Yes, AFAIK. You need a good reason, but expecting to need a knife while pursuing a lawful activity is a good reason. Using it at work or for recreational purposes is OK.
Official info. Note that some kinds (switchblades, zombie knives, sword canes, etc.) are banned. Threatening people with a knife is illegal anyway, so the rationale must be that since you can’t sell or import “bad” knives their supply will be reduced. Sounds nice, but has the existence of this list reduced the incidence of stabbings? Do hooligans check the list before carefully selecting their nightly implements of ultraviolence?
A pub can be a boozer… (isn’t that largely the point?)
Not sure. I imagine it will make prosecution and conviction more of a certainty and less dependent on interpretation, but since there is almost zero cost and effort to the action of adding a type of knife to the list of explicitly banned types, it seems an obvious thing for lawmakers to do.
I guess they’re just trying to reduce the overall number of certain weapons in circulation. Laws won’t stop determined outlaws, and laws like this don’t especially inconvenience the law-abiding either - but a general reduction of opportunity for the idiots in the middle seems like it could be a possible outcome
I quite frequently carry a small folding pocket knife for foraging, and axes, adzes etc for woodcarving - I’ve never actually been stopped or challenged by the police, but I don’t believe there would be a problem with my usage
Here is an online knife store that neatly summarises the rules. You can carry a folding pocket knife less than 3" long, as long as it doesn’t lock, without needing any particular reason.
Note that this means “boxcutter” style blades are generally illegal to carry without good reason.
I carry a small folding pocket knife for general use, and I have a boxcutter in the car I use for work. It is entirely legal for me to take the pocket knife out into town on a saturday night (although some venues may well ban all knives regardless), but it would not be legal at all for me to carry the boxcutter.
As for boozers, sometimes we have more than one word for things. A pub can also be called the local, or tap.
They’re not even intended to be practical. The closest parallel that people in the USA would probably be more familiar with would be the ludicrously over-sized and elaborate “swords” from fantasy games and animations. They’re ornaments. As far as I know, there aren’t any cases of a “zombie knife” being used in a crime. Even the most amoral, stupid and drugged up thug would be capable of realising that a more practical knife is a more practical knife. A cooking knife with some tape wrapped around the handle near the blade to reduce the chance of the wielder’s hand sliding onto the blade when they stab someone would be a vastly superior weapon and be far cheaper.
UK weapon laws nowadays have nothing to do with reality or sense. They are either responses to media campaigns so that the government can be seen to be doing something to address whatever issue is currently fashionable for scare stories in the media or they’re another very broadly and poorly defined crime to give the authorities more leverage over more people. Or, of course, both those things.
A random example:
Skipping ropes meet the UK legal definition of a banned weapon. A weapon that is such a terrible social problem that mere possession of it must be illegal under all circumstances. Fishing rods are also utterly illegal under the same definition. The intent was for the government of the day to be seen as Doing Something about the terrible threat posed by fantasy ninjas that the media of the day had somehow convinced people was a real thing. And no, I am not joking. The start of the banned weapons list (and most of it to this day) was and is very specifically about fantasy ninjas. Not even real ninjas (who were actually spies, rarely fought and didn’t have any special weapons). Hollywood ninjas.
“pub” is a nationally used word(*) and a relatively old one. “boozer” is more local slang, originally from some parts of London, and a relatively recent one.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules that I’m aware of, but “boozer” could be taken as implying a subset of pubs, those in which drinking is the primary purpose. I don’t know if that is the actual usage down south though. I’m just speculating with that bit.
In case anyone is interested in the etymology:
In the late medieval period (and possibly earlier - I don’t know) there were 3 main classifications of premises selling alcoholic drinks in England. Due to the very large number of small villages in the country at that time, the most common type was the smallest type. That was a person’s house from which they sold drinks to the public and so it was called a public house. Which became shortened to “pub”. Over time, “pub” became used as a generic term for premises selling alcoholic drinks, including those that were more correctly classified as taverns (business premises made for that purpose, with the tavern-keeper’s house seperate even if it was part of the same building) and even inns (hotels, essentially), maybe because they were common gathering places for people from the local community to socialise, so they were also a public house in that sense.
It’s not showing up as unsafe for me. It’s just showing up as having its security misconfigured. The SDMB had a similar issue by having a login box while not using https.
Take the s out of the https in the link and it works fine.
Newer browsers bitch about having a login box while not using https, and if you use https while not having the security certificate set up, you get that “unsafe” error.
If anyone is getting a different error, let me know. If necessary I’ll remove the link, but for now I don’t see any need for that.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘fantasy ninjas’ - if you mean ‘idiot teenage males who bought Shuriken to try to look cool’, I guess I’d agree. I don’t think it was a huge problem, but I don’t think it was an imaginary one either.
Whether or not real ninjas ever threw bladed weapons, or that just happened in hollywood, is pretty irrelevant to the UK knife ban laws - what would be relevant, is whether people were creating problems by emulating the hollywood ninja activities.
If the blade locks in the open position, I think it could fall foul of the laws, if a person is found to be carrying it in a place where they have no good reason to take it.
The box cutter knives we use at the warehouse where I work are now all of the ‘safety’ type - they look like the linked item, but the blade springs back in unless the slide is kept pressed.
Fixed and locking blade utility knives still exist here, and are still OK to own and use (I have several in my garage, one of which I only bought a couple of weeks back) - you just shouldn’t take them to a football match etc.
Here in the US I used some paracord and a large ball bearing to make a weighted line that I can use to toss a line to shore when navigating a lock. Someone saw it and told me that it is technically illegal to carry in some states. See: monkey fist/slungshot.
ETA: thanks, I can’t think of a name! Interesting pub info
The UK is extremely strict on the sale and carrying of anything that can be deemed a weapon. As it happens, that also includes the tactical pens that the spammers are so fond of. I assume a zombie knife is some of wicked-looking but not necessarily better knife that serves as a phallic symbol for those of a dim and violent nature. While it is certainly possible to obtain knives of various kinds, you may have a hard time in Europe, and especially the UK, in buying a fighting or combat knife. You can of course buy things like steak knives and cook’s knives that are good as weapons, but if you carry one in public you will quickly attract the attention of the perlice.
Any discussion on gun control illustrates the Atlantic divide and how the situation is radically different on the two shores. Europe has historically pursued a policy of strict gun control, and while it has gone a bit over the top due to gunmen going amok with guns that they possessed legally (or in the case of the school shootings, that their fathers owned), the highly restricted access to firearms of any kind, and military firearms in particular, meant that few crimes were committed using guns. Unlike the USA. However, the situation in Europe changed for the worse after 1990, when large quantities of small arms disappeared from the arsenals of the Warsaw Pact countries.
In short, you cannot prevent people from obtaining weapons, or in some cases, fashioning them. But you can restrict them from easily obtaining items that are inherently lethal and which have no other purpose than vanity. Note the word “easily.” No ban has ever been 100% effective. But at least we should try.
I’ve never seen an ad for a “tactical pen”. I have a utility pen, which includes knife blades, but it takes a couple of minutes to open it up and mount a blade, which would give it very limited utility as a weapon.
“Spammers?” Those who originate robot email come-ons have a favorite weapon? Or should I OP another one addressed “Brits: what’s a spammer?” 
