| Suffering fools gladly |
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This past weekend I spent my Sunday morning listening to a woman declare that all non-English persons living in London were thieves and plunderers. She identified Indians, all Africans and Italians for her criticism. Not only are these people not wanted in her country, but they also have no right to be here. I have never heard more blatant bigotry and racism anywhere. However, she wasn’t hauled off in the back of a police car, nobody from the crowd of thirty or so took her around the corner for a sound beating, in fact the worst that was thrown her way were a few boos. 
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While Speaker's Corner seems to allow anyone who wishes to stand up and speak their mind to do so, there is no more 'freedom of speech' there than there is in any other place in the UK, and expressing views which (in the opinion of the policemen on duty) are illegal or likely to cause a breach of the peace will cause the speaker to be detained and/or silenced and/or arrested. Unlike the US, where those who express unpopular or minority views in public will often have their right to say whatever they want defended by the police.
The only special provision at Speaker's Corner is a certain relaxation of the usual public-order rules about creating an obstruction or nuisance, which would apply if you set up your soapbox in Kensington High Street and blocked traffic. Speaker's Corner is often celebrated as being a symbol of free speech, when it is actually nothing of the kind - the laws which prohibit all sorts of free expression in the UK apply there just as they do everywhere else. The best that can be said is that, at Speaker's Corner, those laws may enjoy perhaps a degree of relaxation - but always entirely at the discretion of the police officers posted there.
Freedom of speech is members of the American Nazi Party marching through downtown Skokie, Ill, yelling their racist trash at the top of their lungs - with a police escort to protect them. Such exercises of free speech are impossible in the UK for a wide range of opinions, which are either simply illegal to express, or which are unpopular enough that they can be suppressed on the grounds of 'public order' - IOW, the mob veto.
llater,
llamas