Ymx wrote: Sun Nov 12, 2023 6:56 pm
Good on her if true !!
It's clearly what she wants to do and she's a very stupid person so it's not surprising she wants to do that.
The pro-Palestine protests have happened multiple times and are extremely large, in total more than a million people have protested and the amount of disorder looks to be completely minimal. The right wing counter protest has happened once, was at most 1k people, and involved storming the Cenotaph, fighting with police at the Cenotaph and in Soho, and intimidating/assaulting the public in a train station. One protest is 99%+ peaceful, the other is mostly violent.
What this is about is shutting down opinions the government doesn't like. The Tories have brought in numerous anti-free speech and anti-protest laws to that end.
But what do they think is going to happen when Labour are in power? Labour have already said they're repealing none of the legislation, it would take up too much parliamentary time and the famous unwritten constitution works by brining in new legislation to supersede the old legislation. None of this will be a priority.
New Labour give an idea of what will happen. They left the Thatcher era anti-protest laws in place, just as all the post-2010 authoritarian Tory laws will be left in place. The full weight of those laws will then be directed at the right wing. You will not be able to protest against anything surrounding migration/race/religion without the risk of severe punishment. To give an idea of what that means, there's climate change protestors that have been jailed for half a year awaiting trial, and others that have been sentenced to 5 years. It'll partly be ideological but mostly it'll be technocratic, the Labour right/New Labour position is that for the most part the structure of the UK is fine it just needs proper management, stomping on anything right of the Tories will be part of that better management. It's an open secret that Starmer's chief of staff is a spook, there's some other spooky people knocking about, expect odd things to start happening similar to what happened under New Labour, like the entire membership list of right wing organisations with full names and addresses being leaked into the public. You'll be able to be a member of "Random Anti-Muslim Group", but you'll have to be okay with maybe every Islamist and anti-fascist knowing where your family lives.
Banning speech/protests you disagree with after minimal disorder, is an interesting precedent. No one will regret that 5 or 10 years into a Labour government that aren't morons and actually try to use the law, rather than fighting the law or making extreme new laws as a flex to look tough for one news cycle.
