Not the MET, the UK government. The MET are just enforcing the law the UK gov enacted, regardless of whether you like the MET or not they didn't suddenly decide to attack the right to protest.
Not quite. Technically, the MET is operationally independent from the government. They asked for additional powers to curb groups that were taking disruptive means (like gluing themselves to roads), and the government gave that to them through the change in the law.
Now, whether there are backchannels on this for the coronation is a different matter...
>The day [20 April] usually draws in huge crowds of Marijuana aficionados with attendees in the realm of 11,000 people.
>Cannabis is a Class B drug in the UK, meaning there is the possibility a five-year prison sentence if you are caught in possession of the drug.
>In what countries is weed legal?
>While medicinal cannabis was made legal in the UK in 2018, it is still illegal to use it recreationally.
>If you are caught growing Marijuana, you can face up to 14 years in prison, an unlimited fine or both.
> The MET are just enforcing the law the UK gov enacted
The police as an institution always also has their own influence on politics. And if there is one thing police across the world wants, it's to get rid of protests.
The role of the Australian Government in doing absolutely nothing to help an Australian whose human rights are being trampled is telling about the structure and priorities of Western power...
... and how "Eastern" it's starting to look.
Freedom, along with a whole lot other words, doesn't mean what it used to mean.
Yes and no. What they decide to enforce is largely political. They won’t get away with ignoring things the Home Secretary wants enforced for very long before some chief is called in to a meeting in which they perspire heavily.
These laws in general may qualify but specifically is it really fascist not to tolerate protest of the coronation in a monarchy? It isn't fascist just to have rules.
Read up on how fascist regimes centralize power, arresting people who object was and is a major aspect of it. By outlawing decent you eventually normalize support for your regime such that even people who despise what’s going on are eventually unwilling to say so.
They may have gotten external damnation for it, but China’s cracking down on protests worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... What seems counterintuitive is the CCP still makes it very clear you’re not allowed to talk about it because they want people to live in fear. Thus, they very much want people to know and not talk about it.
Earlier forms of authoritarianism like absolute monarchy didn’t necessarily include those elements.
Fascist political movements/governments however pioneered them. Thus they techniques are labeled fascist even if they where quickly adopted by communist countries etc.
I'm not seeing how fascism can be said to have pioneered them, concepts of lese majeste - which, for a monarchy is essentially equivalent to the crime of dissenting against the government - have existed for centuries all over the world.
As to timing, it’s the same technological developments which resulted in large companies becoming common and being linked to government for the first time with new options for governmental control.
Radio, telegraph, calculators/computers, and trains allowed for much larger a more homogeneous organizations. The Hitler Youth for example didn’t have similar parallels in the 1800’s and before.
At the same time individuals became less useful to the state. Large prison populations are really expensive in terms of guards and lost productivity. Similarly execution means removing potentially productive people. Historically, only a small number of people within a society would get made examples of until industrialization increased productivity to the point where states could suddenly afford to have secret police capturing large percentages of the population.
> Earlier forms of authoritarianism like absolute monarchy didn’t necessarily include those elements.
Mostly because the technology and bureaucratic mechanisms were not yet sufficiently developed to implement it. It's not as though kings wielding absolute power, ostensibly justified by their god, were champions of liberalism. Maybe a handful liked to think of themselves as liberal humanists, but that was just vanity. More often, these kings had every inclination to be an overt absolute tyrant but simply lacked the technical and organizational means to control large populations in the ways which were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I absolutely agree. Calling such things Modern Authoritarian Practices is more descriptive but it’s simply not what caught on making the meaning less clear.
Calling internet censorship etc fascist is a natural evolution of things, but IMO somewhat dilutes the idea. Creating an out group and book burning are part of the playbook, but public spaces have always had some regulations.
Possibly the early stages of fascism? Something to do with neoliberalism? To me it's more of a shift to authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism equates dissent with violence [1]. And here in the UK we have the "Prevent programme" where people who dissent against the prevailing political opinions can be labelled "extremists" even though they have not done anything illegal [2]. Which is very, very concerning. The laws relating to this were passed in 2015.
I fear that those who complain about the restrictions on freedom of speech and erosion of civil liberties in general, here in the UK, could be considered "extremists" by this government and subjected to Prevent related surveillance by intelligence agencies such as GCHQ.
It's very strange to me how one day 15 or 20 years ago, everything bad in the world was suddenly fascist. Before that time, there was at least this pervasive assumption that something could be bad or undesirable while not wearing jackboots.
And then a switch flipped.
In every government which abuses its people, arresting dissidents was the first resort of the dictators and autocrats.
