Reply #5: Wow, Blair is even more authoritarian than Peter Hitchens [View All]

"It seems to me to be dangerous because I don't know how you can draft these proposals so they don't become a threat to freedom of speech.

There are already perfectly acceptable laws against incitement to violence and conspiracy laws against incitement to terrorism. It is not an absence of laws that have made these things happen.

Banning political parties and classifying parties as extreme is dangerous because it must not become a weapon that a government, yet unknown, can use against people who disagree with it.

Another aspect of this is that disgusting opinions, if spoken openly, can be challenged, argued and defeated. Suppressing them by law doesn't prevent them being thought. If you are interested in tracking extremists then it would be useful to know where they are gathered.