The most British thing I’ve read this year

> Quakers are one of the three historic peace churches and therefore have taken seriously the call to loving enemies and the practice of non-violence.

https://quaker.org/peace-and-nonviolence/

> "Jeremiah Dixon, happening upon a slave driver mercilessly beating a poor black woman. 'Thou must not do that!' he shouted. 'You be damned! Mind your own business,' came the reply. 'If thou doesn't desist, I'll thrash thee!'

> Tall and powerful, Jeremiah seized the slave-driver's whip and gave him a soun thrashing. When he returned to Cockfield, the whip came too, and was one of the Quaker family's treasured possessions."

Eating hummus and bread sticks.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-arrest-act...

For the UK in particular, people may point to how Labor swept the elections last year but they'd be wrong to say that there was left-wing momentum in the UK or even that it was another example of people voting against incumbent governments. Neither is true.

All that happened in the UK is the right-wing vote got split between the Conservatives and the even more right-wing Reform party. That's it. Come next election, that won't be the case. At the current rate, Conservative/Reform will merge or ally and sweep in a landslide. Starmer actually got fewer votes than Corbyn did in his previous two elections by a substantial margin.

The UK Labor party is playing the same role as the US Democratic Party. That is, they make occasional meek noises about institutional norms but they really don't oppose fascism at all. In fact, both parties are way more concerned with the rise of leftism than they are with fascism.

We've seen this exact same scenario play out in France. You have grooming victim [1] Macron who has tried to occupy some mythical "center" with Le Pen's National Front, the brainchild of leaders of Vichy France, playing the role of fascist party. But in France there's actually some leftist opposition. And what does Macron do? Routinely side with the fascists to keep the leftists out of power.

In the US, the role of Gestapo is being played by ICE. They take their marching orders from the Canary Mission to black-bag people who simply opposed Israel's genocide. This is quite literally picking up political dissidents and putting them into concentration camps.

The UK, France and Germany are well on their way to the same fate.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/06/politics/emmanuel-macron-wife...

It seems to me that what the world needs is a mix of conservative and progressive ideas. Instead of calling each other names or label each other, we could also work together.

In the end we all have a the same goal: Preventing harm. We just happen to have different ideas about how to go about it.

Are there sociopaths on all sides? For sure. But right now, I see plenty of sociopaths in power instrumentalizing conservatism to tear apart at our democracies, while screaming and yelling that the left is out there to get conservatives – and plenty of conservatives believing them.

So... no, I don't buy this "no better", not in 2025.

Damned few on the left want to arrest people for giving offense whereas the overwhelming majority on the right support an actual fascist regime on this side of the pond.

You know this and you still made this comment.

Even when people hold views different to mine, I am careful not to ascribe this to some fundamental flaw in their character. There are lots of ways to be wrong about something that are incidental and understandable, and these apply to me as well as others.

I don't think this practice (c.f. "fundamental attribution error") is a route to truth or productive discourse.

Of course they do. Plenty of people on the left say that the very notion of free speech is "problematic" and must be criticized. Which directly implies that they find it less problematic to criminalize speech, as the UK does.

Of cause it is hard to get the balance right and what UK is doing does not look right. But UK does have the problem of ultra-right movements that want to establish a fascist regime.

If the headline was "police raid house to arrest criminal activists", it wouldn't have made a blip.

If you’re willing to lie, the headline could be whatever you want.

Same thing or perhaps worse is happening in Germany, US, etc.

One can just as well ask why would a democratic country arrest and threaten young people for protesting actions of a foreign country, when such actions include things like mass killings of children, or targeted attacks on healthcare and rescue workers, where said country sometimes just murders 15 of them while on a rescue mission (destroying 5 ambulances and a fire engine, basically killing all of the teams), like recently.

It's a worthy question that such an article can elicit regardless of who's being arrested for activism.

> A Met spokesman said six women had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, amid fears of a sit-down protest in the capital. None have been charged.