It’s much older than that, and an outgrowth of both propaganda and the degree to which those governments really did pioneer various methods of social control. This may have simply been timing. The widespread adoption of radio and movies suddenly made it a lot easier to influence society.
Beyond that they really just took things much further, it’s hard to find direct parallels to the scale and influence on society of say the Hitler Youth in the 1800’s or before.
History is full of dictators and political purges, but before this they focused on those with actual power.
Something interesting here is whether your right to protest extends to being paid to protest. If it can be shown an NGO is paying you to engage in a disruptive protest, are you really exercising some kind of human right? IDK, that seems new. It doesn't strike me as being in the spirit of the protected right.
Free choice of employment is article 23.1 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
> Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work
Not really relevant. A plumber may have the human right to work (granting such a thing makes any sense for arguments sake), but if someone pays him to cut off the water supply to a neighbourhood, he can hardly defend himself by invoking that right. Someone who is paid to agitate---I dont know if they can then invoke the human right to protest. Is that really in the spirit of law?
Centralizing power and arresting people who cause a disruption isn’t especially characteristic of fascism. China is a communist country, not fascist. You’re deeply confused.
I agree that fascism is much more specific than how most folks use it, but as a tangent I would argue that China is no longer Communist (with Chinese characteristics) and instead transitioned to Fascism after the death of Mao.
China is not just nationalist but often racist, two characteristics of Fascism but not Communism (which is internationalist and egalitarian). China pushes a market economy under strict government control, creating three legs of Workers, Business Leaders and Government, a facet of Fascism; this is contrasted with the single leg of Communism where everyone is a Worker.
Regardless of whether they're Communist™ or Fascist™, the Chinese government is brutal to its people and often threatens (former) citizens abroad with harm to family members in the PRC. The label is less important than recognizing what they're doing.
“a person who is dictatorial or has extreme right-wing views.” Not the OR is intended as either applies rather than an AND where someone must also have extreme right wing view.
This is in reference to specific kinds of activities not the overall political system. People will call unusually restrictive librarians fascist. It’s just how languages evolve over time.
Do you actually think preventing disruptions to the coronation is an indication the British government is becoming Fascist? Fascism has other attributes. Is there a dictatorial power emerging in Britain? Is there an increase in militarism? Is there even a right wing government (no)? Is the government expressing ideas of a natural social hierarchy (no...some of the opposition may be). Whatever is going on, fascism is not the right word.
They didn't prevent "disruptions" they prevented peaceful protests (non-disruptive).
I've seen messages online heralding how great it is that everyone loves the king, their evidence being the BBC had no news of any dissent, and there was no evidence of dissent on the ground.
The reality is police arrested people for planning peaceful protests, and the BBC provided their usual biased reporting.
> 1. a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
> 2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
The current Uk government has introduced laws to limit protest as described in this topic; it's also looking to limit the right to strike (ref. current health service pay disputes). Both are consistent with the definition above.
Where is the dictator or "autocrat"? It doesn't meet either definition at all. I am not here to defend these laws in general, but I don't think ensuring no disruptions to the coronation has much to do with them (they used them against maybe 6 people and didnt even charge all of them?). And I don't think it is indicative of anything like fascism. It might be indicative of something else bad that is happening in the UK political body.
Really? If Charles suddenly issued an order, "seize @trasz4, take him/her to the Tower of London, and chop off his head," do you seriously think anyone in the UK would obey him? More likely Parliament would start the process of declaring him to be Mad King Charles and appointing William as Prince Regent in his place.
¨Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki ... was an American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a US government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first US citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government.¨
He was a terrorist but he still had rights. And then there was the murder of his non-combatant son who was "collateral damage" from a drone strike on a restaurant:
¨Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki ... was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen by a drone airstrike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama on October 14, 2011.
...
¨Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son was there" before the airstrike was ordered.[8] When pressed by a reporter to defend the targeted killing policy that resulted in Abdulrahman al-Awlaki's death, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs deflected blame to the victim's father: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don't think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."¨
Joe Biden could do this and get away with it. Arguably Obama did, as stated above---there might be better examples. If Charles tried, no one would probably listen, and even if he did, once word got out it would probably actually be the end of the monarchy. Charles is not a dictator, autocrat or anything else. And in fact the US president, though elected, is much further along the spectrum towards autocrat than the British monarch. Many actual autocrats are in fact elected, so this distinction isn't really important anyway.
Banning the types of peaceful protests allowed based on the content of their message is deeply fascist.
