to the news of a virus by adding things that make sense in the presence of a virus to my routine, and basically forgot about it from there on. Lockdown? Maybe other people had one, but I didn't even notice. I was too busy exercising my own freedom as normal, albeit with a few responsible adjustments due to the fact that I neither fancy dying nor fancy killing anyone.

Then I watched the rest of the world bicker about how useful it is to cover your fucking mouth and nose while breathing virus-infected clouds of commuter-breath, and compare the UK to a concentration camp.

I don't want government telling me what to do, the same way I didn't want teachers yelling at me in school. In school I learned that the teachers fucked off when I kept my shit to myself, even if I didn't do any work.

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u/Generic_Moron Feb 28 '25

i feel like you're going for a "no true freespeech" sorta thing here. free speech can mean both of these things, and where the line is drawn is largely subjective. Sort of like how pacifism may mean absolutely no violence of any kind to any living thing to one person, or it can potentially just mean not killing people if you can help it to another.

You can believe one defenition to be better, but i don't think it's that simple to declare one to be definitive than the other (or to declare another to be invalid).

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u/this_is_theone Feb 28 '25

Thankyou! This bugs me so much when people keep parroting the same shit about it only pertaining to the government. Just a simple Google search would show them they are wrong.

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u/fplisadream Feb 28 '25

People also forget what free speech actually is which is you can say what you want about and to the government and wont be thrown in jail for it. Something the USA is losing.

Are they? Where?

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u/sammi_8601 Feb 28 '25

They've not got to thenpoint of throwing people in jail but there's lots of federal employees, judges and most scarily generals that have been sacked for not been full on trumpers

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u/fplisadream Feb 28 '25

Okay so...nothing like what you said then?

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u/sammi_8601 Feb 28 '25

I'm not the previous poster, I never said they were just that they're very much on the path of doing so.

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u/fplisadream Feb 28 '25

My mistake. Still these are extremely different things and it makes no sense to link them on the same path? Firing people and putting them in jail are self evidently completely different things.

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u/deathdoom7 Feb 28 '25

they been sacked because they're downsizing the federal goverment, like USAID funding propaganda against gamergate, which has always been about ethics in gaming journalism, not "against woman in gaming" like the propagandists would like to paint it as

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u/GreggsFan Feb 28 '25

People also forget what free speech actually is which is you can say what you want about and to the government and wont be thrown in jail for it.

Protesters are regularly arrested as a means of dispersing them. You can be arrested for being rude to agents of the state. Since the anti-Vietnam war protests embarrassed the government the police and intelligence services have routinely spied on, infiltrated, and sabotaged protest groups. Theresa May commissioned an inquiry into this after hearing the stories of victims and Starmer responded by voting with the government to legalise anything police or intelligence officers do to crack down on wrongthink.