It has been argued that Brexit will make us freer. Not just in an economic or political sense, but also in terms of individual civil liberties. spikedâs Mick Hume wrote that âthe referendum result is a triumph for free speech and a smack in the eye for the culture of You Canât Say Thatâ. And it is.
Post-Brexit Britain will no longer be bound by an EU Code of Conduct that seeks to police the online speech of over 500million citizens and ban âillegal online hate speechâ. Or an EU law that encourages the criminalisation of âinsultâ. Or a proposed EU law that undermines fundamental freedoms by purging Europe of every last shred of supposed âdiscriminationâ.
We can distinguish ourselves from our European neighbours that are intent on pursuing more and more censorship. Just over the summer it was reported that prosecutors in Spain initiated criminal proceedings against the Archbishop of Valencia for preaching a homily alleged to have been âsexistâ and âhomophobicâ. In the Netherlands, a man was sentenced to 30 days in prison for âintentionally insultingâ the king on Facebook. And in Germany a prosecution was launched against a comedian who made jokes against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
These kinds of cases have become normal on the continent. So much so that they barely generate news. And they are often willingly cheered on by the EU and other European institutions. Britain can tread a different path.
There is just one, small problem: when it comes to censorship and the quashing of civil liberties, the UK doesnât need any encouragement from the EU, or anybody else.
I agree – but surely the point is that with Brexit we are now able to decide for ourselves if we want to take a different course. I’m far from certain, but I think the odds are good that we will.
I am also far from certain, but at least we only need to win in Westminster and not in Brussels as well.
Yes indeed – British independence will still leave the problem of a British government which is vastly too big and too interventionist, but at least we will not longer have the vile European Union government on-top-of-it.
We have a free-speech fight on our hands – and once Brexit has happened, more chance of winning it.
Meanwhile, ordering ‘Trump 2016’ cakes from PC bakers faces just one problem – such people usually live off the state and don’t do anything as useful as bake. I would not trust the judges who ruled on Article 50 to deliver a sauce-for-the-gander judgement, but good luck in any case finding a PCer who does anything as useful as provide the cake they tell us to eat. đ
(Given my qualified enthusiasm for Trump, I might seek another slogan equally suited to testing the consistency of PC enforcers. Suggestions welcome.)
It’s not state censorship, but… well, they never give up, do they?
Sure it does. And apparently demonisation is just fine when the Left does it.
That’ll be all those BBC-Guardian types calling us Leave voters ignorant and stupid, right?
Tesco’s own-brand crisps are surprisingly good. Just sayin’, Walkers…
Jonathan Abbott
That may depend on who “ourselves” are to be; individuals or a collective.
Will the broader public, as represented by the electorate, continue to accept dictates of particular interests as that non-existent chimera, “collective choice” or revert to the collective effects of individual choices?
Does Brexit sufficiently signal for those in England a sufficient halt to the recession and suppression of individuality?
Are the ameliorations by collectivisms so sweet and the complacencies in statisms so dear as to be purchased at the price of individual liberty?
We shall see.
Offered for bumper stickers:
This. ^
Via Breitbart London, some related insanity:
I had to double check the URL, to make sure I hadn’t accidentally navigated to The Onion.
Interestingly, I’ve seen suggestions in a couple of places that Trump might reform NAFTA by expelling Mexico and inviting a post-Brexit UK to join, making it the North Atlantic Free Trade Association.
That would certaily make it easier for me to get my hands on Bovril and Smoky Bacon crisps (Walker’s or Tesco’s, I don’t care. Either would be better than the offerings here, where people think “hot” is a flavour.).
Interestingly, Iâve seen suggestions in a couple of places that Trump might reform NAFTA by expelling Mexico and inviting a post-Brexit UK to join, making it the North Atlantic Free Trade Association.
Do you really think he can expel Mexico unilaterally?
I shouldn’t think so. I took what I read as being shorthand for the USA unilaterally withdrawing from NAFTA, followed by the USA proposing a new NAFTA, with membership offered to the UK and Canada, so long as Canada also withdrew from the rump of the old NAFTA.
Having typed all of that, do you see why I just went with the shorthand?
You think all those companies with investments in Mexico will be happy to see NAFTA fall?
But no doubt they lose their billions happily, so long as it makes America “great” again.
The half a trillion dollars of trade from Mexico will no doubt be replaced inside the US without any dislocation at all.
And has anyone considered that Canada might not look too happily on NAFTA collapsing? They’ll be furious, and unlikely to go with a speculative replacement.
Others on this thread have already beaten me to making the point that it is a lot easier for pro-liberty folk to make an impact in a single country than in a transnational group of 28.
A slightly different point is that such rules and proposals are nothing to do with the Single Market. Some on the Remain side are arguing that if the UK wishes to retain access to the EU, we have to put up with whatever rules that the Single Market consists of. Even if that is true, the kind of rules mentioned in this post, which are nothing really to do with economics, markets and finance, will no longer be part of the daily irritant of being in the EU.
Of course, UK Members of Parliament are just as capable of passing foolish, oppressive and damaging legislation as is the case with European policymakers. But with MPs becoming more important when we leave the EU (that is when, not if, Remainers!) their decisions will be more visible. If they pass some dumb law, they cannot blame it on the EU any more. They have to take ownership of the rules they enact.
@Chester Draws: You make some very valid points. đ
But seriously, it would not be correct to call unsubstantiated speculative negativity and predictions of doom and gloom – views which were apparently arising from an irrational response to an outcome that one did not want to accept – “a rational argument”. For example, that was exactly the sort of false and deliberately deceptive reasoning that the Remainers offered up on the run-up to and post the Brexit democratic referendum in Britain. However, the majority of sensible voters there evidently saw through it, and subsequent events have apparently already started to show it as and disprove it as being egregiously false reasoning.
