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This is how you govern from a position of unpopularity. The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an
by spacebanana7 9mo ago
This is how you govern from a position of unpopularity.
The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an open debate.
So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.
- varispeed 9mo agoAlso never look at what current government is going to do with the framework, but what future much worse government could use it for.
- miroljub 9mo agoDoes it get worse? They are making a benchmark that is hard to beat.
- c0n5pir4cy 9mo agoI wouldn't like to see all the legal infrastructure they're putting in under a Reform UK government - I'd imagine they'll use it for far more nefarious means. That being said - the blame lies squarely with Labour here. I have a gut feel a lot of it has to do with donors to the Tony Blair Institute.
- miroljub 9mo agoWell World Economic Forum (WEF) lists Tony Blair and his institute as one of the top Agenda contributors [1]. It's not even funny that you can trace almost any person responsible for the deterioration of human rights in Western society to one of the WEF alumni or associates. These supernatural institutions and interest groups should be made illegal if we want to continue as a civilization. [1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/tony-blair-2/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/tony-blair-2/
- exe34 9mo agoThey need to, at the very least, obey the prevailing laws of physics.
- owisd 9mo agoThey’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019 https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019
- iamnothere 9mo agoWhich can be undone by another single act of your “sovereign” Parliament. Acts like this must be understood in that context.
- squidbeak 9mo agoBy this logic, governments shouldn't legislate anything or have any kind of policy. Child benefit? Scrap it in case King Herod takes over and has an ready made hit list.
- owisd 9mo agoThis works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the same abusable laws.
- varispeed 9mo agoIt's not always easy. If they don't have large majority, some with a bit of conscience might go against the party.
- ActorNightly 9mo agoMan, its like everyone is blind to the current state of things. Here is the truth: * Everyone with above sentiment always votes for anyone libertarian, which is necessarily conservative, and all conservatives are pretty much liars. * These same conservatives that champion against government overreach, for law and order, and for personal freedoms do the exact opposite once they get into office. Nor do they give a shit about the law. So yea, the whole libertarian ideology is pretty much dead. Its pretty obvious that the best course of action is to sacrifice personal freedoms and elect a government that can keep a tight rein over the populace and keep things like Nazi ideology from spreading.
- iamnothere 9mo agoTotalitarianism has the same end state whether it comes from the left or the right. It always results in suppression of the truth, broken feedback loops that lead to poor decisions by government, economic failure, and finally either bloody repression, war, or revolution. It’s possible to move through this to a place of stability. After all, China only had to kill 15-55 million people in the Great Leap Forward and a couple thousand more in 1989. Today they are fairly stable and prosperous, even with tight controls on information. Perhaps the UK will have a similar path!
- ActorNightly 9mo agoBoth extreme leftism and extreme rightism are composed of the same people - more focused on ideology rather than truth, and authoritarian control rather than voice of reason. In the middle, there is an acceptable range of compromise. Social media is the new town square. People shouldn't be able to post stuff on there without recourse for lying and spreading misinformation, just like they shouldn't be able to do this in public. History shows that this leads to bad outcomes. Also, history also shows that we can't just have personal freedoms unrestricted. And just because that "freedom" is being taken away, doesn't mean that the leftists are in charge.
- iamnothere 9mo agoHistorically, at least in the US, people are indeed explicitly allowed to lie or spread misinformation in the town square. This is specifically allowed by the first amendment and backed by court cases. Your mention of the “town square” here is interesting, as Marsh v. Alabama and Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins both center around this idea. In both cases the Supreme Court ruled that unrestricted free speech was allowed in the town square, whether it was a company town or a shopping mall, so long as the location was effectively serving as a surrogate town square. Now of course this is about the UK. But to my knowledge and based on research there are no laws or cases about lying in public. As long as you aren’t committing perjury or slander, or urging violence, or inciting a panic, this isn’t illegal.
- justincormack 9mo agoThis has been ongoing for a long time, its not at all specific to this government.
- erichocean 9mo agoHuh? Starmer is the least popular Prime Minister, I believe, ever.
- spacebanana7 9mo agoHe wins or draws on every measure of unpopularity, other than YouGov net satisfaction where Liz Truss still beats him.
- geremiiah 9mo agohttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/28/keir-starmer-britain-unpopular-prime-minister-reform https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/28/keir-s... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/30/uk/keir-starmer-labour-party-conference-intl https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/30/uk/keir-starmer-labour-pa... I've come across various sources that lean center-left, note, CENTER-left, saying this. I think there might be something to it.
- iso1631 9mo agoIt's a problem with pretty much anyone. Things are bad from a fundamental structural failings for decades, elect new person, don't see immediate turn-around, they're massively unpopular. The only way out of this is if you successfully blame $marginalised_group for the peoples problems. Or spend decades undoing the damage, but nobody ever gets decades in power.
- pjc50 9mo agoSome of it is deliberately attempting to appeal to Reform voters, in ways which have infuriated Labour supporters while not winning any Reform support.
