It's always funny seeing Americans who have clearly got their news about the UK from questionable sources telling us how actually we live in a dystopian open-air prison.
In the US, you have people being literally grabbed off the street and sent to foreign prisons because of their speech with no due process, but the UK is the one close to a loss of freedom of speech because checks notes you can be convicted in a court of law for actively calling for people to burn down hotels full of immigrants during riots.
This isn't new, of course, I remember some time back I was being told how white people couldn't go into Leicester... while I, a white man, attended University in Leicester.
The UK definitely has issues, even ones related to expression, but generally it's a very free place that does pretty well with respect to it. The US is in a much more dangerous place for freedom of expression right now.
Yes the American media overblow some of the issues for clicks. However you can be arrested for speech and it isn't just threats to violence.
> In the US, you have people being literally grabbed off the street and sent to foreign prisons because of their speech with no due process.
This isn't true. Many of these people were arrested because they had entered the country illegally and then sent to foreign prisons. You are falling for the same rage bait media (except it is left leaning).
> This isn't new, of course, I remember some time back I was being told how white people couldn't go into Leicester... while I, a white man, attended University in Leicester.
It depends which area of the city. The University will typically safer than other areas of a city. Most of the people there are students and there is campus security.
There are areas of Manchester (where I used to live) and where I am the only English guy (not white, there were Irish people there) on the street. There was significant racial tensions and fights as a result. The guy that bombed the Arianne Grande concert lived a 5 minute walk away. I moved out of Manchester because I didn't feel safe.
Again not a "no-go zone area", but there are problems with racial tensions. I've heard it is worse in some places in London.
> The UK definitely has issues, even ones related to expression, but generally it's a very free place that does pretty well with respect to it.
As someone that lived outside the UK for long periods of time and knew what the country was like before the 2000s. This isn't true.
> Many of these people were arrested because they had entered the country illegally and then sent to foreign prisons.
Actually, most of the illegals being arrested didn't enter the country illegally; they legally entered the country (for example, to file an asylum claim), but for various reasons, they're no longer legally allowed to be in the country.
> This isn't true. Many of these people were arrested because they had entered the country illegally and then sent to foreign prisons. You are falling for the same rage bait media (except it is left leaning).
You say it isn't true, but then say "many", so it is true, just not in all cases? Just because others are being deported alongside you doesn't change that you are being sent to a foreign prison for speech, and with no due process anyone can be targeted.
> It depends which area of the city. The University will typically safer than other areas of a city. Most of the people there are students and there is campus security.
What are you talking about? I lived in the city—I rented a house with friends from my second year as most do rather than staying in halls (which are in Oadby), I went out all the time all over the place, as did everyone else. I didn't spend three years locked inside the University.
> As someone that lived outside the UK for long periods of time and knew what the country was like before the 2000s. This isn't true.
Given you are willing to claim it's rage bait media to point out people being extrajudicially imprisoned abroad for speech the admin in the US doesn't like, I'm not going to trust your judgement of how good freedom of expression is.
> You say it isn't true, but then say "many", so it is true, just not in all cases? Just because others are being deported alongside you doesn't change that you are being sent to a foreign prison for speech, and with no due process anyone can be targeted.
Reread what they quoted. The statement as a whole is not true, he was correcting the latter part of it that made it false.
What latter part? They did not get due process. They were targeted for their speech, the administration explicitly said so. The post-hoc rationalisation by claiming they are gang members with laughable evidence (mostly having completely and obviously unrelated tattoos) doesn't mean it wasn't for speech, and without due process they can grab anyone and make that claim without any proof.
I also live in the UK, and I in fact care about both of these. "Things are worse in America" is a tired and harmful cliché frequently used to deflect valid complaints about affairs here. Is the Trump administration really the low bar we're happy with?
And I'm afraid we're long past the point of dismissing police and state overreach into freedom of expression as an "American/right-wing myth". The Julian Foulkes case [1] is just one recent example - and no, the fact that they apologised in this one case, featuring an important person, that received substantial media attention, is not enough to reassure me that it was an error
> "I am pleased that Kent Police has apologised to him and removed the caution from his record."
This is bad, but corrective action was taken. You can look through the news in pretty much any country and find some examples of the police abusing their power or arresting people for stupid reasons. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t bad or that it’s not worth drawing attention to. But cherry picking these kinds of incidents can give people outside the UK a deeply misleading picture of what life is actually like here (see e.g. the green account posting elsewhere in this thread for one example).
I explicitly said that the UK wasn't free of issues: my pointing out the US was worse wasn't defending our own, simply making the point that some Americans tend to massively exaggerate the UK's issues while pretending the US doesn't have any.
Average people from the UK are going to assume that any pushback on speech controls is nutters if the message comes with absurd exaggerations and outright lies. There are legitimate cases of overreach from our legal system, but too often the focus is on someone actively calling for violence, and those are not the same.
Hmm, to me that comment is clearly making a comparison between the US and the UK and suggesting that the UK is in a worse position with regard to freedom of expression (“from across the pond”).
Many of us are well aware of what’s happening in the US, and also deeply concerned by what we see abroad.
The comment that started this subthread gave no indication that they were unaware of the state of things in the US…you’re arguing against people and behavior that might be real but doesn’t exist in the comment in question.
In the US, you have people being literally grabbed off the street and sent to foreign prisons because of their speech with no due process, but the UK is the one close to a loss of freedom of speech because checks notes you can be convicted in a court of law for actively calling for people to burn down hotels full of immigrants during riots.
This isn't new, of course, I remember some time back I was being told how white people couldn't go into Leicester... while I, a white man, attended University in Leicester.
The UK definitely has issues, even ones related to expression, but generally it's a very free place that does pretty well with respect to it. The US is in a much more dangerous place for freedom of expression right now.