[nsnick]

Legislation doesn’t guarantee rights. If the same body trying to violate your rights with a bill can just pass another bill to repeal your rights, your rights are not protected. Two things are required to guarantee rights from a government: a constitution or charter that is extraordinarily difficult to modify, and a court system whose decisions can’t be overturned by the elected government, neither of which the UK has.

[sjy]

> a constitution or charter that is extraordinarily difficult to modify, and a court system whose decisions can’t be overturned by the elected government

Remember Brexit? It took them almost four years to achieve after the referendum, in part due to decisions by the constitutional court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_Secretary_of_Stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...

[hnlmorg]

This is just a hypothetical destination at the end of the day.

For example the POTUS gets to appoint judges which has lead to the courts becoming increasingly partisan. And Trump did a pretty good job of abusing his power left right and centre without any repercussions.

Whereas on the flip side, UK politicians have been taken to court over the lawfulness of various decisions (such as “brexit”) and PMs forced to step down over incidents far less serious than anything that has resulted in POTUS impeachments.

And as much as the US constitution guarantees rights, the constitution can be changed. In fact 2 of the rights described here are amendments themselves.

We can all argue about which political system offers greater safeguards but ultimately it’s all just theoretical debate. A bad actor with sufficient support in either political system could do serious damage to the rights of their citizens.

So I think it’s a erroneous to distil the argument down to such a simplistic model and then argue that America is somehow more free than the U.K. because of it. A more valid argument would be that we are roughly equivalent in a subject that is clearly very complex.