The British government is seriously leaning into censorship, surveillance, and nationalism which is a very dangerous combination. They have even vilified an out group namely immigrants and cracked down on decent. Add in propaganda with strong ties between the government and large private companies really does make me nervous, though I am not expecting things to devolve very quickly the historic left/right divide isn’t particularly important here.
No, it's not fascist. What the anti-monarchists failed to mention is that the protestors were not arrested because they were protesting, they were arrested under suspicion of attempting to lock-on[1] but were later released without charges because of a lack of evidence. There is a debate to be had about what a peaceful protest is but frequently people use the right to disrupt other people's lives such as blocking roads. I don't think there should be a human right that can deny other people the right to use public roads and paths. That would deny others the right to protest peacefully also.
A real monarchy with absolute power is a facist state by today's standards.
Like you literally didn't have any rights and could be killed on the whim of a noble. Even Magna Carta didn't grabt any rights to peasants and riffraff. The times before it were even more tyranical
Is your post written in jest? Nobles could not "literally" kill peasants on a whim. This is a preposterous claim. The nobility had a duty to protect the peasants on their land and they were bound by various general and specific moral duties toward them. Whatever the faults of the people and arrangements of that era, what you've written is a caricature, like something pulled out of the stockpile of slanderous nonsense that appeared in Enlightenment pamphlets and other rags.
While they are exaggerating robber knights were a total thing where two nobles feuding would rob/kill each others peasants as part of it. Different times and places might have rules against it, the Holy Roman Empire very famously outlawed it but actual enforcement on the ground was minimal because there is nobody around to actually enforce those decrees. This isn't going into actual wartime conflicts at all in which case mass murder of non combatants was absolutely a common thing that was essentially sanctioned.
OP clearly meant "fascist" as a shorthand for "extremely authoritarian and non-democratic", which is a common colloquial usage.
But yes, fascism typically includes an appeal to a (imagined) past glory, a close collaboration between corporations and the state, a designated enemy who is both weak enough to be an easy target and strong enough to pose an existential threat and an empowerment of the military and police force. This list doesn't cover most monarchies by any stretch of the imagination even though there are obvious overlaps.
EDIT: I also think it's simplistic to call fascism an ideology as even the historical examples share as many differences as similarities when analyzed as ideologies. I think it's more accurate to call it a strategy or mechanism, or maybe a meta-ideology. There is no "fascist economic model" for example. It's goal is to bring about a social hierarchy through the use of excessive force and typically waves of ever-expanding mass killings of undesirables. It needs an other to eliminate to maintain itself, making it inherently self-destructive.
I think the most accurate description I've seen of fascism is as an "immune system of capitalism" or "capitalism in crisis": it primarily kills the weak, those unable to work, those unwilling to work and those posing a direct or indirect threat to the social order required to maintain the owner-worker hierarchy (e.g. trade unions, socialists, even progressives) and when it eventually collapses, is overthrown or fades away, it reinstates a liberal market economy (i.e. capitalism) while having mostly maintained the power of those that were previously wealthy or were even able to expand their wealth through collaboration.
People use "literally" to mean "figuratively", as well. It doesn't help discussion to allow the blurring of distinctions.
In the context of this thread, there seems to be the implication that the new laws the UN is objecting to have something to do with the arrests of protestors. After some digging, I can't find evidence that more than a few people (6) were arrested under that law (which generally seems rather bad)? And these people weren't even all charged? It seems to centre around the claimed possession of devices to lock themselves to things in public. Arresting a handful of people you think are maybe going to chain themselves to infrastructure to disrupt an internationally important event---maybe the government didnt act the best here but this hardly seems indicative of a great threat to human rights or a rise of fascism in the UK. I would personally worry more about airport security.
One of the main characteristics of fascism is forcible supression of opposition so I think a government that doesn't tolerate peaceful protest is in some sense fascist
Doing one thing that fascist government's sometimes do does not make you a fascist government. The UK might be tending toward fascism, but not allowing disruptive protests of the coronation is not really an indicator one way or the other. The king is certainly not a dictator, having little power at all.
Well, the death penalty was abolished in the U.K. in the 1990s, so there's that. More significant: habeus corpus, which goes back to somewhere between the Magna Carta and Interregnum.
Even at its height, the Crown's power to unilaterally command executions was intentionally curtailed for centuries.
So like: sure the attacker stabbed someone, beat them with a baseball bat, punched and kicked them, but the attacker didn't use a gun so it wasn't violent.
The king has no power, that's why he's able to easily bend the national broadcaster and the police force to his will with ease ... that's why we have to get his consent to pass any laws ... that's why the armed services pledge allegiance to him (as monarch) and not to the UK ... that's why we pay him 100s of £millions from taxes ... that's why we organise a hugely costly parade for him in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis ... these are all signs he has no power /s
This is basic vocabulary. “Violence” is a word that encompasses a range of actions. “Fascism” is a word that refers to a specific political ideology combining various elements.
