You ignore the “legitimate” part of “legitimate fear”.
Although I’d have said "justified. Your example of MAGA and so on are people expressing fear of imaginary or harmless things. Being afraid of somebody burning a cross on the other hand is simply self preservation.
“Bothsides”-ism ignores reality.
Following the 100K anti-migrant march in London a couple of weeks ago, someone I follow on social media reported that this was the first time he and his wife (a mixed race couple) were too afraid to hold hands in public. They will hardly be the only ones.
This is a direct measurable loss of freedom of speech. Lost to intimidation by a hate filled mob.
The idea that we lose freedom of speech by allowing the angry and resentful to harass and intimidate the rest of us out of the public square is self-evident nonsense. There has to be a line and ultimately it has to fall to the government to enforce it. Anything else is a bully’s charter.
Again, not particularly taking cues from the US administration on this matter.
No that’s what makes it your freedom of speech meaningless if there is an exception for causing “legitimate fear”. Its the government that gets to decide what is and what is not legitimate. And they absolutely cannot be trusted to do so. As demonstrated by the multitude of examples in this thread.
And if even a reasonable moderate government like the current labour government in the UK demonstrably can’t be trusted with that power to crush freedom of speech.Then a Trump or Farage would clearly use these kind of laws to outlaw all descent and imprison their opponents.
I’m pretty sure many Israeli students in the US felt intimidated and harassed by pro-Palestine protests on campus, and not unreasonably so. Should they be banned?
If someone who has the same views as Charlie Kirk feels intimidated and harassed by a colleague declaring that he deserved to be killed, can they have that colleague arrested?
If the police feel intimidated by protesters chanting “ACAB”, do they get to arrest and prosecute them?
Who is your reasonable person, here? In America, Trump recently won the popular vote. In Britain, Reform is ahead in the polls. This seems like a recipe for tyranny of the majority, as unpopular kinds of speech are squashed, while popular targets are allowed.
This is very unfortunate. But what do you want to do about it? Ban marches for causes you don’t approve of? The sentiment doesn’t go away if you ban people from expressing it. And they still vote.
Then freedom of speech is meaningless, and all that matters is terror, force and the willingness to kill. Because any public “debate” will be won by the side most willing to threaten force, and carry it out if defied. We know that, because that’s what has historically happened.
Well you really really should. If we were just talking about regular democratic governments of the kind that have ruled Europe and the US since the end of WW2, that would be one thing. For all their faults they did fundamentally believe in the freedom of speech and civil rights, or at least were not fundamentally opposed to them.
That does not apply to Trump, Farage, Le Penn, etc. if your protections of freedom of speech has a huge “makes people unhappy” (offended, scared, distressed, whatever) loophole then it will do jackshit to protect you when they decide to use the law to criminalize dissent.
Stop putting this shit in scare quotes. A mixed race couple were afraid of being beaten up by a racist mob, in London, in 2025. Do them and others like them the credit of treating that as a serious threat to their liberty.
Did I say one word about banning marches?
None of that matters. Such people can and will simply declare what they want illegal to be illegal, or not even bother. You are worrying about a non-issue.
Meanwhile, allowing thugs to terrorize people guarantees escalating terror, violence and eventually massacres.
A mixed race couple
A mixed race couple! Someone marrying a different race to them, and, eve more terrifying, having children with. Wow, that’s a pretty “legitimately” scary concept! Sounds like the whole thing should be criminalized.
No I won’t. As someone in a mixed race marriage who’s taken my wife to the post industrial Reform heartland, I can confirm it’s pretty damn scary. But a future Reform PM having the power to send people to prison for speech he doesn’t like is much scarier.
And they’d have the power to do that regardless of the law. Or they wouldn’t need to, they’d just have the mobs whipped up by “free speech” murder the people they don’t like.
Your describing this like it’s some hypothetical dystopian future. It’s not, it’s a reality, and Trump (and Orban and Ergodan, etc) did not declare all laws null and void, and have themselves crowned dictator for life.
What they did (and are doing) is find all the loop holes in the legal framework and push through them with all their strength. If your protections on freedom of speech are basically “the government can criminalize whatever speech they want, we trust them not to do bad things”, them those protections are not worth the paper they are written on (or not written on). Saying “oh it doesn’t matter they can do what they want” is objectively false. Modern day dictators do not “do what they want”. They find the weaknesses in the constitutional system and exploit them.
And ignored the law when there weren’t any loopholes. They don’t care about the law.
On due reflection, I am afraid I still believe it is possible to protect freedom of speech even in the event of a Reform PM and prevent cheap bullies from driving ordinary people out of the public square by using inimidation and harassment. And in fact that one of the most important safeguards against such a Reform PM silencing opponents is the maintenance of basic standards in public life and shared norms around people’s rights not to be driven into silence by fear.
