This report in the Guardian is depressing. Hong Kongers in the United Kingdom are pleading for the right to protest in public — the way that so many encouraged them to do so in Hong Kong in recent years. Many recently arrived in the United Kingdom under the British National (Overseas) visa program that allows the King’s historical subjects to return to his realm.
The new arrivals are rapidly discovering that the United Kingdom is the sort of place where you can be arrested for posting the wrong thing on social media or for offering silent, gestureless mental prayers to Almighty God on the wrong side of the street.
A group of Hong Kongers has written to Home Secretary Suella Braverman about a public order bill that would give police the power to give “serious disruption prevention orders” — the capability to search protestors and to disperse them.
According to the report, a group of Hong Kongers argues:
The “wide and vague” conditions under which someone can be given an SDPO “echo the dangerously broad and indeterminate national security law that has resulted in many protesters in Hong Kong being imprisoned, some potentially for life.”
It’s a bitter pill, but the free world ain’t what it once was.