Utter bollocks as far as the UK's concerned.
And further to giving the people saying those things the good ole British V salute, it really pisses me off when people start ranting about "freedom of speech" being impinged upon because they're not allowed to be prejudiced any more.
I used to live in Saudi Arabia. The country that bans any non-government approved Islamic scholars from giving fatwas (legal rulings) to the point that if you google search opinions of scholars outside Saudi Arabia, you get the whole "this site is banned by the government" net nanny screen. You literally can't read any Islamic scholar/fatwa site in Saudi Arabia, other than those run by the government approved scholars, i.e. those that will make up rulings to match what the King wants people to think. IKEA had to produce catalogues with no women in them at all, to prevent the Saudi censors ruining their catalogues with big, thick marker pens. Something IKEA were criticised for, but no matter how they portrayed women in their catalogues, the censors were scribbling them out with big, thick marker pens. So what could IKEA do? The censors literally go through every single individual catalogue (or any book, publication, etc being imported) and use marker pens to scribble out the bits they don't approve of. That's if the book gets approved at all, because a great many don't. Seriously, people who whine about "freedom of speech" because they're called out for being bigots need to wake up and see what censorship actually looks like.
So yeah it kind of annoys me a lot when people whinge about "I don't have freedom of speech to be a bigot any more because of these draconian hate speech laws*" - UK hate speech laws aren't draconian. If you're not being a total unmitigated bigot and threatening to hurt people because of their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, etc, you're not going to fall foul of them. Even most bigots won't fall foul of hate speech laws. "I hate/disagree with (add any protected group here)" and similar is not against hate speech laws. "Let's all go and beat up (add any protected group here)" would be against hate speech laws (and might be considered terrorism.)
*and of course the people saying those things are saying it's marriage equality laws that have led to a lack of freedom of speech/religion, which is just silly.
ETA: please excuse my rants I know I'm preaching to the choir here... but I'm just so shocked and angered by this. Let me know if boycotting Australian alcoholic drinks would work or not
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