Comment by kridsdale1
16 days ago
> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc.
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
16 days ago
> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc.
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
Yes but no, post WW2 the UK was one of the most liberal places in the world. Somehow things took a turn in the past two decades or so. And then around the 2020s the decline started to rapidly accelerate. The stories that have come out lately are really insane.
Economic decline fuels resentment towards immigrants and minority communities. Government becomes increasingly repressive to keep tensions from boiling over into riots and perhaps worse. This is why countries are obsessed with growth - many things can be papered over with sufficient growth.
Call me crazy, but it seems probably unwise for any nation to be perpetually operating under "we're a bad recession away from ethno-nationalists starting a race war" as a default state of affairs.
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250,000 gang rapes are another reason for hostility towards immigrants. As well as the cost.
You can’t really put the UK surveillance state on a political left right axis though. Its an orthagonal trend where various Britains have always been trying to monitor each other for various purposes and that’s why it grows and grows. At least that’s how it looks to me as an outsider.
the UK has been ahead of the US on anti-liberal policies for the past decade or more.
bexit came before the trump election
do you have other examples? I have a limited perspective as an American, but I understand Brexit to have been more or less an exception to the way the political winds have generally been blowing in the UK in the last 15 years?
Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
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