Similarly, in the run-up and post the US democratic election.
In the Brexit case, one could understand the irrationality, to the extent that the sensible patriotic majority (the Leavers) essentially chose and voted for the UK to remain a sovereign democracy where their freedom and individual franchise as British voters still counted for self-governance, rather than being locked-in and dictated to by an originally Hitlerian concept of a Federal European State dominated by Germany and run by a bureaucracy composed of largely foreign and unelected “representatives” (i.e., an elite class of rulers). Thus, those who voted to Remain would, presumably, have been prepared to give that freedom away, so their complaining of the democratic process could be understood in that light – i.e., they did not want or value it.
In the case of the US elections, however, the voters’ choice is/was apparently between two presidential candidates, one of whom would be and has been selected by a sensible patriotic majority, in a correct civil democratic process, as the President Elect.
This process would seem to be a vitally important component supporting peaceful co-existence under the American Constitution, so presumably all patriotic American voters who believed in or wished to adhere to and follow the basic prevailing US religio-political ideology (i.e., including democracy and Capitalism) would be keen to use and accept the process and its eventual outcome.
As a Kiwi, I think I might have that (above) about right, though I am (usually) at a loss to comprehend American politics in general.
However, the sort of non-argument which you seem to be putting forward would seem to be at odds with that, and possibly unpatriotic to boot.
The minority – the Clinton supporters – are “liberal progressives”. That is (so I am informed), people who proclaim the most loudly that there is no reality, no objective truth, and that we all must respect our different realities and perspectives. Yet they now apparently seem to have nothing left in place of argumentation, persuasion and reason except shouts, screams, insults, pouts, tears, threats and even death threats. Did they perhaps only accept the democratic process whilst it presented a means of imposing their will/ideology onto others and do they now reject the democratic process because it has failed them in this?
If so, then one should surely come out and say so, instead of engaging in this nauseous ceaseless stream of protest and overt/covert whining and whinging that “it’s not fair” or “it’s all going to go very bad” or threatening people who disagree with one’s personal and strongly held views about that. And if one doesn’t like the situation, then stop trying to ram one’s undemocratic views down the throats of the democratic people, and go to live somewhere else – another country – where one prefers the undemocratic system they may have. That could possibly raise the average IQ levels of both countries.
1. I think that Trump’s attitudes towards Mexico are largely misunderstood. While he may be quite down on imports from China, I think his take on Mexican trade is much more benign. If he can nail down the open-border problem, I think Mexico is going to end up with a fair, mutually profitable deal.
2. Re: Censorship: The strength of the internet was always that no one knew you were a dog. In the same vein, no one knows that you’re not from the Netherlands. It seems to me that nation-centric censors are going to fail every time, if only the concerned audience takes some small action.
When someone in a king’s country is punished for insulting the king, what’s to stop every other person in the world on the internet but not in that country from repeatedly and imaginatively calling that king every type and kind of pig-fornicator? The internet has no boundaries; nothing stops me from calling Cameron a buffoon, or Corbyn an ass, or . . . whatever.
If every would-be speech dictator knew he would simply trigger millions of insults on every website if he were to try to punish someone speaking wrongly, wouldn’t he simply . . .not?
The EU has always been a political project to create a highly-centralized anti-democratic single European state. As long as we remain in the EU we remain a part of that project and our freedom to choose our own laws diminishes every year. Therefore leaving the EU does not in itself guarantee any particular kind of change. But it is a necessary first step, because without it there is no possibility of changing anything.
1. The US has to continue trade with Mexico if the US intends to have them pay for the wall. (It will be done with tariffs and the like).
2. While America’s left has also been dragging the nation over to the criminalization of “hate speech”, which includes even quoting the koran in a critical examination, realize that with the election of Trump, we’re not out of the water yet. There is a REASON Obama handed the keys to the internet over to the fucking UN. And that’s so they can impose their irrational biased censorship rules to internet communication, the bane of the globalists and the downfall of the Slithery campaign.
3. The legacy media “News outlets” in America threw itself on the sword for Slithery and now is left with a sword thrust through collective guts and no decent reputation to fall back on. This election was a moratorium on a corrupt media just as it was a corrupt politics proper, quickening the demise of legacy media. What’s the alternative? Online information….that’s threatened now by the UN’s arbitrary whims and no longer protected by the US’s constitutional amendment for free speech. One of the first thing Trump needs to do is to at least attempt to reverse Obama’s perhaps illegal action of handing over the control of the internet to the UN. After all, internet freedom is the only reason he managed to become POTUS elect.
Slartibartfarst,
Those dickless wonders are not “protesting” in the US, they’re rioting.
And it’s not any organic grass-roots rioting, the’re being PAID by George Soros and Media Matters and the like and being bussed in to places they don’t even live to wreck havoc.
Why?
Because democrats and their policies have been given the boot by US voters, which gives the House of Representatives, the Senate AND the presidency to the republicans. Dems, i.e. the Jackass Party, has zero leverage, so they create or at least complacently condone rioting with the intent to tell those in power to “compromise” to “appease” the distraught.
Sadly, it’s worked before. It won’t work this time, even with largely spineless republicans and “rinos”, (republican in name only), even with the “distraught” being paid $35/hr to tear apart cities. Like paying terrorists and kidnappers, to appease these Alinski-ites is to invite more of the same.
It wont work for a reason that the left never seem to see, (because they lack a shocking degree of self awareness), and that reason is that they are offering up behavioral reasons why they were rejected. Throwing a tantrum doesn’t mean you get icecream. It means you get sent to bed.
Thailover, paying “protesters” and bussing them into cities to wreak havoc should be prosecutable under the Mann Act (surely it’s an “immoral purpose” đ ).