All speech, including that inciting violence or dissent should be protected. If a populace allows imprisonment over utterances, rebellion against tyranny become

All speech, including that inciting violence or dissent should be protected. If a populace allows imprisonment over utterances, rebellion against tyranny becomes impossible. Imagine Thomas Paine was imprisoned for "Common Sense" or the First Continental Congress was imprisoned for discussing independence, or that Martin Luther King was imprisoned for expressing the extremely unpopular and offensive notion of equality for all races, or Pope was imprisoned for his satire of slavery or Joyce for his depictions of people going to the restroom. Socrates was willing to go to death because of his ideals. The least of us should be willing to decry the suppression of opinion of any form at the risk of being offended or verbally injured or even incited to violence against the forces that support the suppression of Speech, lest we find ourselves the member of an oppressed, unpopular, and thus imprisonable or executable minority. To fail to protect the Speech of those with whom we disagree is to fail to live as free people. This was the salient theme in Orwell's 1984. Newspeak was an attempt not to remove offensive Speech, but to make impossible the act of expressing any thought through speech that may move the populace to action to throw off the shackles of tyranny that chained them to a life of slavery. Britons have a right to be angry, and a right to express their anger at these arrests. They are an assault on the human rights of all citizens of the UK and the willingness of some on this topic to accept these assaults is both unsettling and unexpected.