Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

text.npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 693 posts

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#161

Post by rhacker »

kazinator wrote: post #75
dijit wrote: post #9

They aren’t being arrested for being anti-monarchy though. They are being arrested for being rude about it. Was the fella on radio 4 who stated to the entire nation that ‘King Charles and his family should be put in a council house and that the Monarchy should be abolished’ arrested? No. If you are going to attend a funeral, any funeral, be it the Queen’s or anyone else’s and hurl abuse or hold up signs with obscenit…

Police are looking for barrister Paul Powlesland who held up a blank sign and only said we was going to write "not my king" on it: https://twitter.com/paulpowlesland/status/156935177260655002... Or, more precisely, he was going around with this blank sign, asking officers whether he would be arrested if he were to write that on the blank paper, according to the account here: https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/man-said-…

I was looking at various other twitter posts about russians holding up blank signs too. I guess that's "Quiet Protesting".

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#162

Post by ysavir »

matthewh806 wrote: post #109
dijit wrote: post #9

They aren’t being arrested for being anti-monarchy though. They are being arrested for being rude about it. Was the fella on radio 4 who stated to the entire nation that ‘King Charles and his family should be put in a council house and that the Monarchy should be abolished’ arrested? No. If you are going to attend a funeral, any funeral, be it the Queen’s or anyone else’s and hurl abuse or hold up signs with obscenit…

I see this exact same comment did pretty well on Reddit too: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/xckw5v/comme... 1. Not all of the arrests have been made at a "funeral" 2. It wasn't a funeral 3. If you're going to have a very public precession, parading a body through the streets with all the obedients lapping it up, surely you have to have a level of tolerance for dissenting voices? I imagine the disrupt…

> surely you have to have a level of tolerance for dissenting voices?

To the procession or the monarchy? If you say the procession, sure. If you're talking about dissenting voices against the monarchy, I think that can be done without disrupting a memorial service.

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#163

Post by pharmakom »

prvc wrote: post #141
dijit wrote: post #9

They aren’t being arrested for being anti-monarchy though. They are being arrested for being rude about it. Was the fella on radio 4 who stated to the entire nation that ‘King Charles and his family should be put in a council house and that the Monarchy should be abolished’ arrested? No. If you are going to attend a funeral, any funeral, be it the Queen’s or anyone else’s and hurl abuse or hold up signs with obscenit…

Worth noting that currently, most UK arrests over "offense-giving" (which are increasingly common) are done on behalf of precisely those grievance-based identity groups which anti-monarchists support.

Huh? What does republicanism have to do with identity politics?

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#164

Post by rtpg »

munk-a wrote: post #148
bjourne wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The queen was a public figure whose lavish livelihood were paid for by British tax-payers. So it seems to me that British people should have the right to celebrate her death in any way they please. Curtailing people's freedom of speech by misusing public order laws (the queen's funeral is not comparable to any normal funeral) is curtailing freedom of speech.

This is actually an incredibly false point. The royal family (if treated like anonymous land-owners) would cause a sudden and drastic drop in fundraising within the UK. Assuming their property wasn't seized having them retain their current station is actually a net positive to the British tax-payers - they lose far more potential income each year in free land leases and charitable donations (known collectively as the…

I mean… why would the royal family be allowed to “keep” anything in an abolished monarchy? Obviously you should just seize roughly all the property. It’s a product of the State, not the royal family working hard

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#165

Post by wutbrodo »

gambiting wrote: post #102
alasdair_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They arrested a person for making a video of his dog doing nazi salutes. It's not that the royal family is singularly fragile about being upset by other peoples' expression, the whole of the UK is like that. And yet at the same time one of the biggest movies in the cinema was a Nazi spoof comedy with jokes in far poorer taste. But the movie producers have money.

That's like complaining that you will get arrested for having sex in the middle of the street, but sex in a film is somehow fine(surely it's because movie producers have money and are in cahoots with the government, and not for any other, more logical reason, like the fact that art forms, no matter how poor in taste, are protected by society).

In what legal sense is the YouTuber with the pug less protected by the "art form" argument than the movie production? Did the latter get a permit for Nazi jokes? (Sincere question, maybe they did: UK speech norms and laws are incredibly alien to me)

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#166

Post by jjgreen »

account-5 wrote: post #78
mytailorisrich wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Oxford someone was arrested for shouting " who elected him " during the proclamation of the new king so it's not just about respecting a funeral (which is understable) or unacceptable language. But in fairness to the police there seems to be a mass fervour at the moment and they may actually be doing the hecklers a service by taking them away for their own safety...

And then de-arrested.

That arrest can still see you barred from certain jobs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29784497

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#167

Post by lucb1e »

seydor wrote: post #132
bawolff wrote: post #47

Im totally A-ok with arresting people disrupting a funeral. Like sessh. These are people too. Let them have a funeral, you can protest them afterwards.

12 days funeral is not 'a funeral'

It's a bit different when an unholy amount of people show up for it, compared to some regular 'a funeral'

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#168

Post by wutbrodo »

dTal wrote: post #139
dijit wrote: post #9

They aren’t being arrested for being anti-monarchy though. They are being arrested for being rude about it. Was the fella on radio 4 who stated to the entire nation that ‘King Charles and his family should be put in a council house and that the Monarchy should be abolished’ arrested? No. If you are going to attend a funeral, any funeral, be it the Queen’s or anyone else’s and hurl abuse or hold up signs with obscenit…

Really. A woman who held an “abolish monarchy” sign at a proclamation ceremony for King Charles III in Edinburgh has now been charged with a criminal offence. That's not a funeral, nor was her political statement rude.

She also had a "fuck imperialism" sign, and was outside of the cathedral in which QEII's body was lying. Cultures that are more fragile wrt speech norms may object to that.

A better example is the man calling out "who elected him" to the proclamation of Charles III, at a ceremony that had as little as possible to do with funerary rites while still dealing with her son's ascension.

The better example is

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#169

Post by blibble »

rtpg wrote: post #164
munk-a wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually an incredibly false point. The royal family (if treated like anonymous land-owners) would cause a sudden and drastic drop in fundraising within the UK. Assuming their property wasn't seized having them retain their current station is actually a net positive to the British tax-payers - they lose far more potential income each year in free land leases and charitable donations (known collectively as the…

I mean… why would the royal family be allowed to “keep” anything in an abolished monarchy? Obviously you should just seize roughly all the property. It’s a product of the State, not the royal family working hard

if the government tried it they'd take it to judicial review

and they'd win

Re: Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows

#170

Post by Vecr »

heavyset_go wrote: post #133
mwint wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USAian here: > Protests should be allowed They are. > destroying public property Is illegal and you can be arrested for it. > advocating violence or hate Is illegal and you can be arrested for it. You just can’t be arrested for “being rude”. You have to commit a crime. Protesting does not mean you’re immune to prosecution for non-free-speech crimes. What happened with the BLM riots was simply governments deciding, fo…

> > advocating violence or hate > Is illegal and you can be arrested for it. This is untrue. Immediate, direct, actionable threats are illegal, saying "I/we/you need to go hunt down and murder X now" can be construed as an actionable threat. Extolling the virtues of murder and opining about how nice it would be if someone finally hunted down and killed X is legal free speech. You can talk about how X needs to die all…

This is correct, I'm not sure why it's being down-voted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
Post reply on HN