Britain's police are restricting speech in worrying ways

I appreciate the hostile tone, very in vogue, but no, what I'm saying is that this...

> THE POLICE arrived at Maxie Allen’s door at midday on January 29th. None of the six officers seemed to know much about why they were there, recalls Mr Allen. But they read out a list of charges and searched the house, before arresting him and his partner and taking them to the police station, where they were held for eight hours. The couple’s alleged crime? Disparaging emails and WhatsApp messages about their daughter’s primary school.

...is a lot more vague and less compelling than what you drew up here.

Namely it doesn't mention:

- that these people are journalists

- that they were criticizing their daughter's primary school's handling of her disabilities

- how exactly were they criticizing it and to what audience

- any links to any of the court documents for people to inspect, to support these

Am I supposed to conjure up these details from thin air or something? I'm not from the UK, this is not a story I was familiar with. Literally all the article had to say in the way of the arbitrariness and vagueness of this case was:

> At one point during his questioning Mr Allen’s partner asked for an example of a WhatsApp message that constituted “malicious communication”. The detective had to stop and Google the crime.

Which sounds crappy enough, but then this is pretty on par for cops to begin with in my impression, topic nonwithstanding. So yeah, not very compelling.

> you think this isn't worrying, isn't arbitrary,

Correct, what was written in the article isn't particularly worrying at all, nor does it do a particularly good job of demonstrating the arbitrariness. That's exactly what I said.

> and doesn't hint that the standards set out in those laws are vague?

Law is written in natural language, imposing rules over things in the natural world. It will never not be vague, and it cannot in good conscience afford to not be vague either. It could be specific in some ways I'm sure, at the cost of effectiveness as usual, but the article doesn't exactly support or detail this idea much, by virtue of not saying anything more specific. Which is what I was talking about.

this is very important context

No-one voted for this. The police in the UK are using a combination of existing powers (for example, intimidating people by using their powers to question people), non-statutory instruments that politicians have told them repeatedly to stop using, and laws that are being applied to the online world in an expansive way (the current PM is the former head of government prosecutions so is basically the worst person possible to prevent this, the person who passed one of the most infamous laws, Tony Blair, has said it is problematic).

Just generally, this model doesn't apply to the UK. There is an extremely long history of people voting one way and the government doing something else. This is because the country is led by people whose views are shared by no-one, and the tremendous power of the Civil Service (elected officials have limited powers to direct civil servants and cannot remove all but a handful of civil servants...there was an example recently of a senior civil servant giving incorrect information to a minister, the minister was forced to resign, that senior civil servant stayed in for several years, another minister attempted to remove them, the civil servant sued and won a substantial settlement then chose to retire early on a full pension...he was responsible for several massive issues in his department too, Windrush was one, there were many others).

A more nefarious factor is that turnout has collapsed because voters, correctly, understand that their vote doesn't actually matter. The government is unable to do things so why bother voting. Turnout is significantly higher in Russia presidential elections.

To give you an example, the current level of immigration is supported by ~3% of the population. No-one supports this. The government knows no-one supports this. Immigration has stayed high for multiple years, we have had elections, it doesn't matter. If we elected someone to fix it, they would be unable to fix it. Labour have tried to fix it...they spent years in opposition saying the Tories couldn't fix it with their policies...they get into government, within a year they are now trying the exact same policies...because Parliament has no real control, whether in theory or in reality, to change anything, the government gets in, the civil service present the same choices that won't work...you have to be actually mad to think voting makes a difference. The idea that you can fix things by voting is the reason why things are stagnating.

Illiberal democracies are also democracies if we treat 1950s era US, Australia, UK, and Canada as democracies.

Much of the Western world only saw a shift to Liberal Democracy (as in the enshrinement of civil liberties and limits to majoritarianism) in the 1960s to 1990s.

Liberal Democracy can be protected only if it's norms are enshrined in jurisprudence, and a lot of Liberal Democracies like the UK didn't do so.

> And the second goes for the people affected by the muddled laws too, who have way more discretion than the police.

Are you arguing that the fault for being on the wrong side of the powerful lies with the people who could have just decided not to be on the wrong side of the powerful?

We're discussing here laws where someone, whether the police or some other authority figure, is going to be deciding whether you're subject to them based not on plain and objective facts, but on subjective criteria - which inevitably, and unaccountably, will include your other activities. They're designed to offer a fig leaf so that you can be prosecuted for something whose punishment is comparatively palatable, without having to acknowledge the actual cause for offense.

Of course one can argue whether any particular law falls in this category, but I think it's difficult to argue that the designed consequences of such laws are the fault of the person subject to them.