We do not. There are so many caveats in relevant part of the human rights act.
> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
While the US has restrictions on speech, there are far far fewer restrictions.
The "uncodified constitution" that we have doesn't guarantee you "Freedom of Speech" either. I've read the relevant parts of the constitution in the UK. It gives Parliamentarians the right to unlimited speech.
Finally "Freedom of Expression" and "Freedom of Speech" are not the same thing.
Speech is a form of expression; freedom of expression encompasses freedom of speech. To quote from the link you provided:
"This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
As you point out, all countries have some restrictions on speech. We can obviously agree that somewhere like North Korea has no freedom of speech, in the same way we can agree the Moon is clearly outside our atmosphere. But in the margins it comes down to where you draw the line.
There's also a difference when it comes to theory and practice. In theory the US is more permissive; it lacks the ECHR's caveats that permit restricting speech to protect health, morals and territorial integrity. But in practice the US is rated as coming below the UK in the World Press Freedom Index and the Freedom of Expression Index. The US government has a lot of power to lean on organisations and individuals to stifle speech, which of course it's currently doing.
Neither the World Press Freedom Index nor the Freedom of Expression Index are particularly good measures of government restrictions on individual's speech.
The former includes things like how much editorial control journalists are subjected to, the right of journalists to unionize, the cost to print/distribute newspapers, whether journalists are subject to economic constraints (like being dependent on advertising money), etc.
The later is not only far more opaque in how it measures things, relying on a panel of country-specific experts, but it also more press/media related and includes things like media bias and print/media perspectives which is more about diversity of press opinion than freedom of expression (arguably, media bias shouldn't negative affect a freedom of expression index unless it is government imposed).
A more objective comparison of freedom of expression/speech would rate how the government would respond to specific instances of public and private speech - like say calling for the king/president/prime minister/etc. to be replaced, posting nudes (or going nude), blaspheme a particular religion, publishing embarrassing and reputation harming information about a celebrity/someone powerful/a judge/a religious figure, playing loud music outside, refusing to speak when ordered to by a police/judge/legislature/ruler, wearing the clothes various sexes, etc.
It might be difficult to create perfectly equivalent speech across countries, but I think one could get close enough.
I'm not sure I buy that we can entirely separate the freedoms of journalists from the freedoms of individuals; but I do like your idea of coming up with a list of criteria for measuring the freedom of speech for individuals. It seems a useful point of comparison. Where I think you'd need to be careful is in weighting the criteria.
These Indexes exist so that people (that may have an agenda) can point to it and say "well we aren't as bad as these other places" and can dismiss the actual issues that exist.
No freedom of expression is a nebulous term that was invented obfuscate the very discussion we are having. It consider it to be nothing more than weasel words.
Pointing at extreme examples like North Korea and pretending their isn't an issue because we are better them is classic whataboutism.
I also don't care about what some random index that people pull out of their backsides. I care about the legality. Freedom of Speech in the US is enshrined in the constitution. It is not enshrined anywhere in UK law.
As for the section you quoted, that is made effectively moot by the exceptions that I originally quoted.
Generally I am pretty tired of people engaging in apologia for the British state.
So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?
I mean, I agree with you on that, but it's a circular argument.
My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue.
I personally agree that morality and territorial integrity aren't adequate reasons to restrict speech, and I'd say that a country without those restrictions has freer speech (from a legal perspective) than those with them. But again, it's a relative comparison; I wouldn't say that a country had no free speech if they did have those restrictions.
> So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?
No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
I believe Freedom of Expression is weasel words to obfuscate the conversation as now you have an additional legal concept in the mix, with some nebulous definition that reads like a Terms and Conditions from one of the big tech players.
That is it.
> My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
It is the fact that it is brought up at all is engaging in whataboutism.
Why are you even mentioning NK? Why do you care what old Kim Jong does? Really think about why you are even mentioning North Korea. I don't expect or want an answer BTW.
> I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I don't care about the left/right slop politics. I don't care who the "villian of the week" is. Most politics is presented to you in the same way as Scooby Doo.
Why do you care about what Donald Trump is doing in the US? Please actually think about why you are even mentioning it. I don't expect (or want) an answer BTW.
> I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue
The very fact that you are making this argument about gradients of freedom, and everyone has restrictions etc. Is literally the issue. The conversation about it has been obfuscated deliberately.
I don't care what restrictions they have in France, NK, China or anywhere else. That is their business.
I care about the restrictions in the UK, why they exist and whether they are valid.
As for the encryption back-doors, why do you think they actually want to do it? GCHQ just happens to be looking for more developers BTW! I know this for a fact because I had one of their recruiters phone me. I told him what I thought about the British state and not to ever call me again.
> No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
We do, in the Human Rights Act 1998.
Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
No we don't. I've explained why. It even says in the text of the law the caveats it carves out.
But you can believe whatever fantasy you like. I am tired of trying to convince the fish that they are indeed swimming in water. The funniest thing is that until you've had it affect something/someone you like or respect, you won't change your mind.
