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Notes -
Please do not use the word "literally" metaphorically.
There are many people in the UK (Nigel Farage most obviously) who have made a good living out of saying things they insist you are not allowed to say. That is because you are allowed to say those things.
There are still too many things that are illegal to say in the UK, to the point where if you didn't say "literally" I would accept that you were engaging in permissible exaggeration and not argue, but one of them is not "the UK has the right as a sovereign country to exclude net-taxpaying immigrants on cultural grounds". And if it isn't illegal to say, it isn't literally illegal to say.
People have been arrested for anti immigration comments.
Can you say, the UK has he right to exclude immigrants for any reason, especially ethnic replacement? I don't think you can.
The UK, as a sovereign state, has the right to exclude any non-citizen it wants, for any reason. (In some cases we would need to withdraw from treaties like the Refugee Convention or the European Convention on Human Rights to do so legally, but treaties have exit clauses).
I just did, from a UK IP, using a weak pseudonym.
Seriously, the UK establishment doesn't have a brief to protect Nigel Farage or Melanie Phillips. If it was illegal to say the things they are saying, they would be arrested. The UK hate speech laws require the speech to be "threatening, abusive, or insulting" as well as discriminatory against a protected group, so if you are polite and don't insult identifiable individuals you are not breaking the law. I don't support these laws, but I don't support foreigners lying about them either.
In the context of the recent riots, the much bigger difference is that the US has an unusually high bar for substantive incitement charges (which carry much higher sentences than hate speech charges) - if you poast "There are asylum seekers at 10 Acacia Avenue. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone burned the place down?" from your mother's basement and someone you never met who read the post does, in fact, burn down 10 Acacia Avenue then you are likely to be convicted of incitement to commit arson in the UK, but this would probably be 1st-amendment protected in the US.
Investigating "non-crime hate incidents" is stupid and the police should stop doing it, but the operative part is "non-crime" - none of the stories you hear about them involve someone being arrested, prosecuted, locked up etc.
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I wasn't clear, sorry. Making the general anti-immigration case is legal, but what about saying to an actual immigrant in front of you, 'I don't care how much tax you pay, I don't think you should be here'? At the very least, I'm pretty sure that it would be counted as a non-crime hate incident. And since that's the case, any given immigrant is never going to have their bubble of 'I pay my taxes, so it's fine' disrupted.
I'm not actually advocating for going around yelling 'Go home' in people's faces, but I think it's important to realise that here as in many areas status quo bias rules. Once you're in the country, it's very hard for people to tell you to leave it. Whereas if you're out of the country and you want to come in, shrugging and saying 'sorry, no can do' is much easier. Thus my constant insistence that immigration is like nuclear fission in a power plant: it has to be strictly controlled at all times because you can't undo a chain reaction later.
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