That’s like saying that having four limbs is a major characteristic of mammals so anything with four limbs is kind of a mammal. Many governments of different forms don’t generate protest. For example, in both theory and in practice, suppression of protest is entirely compatible with democracy. In a democratic country with high social cohesion, like Singapore, protest is often a disgruntled minority trying to undermine the democratic will.
"Democracy" is more general term than "liberal democracy", the latter includes protecting political freedoms. Suppressing protests because majority wants to is democratic, but it is not liberal democratic.
Liberal democracy is a check on the possible dangerous consequences of full naive democracy.
Only if you think protesting is a “political freedom” and I think that’s debatable even in the context of liberal democracy. A minoritarian veto is anti-democratic, no matter what prefix you put on that term.
Does the UK have rules against protesting the coronation of the monarchy? Are they following them? Or are they bending/breaking the rules to shut down the protests, to avoid making the new monarch look bad?
Breaking the rules to prohibit protest in one specific case may not be fascist, but it isn't the rule of law...
At the coronation of William the Conqueror the soldiers were really nervous, no one was sure how people would react to William's coronation for a variety of reasons. There was a large crowd outside the church. At a certain point in the ceremony was the acclamation where the people are asked if they accept the king. This was asked in French, then English. Somehow the Norman soldiers got confused at this point and thought this was a start of a riot and began to attack the crowd and set some houses on fire. Some of the more enterprising Norman soldiers took the opportunity to loot nearby houses. The ceremony fairly abruptly ended at that point with no one inside being sure what was going on.
So I guess the MET can point to that as an example of historical precedent and how they handled themselves with relative restraint.
There is also not a really deep right to protest in British law. The right to protest comes from their signing the European convention on human rights (they have some law called Human Rights Act). It is not enshrined fundamentally as in the United States afaik.
Police does not hold any discretionary powers on whether to enforce a law. In a functional State, Police is a subordinate of the executive branch, not it's willing accomplice. It can't enforce laws it deems "ok" and turn a blind eye on those it deems "meh".
Police absolutely have discretionary powers; it would be logically incompatible for them to not have such powers.
They have a chain of command, and at each level decide where to focus their efforts (guided by existing laws, to be sure). Patrol routes are chosen, dispatchers must (effectively) triage calls, and officers make decisions like whether to assess a warning or a citation.
But that is not true, most countries have what is called prosecutorial discretion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_discretion
The police can, for the most part, decide whether or not to enforce laws. They can also choose not to investigate certain crimes as they simply don't have the time to look into absolutely everything.
Furthermore, if police had to literally enforced every law on the books to the letter, they would not be able to drive or walk down the street without having to arrest people constantly.
I sometimes wonder if this would be a net benefit in the long term. My hunch is that after a week or two of people being constantly arrested, and the accompanying collapse of society, there’d be a push to repeal laws that aren’t relevant anymore and revise those that were overly broad.
Yeah I agree, its kind of silly that we allow ancient irrelevant and overly broad laws to stay on the books, especially in most societies that ignorance of the law is not an excuse. For example, in Canada, the police can issue a DUI if you have a BAC exceeding the limit for driving up to 2 hours after you have parked your car. If they literally went to every bar and drinking establishment (or door to door) and enforced that to the letter, it would be changed in quite a hurry.
> Furthermore, if police had to literally enforced every law on the books to the letter, they would not be able to drive or walk down the street without having to arrest people constantly.
It sounds to me that addressing that problem at the enforcement level, as opposed to the legislative level, is the wrong place to address it.
And yet, this happens literally every day. Many individual officers, if not entire forces, have effectively stopped enforcing marijuana posession laws. If that happens, why not refuse to enforce fascist anti-protest laws?
If that were literally true, then the police would arrest everyone who goes even a mile over the speed limit. Everyone who throws out junk mail addressed to a previous renter.[1] Etc.
So there is definitely at least some sense in which the police have discretion. The question is when and how much.
[1] I don't actually know if that's illegal in the UK; in the US it's a federal offense.
I think it's a little silly people pointing to the extremely limited "discretion" police have and saying they should have used it to ignore the law. That's not how police discretion works and in modern policing it hardly exists alongside it's counterpoint which is : neglect of duty.
Policing is not a job I'd want to do. Damned if you do, damned if you don't; and everyone knows how to do it better than the people actually doing it. But those people given the chance wouldn't do any better.