- 9mo ago
- mc32 9mo ago[flagged]
- simmerup 9mo agoWhat’s going on over here? You have ICE thugs executing citizens and being defended by the government while doing so
- mc32 9mo ago[flagged]
- simmerup 9mo agoInteresting how you think being shot by authorities is less bad than being talked to for shitposting on X
- mc32 9mo ago[flagged]
- simmerup 9mo agoI don’t think you understand how different the UK is Police killings are extraordinarily rare here so hearing about any is eyebrow raising. Even more so the latest example of an ICE agent killing someone simply for pissing them off
- throwaway85825 9mo agoJustine Damond. Got swept under the rug.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- pjc50 9mo ago
- geremiiah 9mo agoThere seems to be a prevalent notion within UK establishment circles, "we are being attacked from both sides, therefore we must be right/balanced/fair", which is totally not how it works. You see used for example to defend the supposed impartiality of the BBC.
- piltdownman 9mo agoThe BBC has never been impartial to internal concerns - domestic politics in particular. Leveson Inquiry recommendations not being implemented is the tip of the iceberg in relation to the extent of client-journalism it engages in with regard to the Conservative party. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-under-scrutiny-heres-what-research-tells-about-its-role-uk https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/bbc-under-sc...
- geremiiah 9mo agoI used the BBC just an example. Starmer seems to have the same attitude. If both Farage and Corbyn, and Polanski and whoever is leading the Conservatives and LibDems are attacking me, then I must be super in the middle i.e. I must be so doing it all super right!
- 9JollyOtter 9mo agoI don't think Starmer really knows what he is doing one way or another. The Island of Strangers speech out flaked Farage to the right. Dominic Cummings had a bunch of interview appearances online. His experience in office when he was working with Johnson (and many Ministers in general) is that they don't actually understand what they can and can't do in the job. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar situation is present under Starmer.
- piltdownman 9mo agoI mean where is Sir Humphrey Appleby when you need him! Johnson's incredibly colourful reaction to Starmers trade deal, in that he was 'acting like an orange-ball chewing manical gimp', speaks volumes about the discourse around Starmer. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ld3qkz https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ld3qkz Hislop is particularly scathing, albeit cynically pragmatic, since Starmers appointment - "“Keir Starmer is the man who likes to sit on the fence unless you don’t like fences and then maybe he can find a hedge, or if you don’t like hedges he’ll find a wall." “People have suggested Keir Starmer is very boring, but I think that’s partly his superpower, in that being interesting in the way his predecessor was manages to lose you elections. “You have to be careful when you dismiss people as boring. Everyone thought John Major was boring, but then you had him for two elections.”
- miroljub 9mo ago> So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort. You forgot gun control. That's the first thing they took away. Thereafter, freedom after freedom has been made optional by the government [1]. When government becomes overreaching, and you don't have the means to protect yourself and your rights, that's where it goes. [1] I said "government", but probably "regime" would be a more suitable term here.
- dijksterhuis 9mo agoi’m absolutely, concretely and overwhelmingly fine with the concept of gun control here as a uk citizen. i say this as someone who did target rifle shooting as a kid. so, i’ve been around weapons in a positive way. the controls are a good thing.
- baal80spam 9mo ago> i’m absolutely, concretely and overwhelmingly fine with the concept of gun control here as a uk citizen. That... speaks volumes of the citizens of the said country.
- whynotmaybe 9mo agoI still don't know what's so important about guns and how it's a metric for freedom.
- logicchains 9mo agoAs Mao said, political power grows from the barrel of the gun. In the past decade freedom of speech and internet freedom has being dramatically curtailed in pretty much every western country where the citizen are unarmed.
- Maken 9mo agoThese guns didn't stop the CLOUD act.
- 9mo ago
- 9JollyOtter 9mo agoI don't agree. The British State has been going in this direction ever since Blair's government and probably before that. I don't remember Blair's government being that unpopular.
- vablings 9mo agoNew labour really laid the groundwork for alot of the orwellian laws that are in place now. Its a shame nobody who has been elected since sought to roll them back...
- 9JollyOtter 9mo agoThere is simply no-incentive to. Generally there are many incentives to increase the number of laws, as they can be seen as doing something about a some recent issue. Many of the recent online safety laws (even before OSA) are good examples of this. Additionally Britain generally has a problem with politicians believing that the only solution to a problem is banning/regulating things, regardless what the root cause might be. Banning/regulating something requires new legal powers. So more laws. This been true as far back as I can remember with them talking about banning the Lotus Carlton back in the early 90s because one vehicle the infamous 40RR was used in a spate of ram raids which embarrassed the police. I remember this on the news when I was about 9-10 years old.
- vablings 9mo ago40 RA, my mum used to drive a Vauxhall Carlton > Additionally Britain generally has a problem with politicians believing that the only solution to a problem is banning/regulating things, regardless what the root cause might be. Banning/regulating something requires new legal powers. So more laws. I mean it's true and it does work for the most part. The bans on knives, drain cleaner etc have reduced the number of these kinds of crimes especially in London. It's hard to argue against something when a lot of this kind of policymaking is effective
- 9JollyOtter 9mo ago
- letn1 9mo agoWhy is it happening in the UK though? Why does their government think that they need this?
- mike_hearn 9mo agoIt's not only happening in the UK. It's happening across the entire western world except for America. Australia, Canada and European countries have also been implementing retroactive speech laws, mass debanking, imprisonment for political speech and so on. The UK gets a lot of attention because it's historically been a fairly free country, and because it's English speaking.
- cryptonector 9mo agoEven in the U.S. there is constant pressure on the First Amendment. It's just that the 1A has been quite resilient because the courts have helped it, but that can stop at any time.