[defrost]

To recap, as I understand it your claim is that:

> 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).

[EpicQuest_246]

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.

[defrost]

Try:

https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/cps-data-summary-quarter-...

and: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-court-stat...

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)

https://products.aspose.app/cells/viewer/view?FolderName=0f8...

"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.

[EpicQuest_246]

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.

[defrost]

I'm not telling you it isn't happening - I linked to the current UK summaries of all the cases referred by police to the CPS for prosocution.

The 7 cases a day to which you referred to above will be in there and quite likly flagged as Hate Crime related.

> I believe the 3000 a year number was banded about for speech offences.

( Bandied ? ) Sure, I dare say it was, the real question was that a reliable bit of infomation or something spread about?

If you're interested in pursuing the matter then I dare say you can contact the civil servents that maintain the UK CPS stats pages and ask them for speech prosecution numbers.

My stance on such things is that almost all figures "bandied about" with respect to contraversial subjects ( crime, immigration, free speech, climate, et al ) are forms of iterative improv by vested parties. *

I'm genuinely interested in actual figures from authorative sources for all manner of things in the world.

* https://theconversation.com/how-right-wing-media-is-like-imp...

[EpicQuest_246]

I appreciate you wasn’t but a lot of the discussion about these issues follows the same pattern of people pretending there isn’t an issue, then pretending that it isn’t as bad and then arguing over the minutia.

This convo thread the same route of someone disputing the fact the journalists were having their homes raided, I couldn’t remember the name of the journalist or the exact time, so when someone does find it, we then have a discussion on the exact language and numbers. Ignoring the fact that what I said was largely correct.

The number seems reasonable considering the data we have. TBH, It doesn’t matter if it is 1000 or 3000. It is too much either way IMO.

This isn’t a right or left "team sports" issue either. I deliberately avoid talking in those terms yet people seem to assign a team to you.

[pjfin123]

You were vindicated in this thread. It's insane that the U.K. is throwing thousands in people a year in jail for speech "crimes". I remember ten years ago when free speech was a sacred value in the West; as soon as non-institutionally-connected people got a platform with social media elites changed their mind though.

They're estimates but I've seen some numbers that suggest the U.K. is imprisoning more people (per capita and absolute) for speech crimes than Russia.