If anyone’s interested, Coskun’s case went to the Appeal Court today: his appeal was granted and his conviction overturned.
The judgement is here, and is well worth a read for anyone wanting to know the current state of English law with respect to protest, free speech and harassment:
The fundamental legal framework:
This case is about the appeal of an individual appellant against his conviction of an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 (“section 5”). It must turn on the facts of his particular case. There are, however, some important matters of principle which are central to our decision so we begin our judgement by setting them out. It would be presumptuous of us, sitting as a court of second instance, to purport to make new law and we do not do so: What follows are clear and wellestablished propositions in the law of England and Wales.
2. There is no offence of blasphemy in our law. Burning a Koran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive. The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.
3. We live in a liberal democracy. One of the precious rights that affords us is to express our own views and read, hear and consider ideas without the state intervening to stop us doing so. The price we pay for that is having to allow others to exercise the same rights, even if that upsets, offends or shocks us.
4. The criminal courts will interfere to protect people. A person who acts so as to cause harassment, alarm or distress to another may commit an offence.
5. These propositions have been articulated in numerous decisions of the appellate Courts, both domestic and in the European Court of Human Rights (see, as examples, Handyside v UK 1 EHRR 737, DPP v Redmond-Bate [1999] Crim L R 998 and Campaign Against Antisemitism v DPP [2019] EWHC 9 (Admin)).
6. These rights, and that balance, are the bedrock of the English common law and the rights encapsulated in the European Convention of Human Rights (“the Convention”). Whether the Convention adds or merely enshrines the common law is a jurisprudential debate outside the bounds of this judgement but in general the two formulations of rights go hand in hand. The common law and Convention rights are, in the words of Michael Fordham QC as he then was, “human rights law’s belt and braces”.
7. It has long been recognised, both inside and outside the law, that there will be circumstances in which the right to free speech has to yield to the protection of human beings. Over 150 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote that an opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor ought to be “unmolested” when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer
The specific legal tests applied:
33. The questions we may have to answer in this appeal are:
(1) Has the Prosecution made us sure the Defendant used threatening or abusive words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour? If the answer is “no”, the Defendant’s appeal must be allowed. If “yes” we need to consider the next question.
(2) Has the Prosecution made us sure the Defendant did so in the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby. If the answer is “no”, the Defendant’s appeal must be allowed. If “yes” we need to consider the next question.
(3) Has the Prosecution made us sure the Defendant intended his behaviour to be, or was aware that it may be, disorderly. If the answer is “no”, the Defendant’s appeal must be allowed. If “yes” we need to consider the next question.
(4) Has the Defendant persuaded us it is more likely than not that he had no reason to believe that there was any person within hearing or sight who was likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress, or that his conduct was reasonable. If the answer is “yes”, we must allow the appeal. If “no” we need to consider the final question.
(5) Are we sure the Defendant demonstrated towards the victim of the offence hostility based on the victim’s membership or presumed (by the Defendant) membership of a racial or religious group or that the offence is motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility towards members of a racial or religious group based on their membership of that group. If the answer is “yes” we must convict the Defendant of the racially aggravated form of the offence. If the answer is “no” we must convict the Defendant of the simple section 5 offence.
On the specific concern that anyone may claim to have “legitimate” fears and that this would make it all too easy to stifle speech, this was interesting:
The need to avoid the reaction of displeased others leading to a protest becoming unlawful was stressed in a judgement of the House of Lords, in the context of another minor public order offence. In Cozens v Brutus (1973) AC 854 at 862E Lord Reid said (at 862E):
It would have been going much too far to prohibit all speech and conduct likely to occasion a breach of the peace because determined opponents may not shrink from organising or at least threatening a breach of the peace in order to silence a speaker whose views they detest
That perfectly encapsulates the problem with free speech in the UK described in the OP, and how the protections on free speech in the UK are completely ineffectual compared the American Bill of Rights.
In this very specific case, after a long drawn out expensive court case, it was found that his particular right to freedom of speech in this specific circumstances (namely his right as an islamophobic old white guy to burn a Koran because he hates Islam) was protected. It doesn’t strike down the law he was prosecuted under or protect the rights of say a liberal Granny to say nice things about Palestine Action, or the right to project images of Trump and Epstein, or any the the other innumerable ways UK laws threaten freedom of speech.
It is a very graphic demonstration of how a concise unambiguous definition of your rights like the 1st Amendment is much better at protecting your rights that ambigous ill defined protections like the Britian’s.
Courts never ‘strike down’ laws in the English system. “If the law be defective, that is for Parliament to remedy, not this court.”