Is Britain the only Western country that gives visas to Islamic hate preachers and invites them to anti-terror conferences?

Are they? Really? Met many of them? The more extreme their views in Britain, the fewer there are of them - Right or Left - and most people ignore them.

Yes, to all three of your question marks. Compared to U.S liberals, the U.K ones are far more left. 

Thank you!

I'm afraid I've not visited the US but from a few years of conversations on sites like this, and reports by American journalists and commentators explaining US politics on BBC News programmes, I have realised the UK seems almost socialist to many Americans. That's even when we have a Conservative government - we have  overheard the arguing over any proposals to introduce even something a little like the UK's National Health Service to the US.

Ironically, our own NHS is being stealthily nibbled away at, with important parts of it sold off, some to American companies for whom illness is a commodity.

A few decades ago, the Far Left were regarded as more of a threat to the UK than the Far Right. The Marxists were generally much more organised, and much more subtle, than their Right-wing opponents, who were mostly a rag-bag of oddballs more noisy than effectual. Indeed, during the Cold War, Moscow was courting a lot of the Left-wing groups and trying to infiltrate the trades-unions.

Too many people in the UK had too many personal or one-generation-removed memories of WW2 and why it was fought, to have any sympathy for the hard-right types. On the other hand, Britain has a strong trades-union history - we invented them, after all, particularly in the wake of the Industrial Revolution - and the unions and the Labour Party they founded, did have genuine, major causes to fight in the 19C and 20C. The bulk of the unions and Labour politicians did not want the UK to become Communist, though the USSR and some factions in the UK did; but they did fight for and gain what we now enjoy but take too much for granted - and which the USA seem to think dangerous.

Interestingly, at the height of the Cold War when the US was persecuting anyone even suspected of Communist leanings, the actual Communist Party of Great Britain appears to have been left alone. It was probably seen as more an irritant than a poison, and its Morning Star newspaper was openly on sale; but I expect the authorities were keeping a very close eye on its members....

More recently, the USSR has collapsed so Marxism is largely a spent force in Europe. However, the European Union is becoming ever more a de facto, but fragile, supra-nation for which Britain, France, Italy and Germany are the main bank-rollers without anyone knowing where all the money actually goes; and now many thousands of people have fled North from the shambles in the Middle East and Africa. These two factors have put considerable pressure on many European countries, leading to the rise not only of genuine national-independence parties in EU countries, but also rabidly right-wing extremist groups. 

It is these, and the threat of indiscriminate murders by "Muslim" fundamentalists, that are seen as the problems now; and one or two of the nastiest neo-Nazi groups have been banned in the UK; not for their political opinions as such, but for promoting racist hatred and violence. I don't know the situation there now, but in Austria, trying to deny the Holocaust occurred was a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment, certainly until quite recently.  

Returning to the original question...

I do not know if hate-preachers are allowed into the UK but nowhere else, but the EU and the separate, non-EU, European Court of Human Rights have become so hoist by their own human-rights petards, that stopping those people is now legally very difficult, especially if the preachers can find (and afford???) defence barristers with very sharp minds but very blunt humanity. I think the problem is that the matters these bodies are now called upon to settle, are very different from those for which they were designed. One unforeseen consequence is that the ECHR in particular is regarded by many, rightly or not, as favouring the "rights" of criminals over those of the victims.

I suppose in the end, "Right" and "Left" are highly subjective terms, and are inevitably referred to their user's own nation's culture and politics.  

Thank you for this very thoughtful contribution, Durdle. 

It is sometimes said - especially in a British context - that the Right won the economic war, the Left won the cultural war. On "bread and butter" issues like the free market versus intervention, nationalised versus privatised industries, and progressive taxation, the Right largely got their own way, whereas on social, moral and cultural issues, the liberal-Left (which is not the entire Left) pretty much got their own way. This is an oversimplification of course, but over the last 20 years it has often felt as though we are living under an artificial consensus - a meld of Thatcherism, extreme social liberalism and political correctness. The Tory Party has abandoned the last vestiges of traditional conservatism, embracing liberal identity politics with almost the same enthusiasm as Labour.

The consensus has started to come under attack in recent years, both from the Left, with the rise of Momentum in Britain and populist movements in Mediterranean countries, and from the Right, on the specific issue of immigration as you mentioned earlier. So perhaps in the long run it will turn out to be just as fragile as the old Post-War consensus, although at present there is no movement that can provide a clear joined-up alternative to it. Of course Brexit is one of the most contentious issues of the day but was never really a Left versus Right issue. Before the mid-80's, Labour was the more Euro-sceptic party, or so I have been informed.

