> The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American?

It's a quote from one of the American founding fathers. I don't remember which, and I don't remember the exact quote.

> Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it?

In British law, most of what we now call 'human rights' were granted as settlements following rebellions or civil wars, the most notable example being those in the Bill of Rights 1689[0]. It was the Americans who copied that piece of legislation and wrote God's name at the top. The Parliamentarians who first wrote that bill remembered the Second English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I on charges of Tyranny - he wanted to levy taxes that Parliament opposed. (Sound familiar?)

> It's still an infringement and should be fought.

We don't have absolute freedom of speech in this country and that's fine. Freedom in this country is about doing not speaking.

> Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.

We don't do abstract principles in Britain, we're all about 100% organic realpolitik. Our system of government has been slowly evolving for nearly one thousand years, and continues to evolve. One of our kings was a tyrant, so we killed him. The republic that replaced him was worse, so we restored the monarchy. We solve the problem in front of us - there's no need to solve every problem ever right now.

> Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?

This is how Britain has always been governed - with minimal effort. Yes, it's mad. With specific reference to prosecutions, the Crown Prosecution Service only prosecutes if it think it will get a guilty verdict.

> Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?

The government (i.e., the Cabinet and other Ministers of the Crown) have no direct control over the implementation of this legislation; that is delegated to Ofcom, a regulatory body that answers to Parliament as a whole. Any attempt to seize control of Ofcom would require legislation, which would be heavily scrutinised by the House of Lords (which is not elected, and therefore is only weakly influenced by party whips) and would also have to gain Royal Assent, which would probably be refused if the legislation were seen to weaken British democracy.

> As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.

Absolute freedom of speech is only granted to parliamentarians when speaking in Parliament. The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law; Article 10 of the Convention provides for a general right to freedom of expression, but permits certain restrictions. Prior to the Human Rights Act, there was no general freedom of speech; instead everything that was not specifically prohibited was allowed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689