Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?

I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.

Also:

Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).

Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.

Step 3: They get elected.

Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.

Sounds brilliant, lets do this.

The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?

Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.

I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.

Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…

That is a good definition of not having free speech. If it can be whittled away every year at the stroke of a pen by a single parliamentary body (without judicial oversight) it's not really a right, it was just a temporary policy like taxing some new product.

What is an example of any right we have that can't be whittled away at the stroke of a pen?

Well the original US system is (so far) the best designed system for protecting from that sort of thing. It has multiple layers of checks via separation of powers, which is the greatest contrast to UK system where courts can't overrule parliament. The courts in the US closely protect the constitutional rights like free speech and are always shutting down new laws.

Constitutional amendments are also an extremely high bar (2/3rds in congress + 2/3rds of state legislators), so much so that they never even try them anymore. So adding a hate speech amendment or "sending offensive messages" law, like the UK did via parliament, would basically be DOA in the US.

But of course all rights can hypothetically be taken away in any human system, if there's enough public support or obedience.