The ECHR has made some perverse decisions but the situation has become worse with the passing of the Human Rights Act which has led to UK courts treating ECHR judgements as binding precedents, which they were never intended to be, and to what Dominic Raab, in his book "The Assault on Liberty" has termed "rights inflation". The case referred to in my question above may or may not be linked to this, but I posted it because I found it very striking that it hadn't led to a big scandal at the time. Perhaps it's just another example of the Brexit debate crowding out other issues?

Thank you for that analysis.

I agree that it's now hard to tell Right from Left in Britain, with both main parties meandering around very similar ideas. For example, the Conservatives led by Mrs. Thatcher started selling off huge chunks of the public services with no thought of value, only absolute cost, and Labour were very indignant about it. Then Labour, under Tony Blair first, continued this dismantling with, if anything, even more vigour than the Conservatives had shown. (My own employer was one such victim.)   

Apart from the main industries, the main target was probably the Scientific Civil Service, as it was an easy target, thanks to ignorance by too many politicians, journalists and members of the public, of its existence let alone roles. I think this encouraged by a rise in the so-called "professional politician" - typically a degree-holder in something like economics, becoming a Party clerk then an MP - without ever having any sort of real employment outside of politics.

I think you're right about the Labour Party being more Euro-sceptic in the past - it included such figures as Tony Benn, whose opposition to the way the EU was developing was based wholly on his experiences of working with it. I think he was a member of the Council of Ministers, and would have supported the organisation at first. 

Later, views changed, with all three main parties being officially and perhaps generally, pro-EU but with differing shades of support. The Liberals were simply abdicants, for whom the EU could do no wrong. Labour and The Conservatives both supported it, but the latter were more cautious and questioning. UKIP is often snee5red at "right-wing" - and Gerard Batten hiring some ex-EDL member as his "advisor" did not help it - but it's actually quite centralist, having drawn members from both Labour and the Conservatives, and a good many business people.

The EU itself is vaguely socialist in some ways - and its governing structure eerily parallels that of the old USSR - but it is heavily influenced by major corporations and lobby groups.  The difficulty we have in Britain is that the Press and the BBC are notoriously lax at reporting it. They report and comment in great detail, as they should, on the UK's internal politics, and certain sections comment endlessly on American elections of no real importance outside of the USA.  The EU though has been largely ignored, then the politicians wonder why their employers - we the people - think as we do about it.

An example of this lack of information is the confusion between the ECHR and the ECJ, with a lot of people thinking both are EU bodies. The ECJ is - it oversees EU nations' governments in applying EU laws to their own statute-books, and settles disputes between governments and EU. It has enough to keep it busy: since the UK "joined" what was then the European Economic Community, it has had to absorb many times more rules and regulations in 40 years, than it created in the preceding 1000! Estimates vary widely, with figures of over 100 000 bandied about, but it is very hard to know, and this probably includes rafts of petty rules governing individual trades and professions. (Yes - it did have a rule about the shapes of bananas - this was finally proven when the EU announced repealing (repeeling?) it! It had almost certainly been made at the behest of the supermarkets.)

EEC, later EU: there was never a "Common Market". That was Edward Heath's name for it, when he signed Britain's accession, a move of questionable constitutional legality - and allegedly encouraged by a handsome personal cash "reward" of tax-payers' money for doing so. Contrary to common belief, the UK DOES have a written Constitution, but it is scattered around very many vital Acts going back centuries, not enshrined in one document. 

Ironically Britain was very active in establishing the ECHR, but we have a unfortunate tendency to regard all rules as not only inviolable but also weak, so "gold-plate" them. Combine this with the risk of courts using poor precedents without fully considering the consequences, and it is not surprising we do trip over them.

I agree with your point about the "Brexit" debate ( what a ghastly word, following the equally ghastly "Grexit") dominating the news. I can't recall if similar happened around the time of our "joining".

I've not come across Dominic Raab's book, but "rights inflation"? I'd certainly agree that  the laudable desire to treat everyone fairly has led to an awful situation where minorities seem to assume "rights" above others', merely for being in a minority; and far too many people now are far too ready to take offence to the nth degree, often even on assumed behalf of third-parties whose views may not actually have been sought. Conversely, all sorts of otherwise harmless events or even more dangerously, ideas, are stifled lest they offend the un-asked. We see this in the childish rows in universities over so-called "safe spaces", or whether to invite speakers lest some students might disagree with them. Being non-university-educated I'd thought university students are all naturally highly-intelligent, highly-educated and capable of rational analysis of difficult, maybe even socially sensitive, information. Evidently, some are not, and they risk poisoning all. 

Altogether, a very unhealthy, even dangerous situation; a sort of self-imposed, social fascism based on the ability to parade the noisiest, one's own assumed virtues, own rights and ideas above those of all others even of equal merit.