Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.
Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.
I lived for over a decade in the UK and hence am quite familiar with the British system.
However the standard I compare Britain against is The Netherlands, not the United States.
In European terms the UK is de facto more authoritarian than most, though not in a goose-stepping jackboot way but more in a “laws designed for very broad interpretation” + “they’ll throw the book at you if you’re foreigner, or critical of the system itself (for example, member of a leftwing party, an ecologist or participate in demonstrations against the government)” + “massive but quiet surveillance to detect dissent early”.
Maybe the posh, velvet glove wrapping a steel fist, way of exercising power in the UK is a fucking paradise next to the “gun in your face” way of the US, but it’s not at all a free and fair system compared with most of Europe, especially Northern Europe.
The system will fuck you for being a dissenter, but they’ll do it by taking your shit, your options and possibly your freedom, not by taking your life. Then again, nowhere in Europe they’ll take your life like that - that specific form of abusive/reckless use of force in policing is very rare in Europe and an outright scandal just about everywhere in it when it happens.