BTW, I used to make all of the same arguments as you do btw about the Human Rights act and the ECHR etc. I realised after actually reading them, and seeing what actually happened and how the state operates, that what I believe was all bollox and I had been deceived.
> Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
It doesn't line up with any definition of free speech because it is a separate legal concept. I've already explained why they are different.
I happen to believe that legal concept is done deliberately so people like yourself will engage in this time wasting discussions about what is and isn't free expression. That is evidenced in this very discussion.
Ask yourself. If you happen to support Palestinian Action and do so publicly how long until police visit you or you are put on a watch list? Probably not long.
> But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
If I provide you with any sort of definition someone else will say "well that definition isn't correct", all of which ultimately deflects from the issue and is another waste of time.
The issue is that speech is restricted in the UK. It is done selectively. Some viewpoints are allowed by the British state and other aren't. Some of this is done directly, some of this is done indirectly.
e.g. There was a super injunction granted sometime last year to hide information about a large number of Afghan migrants / refugees / nationals being resettled after the Taliban took back control. Therefore the public, the press (little good they are) and presumably oppositional political parties couldn't scrutinise these plans. These types of super injunctions happen all the time.
What good is it that someone it is written on a piece of paper that you are legally able to have opposing view (as long as they fit inside the Overton window), when they literally hide information that is important for you to have any sort of informed view from you?
I asked you in my previous reply to go away and think about why certain narratives are presented to you. I never mentioned Trump, yet you seemed to want to talk about him without explicitly saying his name.
Someone somewhere wants you to worry about the press freedoms in the US. This is likely to distract you from more important things like the US have just landed some strategic nuclear bombers in the UK ahead of peace talks between Ukraine/Russia.
> So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
It is irrelevant, I've explained why above. Any nation state will suppress your speech when it deems it to be necessary and will invent excuses as why it has to do it. That is the reality of it. How you choose to deal with that reality is your own choosing.
You believe that the HRA does not grant "free speech" due to some, or all, of the exceptions.
You refuse to define which specific exceptions you have a problem with, or define what you mean by "free speech", because if you did, people could argue against you.
That's all fine, but I wish you'd led with that. Next time write something like:
"I have my own definition of 'free speech' which I will not share, and according to this definition the UK has no freedom of speech."
In practice there isn't freedom of speech. The UK government violates that all the time. Their agencies operate in secrecy and they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders.
I would not hold up any country because there are flaws everywhere; and I don't like writing about free speech because it has different meanings for everyone. But even in our puny Slovakia raiding newspaper offices and taking peoples private data at the border is not something that would happen and didn't happen for at least the last 25 years or so, even though we had and currently have horribly bad governments.
The situation in the UK is particularly bad I think because the legal situation is a hodgepodge of a missing written constitution, interweaving of the government branches (as I understand, the government can sometimes ignore the courts or is above them), the libel laws, and while still (for now) a member of the ECHR which gives some guarantees, it's rulings are always (many years) after the fact. Crucially, the UK is a very class-based society. The ruling class gets what it wants and it does not want free speech.
There's some truth in what you say, but it's filtered through a distorted lens.
Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.
The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.
There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).
The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.
Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.
But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.
> In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class
And yet their policies are broadly right-wing conservative. Point is the government itself does not have to consist of upper-class people for the class to steer and benefit from the policies. Why is that? Well...
> The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries
We really don't know that because the population has been massaged by right-wing propaganda for (at least) decades. I remember even in the 90's reading Financial Times or something like that and the opinion articles about the EU were quite simply lying. Can imagine it was even worse in the Daily Mail etc. The result regarding the EU is well known, but I think this applies to everything; the population seems to lean conservative because the ruling class prefers it like that and the media owners oblige.
To return to the free speech/press freedom issue, it's the same again: it only works as far as the ruling class allows that. One obvious example are the past climate and current anti-genocide protests, where the government heavily abuses anti-terrorism laws to limit free speech.
You're using the word "class" in two different contexts here. The "class" in "upper class" is not the same as the "class" in "ruling class". This may seem pedantic, but when people say that the UK is a class-based society they're explicitly talking about the former. That's not to say there isn't overlap, but they're still two distinct sets.
I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Obviously these incidents shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and I fully agree that the government is abusing the law to get its way. But the actions of the home office don't necessarily reflect the country as a whole. They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
> I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Yes but the issue is already the government acting like this. They most probably know they are in the wrong and are acting anyway, because they want to quell the dissent. The damage is already done.
> They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
Of course. I still think about the Labour as 'the good ones', compared with the Tories (or Reform) anyway. OTOH I think this does reflect the country as a whole and not only the current government. That is my feeling from living in the UK some time ago.
I will end this saying that IMO the main difference in speech/press freedom between the UK and say Slovakia is that the UK imagines itself a powerful country fully in control of its destiny, and this illusion enables executive overreach. While Slovakia is a small country thrown around by external forces so much that only the dumbest politicians waste their energy trying to limit press freedom.
That's fair. The government certainly shouldn't be acting like this, and if Slovakia is better in this area, then that's certainly something the UK should seek to emulate.
It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.
However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.
They do.
The UK has an uncodified constitution, and this includes the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of expression to UK citizens.