> The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related offences (I guarantee it is more now).
So the claim is that the UK is prosecuting a minimum of some 2,555 speech offenses a year (or as few as 1,820 if it's 7 a day each day of a five day working week in a year with 52 working weeks).
Yes. I remember seeing the statistic a number of years ago. I cannot find the source easily. The last time I checked was ~2018. I never claimed "daily raids on journalists". I did say "regularly", which is incorrect, I should have said "an alarming number of". But that if people are going to hold me up on that they are nitpicking.
In the UK there were 11,767 prosecutions (referred by police, whether or not a conviction was found) in the past year flagged as "Hate Crime" (the category that a speech prosecution would fall under?)
Of those many were robbery, homicide, assault, etc .. not simply "speech".
Here is a link to an online sevice to mount by URL those spreadsheets onine (showing the UK Prosecution Crime Type Data Tables Q4 23-24)
"an alarming number of" is entirely relative to the population size and general referral levels, at seems unlikely that just pure "speech" alone and no other action forms 20% of the Hate Crime flagged prosecutions - that would take some legwork to verify I suspect.
When I said “alarming number of” I was specifically referring to journalists being harassed by the UK state. I am aware of at least 3 or 4 this year.
Non-speech related offences I don’t care about in relation to this topic. I believe the 3000 a year number was banded about for speech offences. I do think it is likely that this number is roughly correct as it matches up with what I previously heard.
I btw believe one person being prosecuted for speech related offences is too many. IMO it shouldn’t happen at all.
Moreover I am quite tired of people telling me it isn’t happening after I can distinctly remember a large number of cases over the years where this does happen.
That is rather less sensational than the 'daily' raids you mentioned though, isn't it?