A 22-year-old woman will face charges for holding up a sign that said “fuck imperialism,” while a man was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police van for asking who elected King Charles III.
A law that means if the police just feel like something you’re doing may cause distress or offence to a hypothetical person then you’ve committed a crime. There doesn’t even have to be a complaint.
yeah this is literal police state shit. it is completely ignoring even the flimsiest pretense of rule of law, delegating the power to infringe one of the most basic civil rights to the truncheon-wielding legbreaker pigdogs of capital. now don't get me wrong, i don't believe in all of that liberal hogwash anyway, but it used to be that western states at least tried to keep up a facade of being "the free world." These were ofc purely bourgeois freedoms that were only upheld as long as you didn't threaten the societal distribution of wealth and the dictatorship of capital. But even that is too much of a hassle for the ruling class now. one guy holding up a sign or yelling slogans doesn't threaten anything. it is fucking nothing. the royals do not have to give a flying fuck about one rando in a crowd of tens of thousands of avid cowtowing monarchoids, but no. not the tiniest bit of dissent is tolerated. questioning the west's genocidal imperialism was never something the ruling class was happy about, but it is being turned more and more into a completely taboo subject. If things go on like this, literal holocaust denial will soon be more acceptable than mentioning the crimes the british crown committed in Africa.
The oppression and lack of bourgeois freedoms that targeted minorities and actual threats to the establishment already felt is getting rolled out wholesale. And the comfortable middle class whites are still treating each example of it happening to someone like them at a Royal event or a climate demo as an isolated incident of overreach because they're too comfortable to notice that their relationship with the state is changing.
Britain has never been the liberal, diverse opinionated, marketplace of ideas that it has pretended to be. But in the last 20 years or so we've gone from protest and non-state sanctioned opinion being tolerated but ridiculed, to actively suppressed and punished, and now the establishment treats anything less than fawning praise and respect as a criminal and traitorous act.
yeah this is literal police state shit. it is completely ignoring even the flimsiest pretense of rule of law, delegating the power to infringe one of the most basic civil rights to the truncheon-wielding legbreaker pigdogs of capital. now don't get me wrong, i don't believe in all of that liberal hogwash anyway, but it used to be that western states at least tried to keep up a facade of being "the free world." These were ofc purely bourgeois freedoms that were only upheld as long as you didn't threaten the societal distribution of wealth and the dictatorship of capital. But even that is too much of a hassle for the ruling class now. one guy holding up a sign or yelling slogans doesn't threaten anything. it is fucking nothing. the royals do not have to give a flying fuck about one rando in a crowd of tens of thousands of avid cowtowing monarchoids, but no. not the tiniest bit of dissent is tolerated. questioning the west's genocidal imperialism was never something the ruling class was happy about, but it is being turned more and more into a completely taboo subject. If things go on like this, literal holocaust denial will soon be more acceptable than mentioning the crimes the british crown committed in Africa.
Couldn't agree with this more.
The oppression and lack of bourgeois freedoms that targeted minorities and actual threats to the establishment already felt is getting rolled out wholesale. And the comfortable middle class whites are still treating each example of it happening to someone like them at a Royal event or a climate demo as an isolated incident of overreach because they're too comfortable to notice that their relationship with the state is changing.
Britain has never been the liberal, diverse opinionated, marketplace of ideas that it has pretended to be. But in the last 20 years or so we've gone from protest and non-state sanctioned opinion being tolerated but ridiculed, to actively suppressed and punished, and now the establishment treats anything less than fawning praise and respect as a criminal and traitorous act.