I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.
This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.
He seemed pretty fixated on "monotheism" being a particular problem, as though two gods were fine.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-06/hacker...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/nov/21/immigration...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/britains-nh...
I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”
[1] https://hansard.parliament.uk/ [2] It was a very quick search.
I feel like during an election, policies and election promises are what should be presented, make it illegal to vote for a specific candidate, or for specific candidates to say what their policies are; they can only register policies with the election process.
Then people vote on the policies/promises they'd like to see implemented and whoever made those then gets in.
If policies and promises are not upheld during an election cycle, then that is illegal and those involved get charged and sentenced, though allowing for mitigating circumstances (say if the Tories promised x houses built in the last cycle, the pandemic would be mitigating circumstance for fewer houses built - but not _not_ houses built).
But meh, nothing will change and I really cannot be bothered with many people out there. Nothing will change the way people act, how apathetic they are.
It's the UK's Stop Making Me Defend Trump[0].
[0] https://pjmedia.com/charlie-martin/2017/01/20/stop-making-me...
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him to one of the nastiest people in our country’s history.
This is government overreach and they know it.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goals but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud just to access Spotify or wikipedia.
And no one voted for this.
When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of others' on thousands of decisions.
And even then, if both parties want to do something, as in this case, there is nowhere to go.
This is force. If you can't say 'no', this is immoral, coercive force, even if the person or party doing the forcing says it isn't.
And no, the forcer (government) won't give back freedoms (the right to privacy) that it takes away.
In the end, the only moral, respectful and free way to proceed, without force, ie where people opt in. Individuals would opt in/out to paying tax for wars/schools/online safety, etc.
"But it is impossible that everyone should be allowed to only opt in to the decisions they like!" .. is only the case because we think it is normal to endlessly abused by governments and because so many citizens are dependent on its handouts.
Your average citizen neither knows nor cares about the legislative landscape - they just know that the daily mail says Wikipedia hates the U.K. and is staffed by communists.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...
Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in power, it will not be repelled. Even so most likely they will try to wash it down instead of actually abolishing it.
Trouble is, like the frog in warming water, the UK is by a series of steps falling into ever-increasing irrelevancy on the world stage. By the time it wakes up to the fact it'll be too late.
Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally and culturally stronger, both major parties are virtually identical in what they actually permit the surveillance state to do once they get in office (despite sometimes talking differently while campaigning).
The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings. They keep these presentations secret from public and press scrutiny by claiming it's necessary to keep "sources and methods" secret from adversaries. Of course, this is ridiculous because adversary spy agencies are certainly already aware of the broad capabilities of our electronic surveillance - it's their job after all and they do the same things to their own populations. The intelligence community rarely briefs politicians on individual operations or the exact details of the sources and methods which adversarial intelligence agencies would care about anyway. The vast majority of these secret briefings could be public without revealing anything of real value to major adversaries. At most it would only confirm we're doing the things adversaries already assume we're doing (and already take steps to counter). The real reason they hide the politician briefings from the public is because voters would be creeped out by the pervasive surveillance and domain experts would call bullshit on the incomplete facts and fallacious reasoning used to justify it to politicians.
Even if a politician sincerely intended to preserve privacy and freedom before getting in office, they aren't domain experts and when confronted with seemingly overwhelming (but secret) evidence of preventing "big bad" presented unanimously by intelligence community experts, the majority of elected officials go along. If that's not enough for the anti-privacy agencies (intel & law enforcement) to get what they want, there's always the "think of the children" arguments. It's the rare politician who's clear-thinking and principled enough to apply appropriate skepticism and measured nuance when faced with horrendous examples of child porn and abuse which the law enforcement/intelligence agency lobby has ready in ample supply and deploys behind closed doors for maximum effect. The anti-privacy lobby has figured out how to hack representative democracy to circumvent protections and because it's done away from public scrutiny, there's currently no way to stop them and it's only going to keep getting worse. IMHO, it's a disaster and even in the U.S. (where I am) it's only slightly better than the UK, Australia, EU and elsewhere.
Those politicians who are vocal against mass surveillance tend to change their tune the moment they're in office and I doubt they were all intending to go back on their campaign promises from the start or that they were really convinced by horror stories of terrorists told over powerpoint in closed door briefings.
I wouldn't doubt if they were also giving politicians examples of the kind of dirt they already have on them and their families. This is one of the biggest risks of the surveillance state. Endless blackmail material made up of actual skeletons, as well as the resources to install new ones into anyone's closets whenever needed.
But when it comes to politicians and people with power, I think it's even worse than all of that. It's kind of obvious what Mr Epstein was getting up to with regard to blackmail.
Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.
They may be puppets, they may be manipulators, they may be con-artists, they may be liars; but what does it say about oneself if an “idiot” managed to become one of a few hundred most powerful humans on this planet and in all of human history (in the case of an American politician) and you did not?
We collect tons of data on people to sell ads. Why not to save children?
But, I expect that that won't help because your claims don't tell the while story. Most representatives don't act in good faith and like the government that they're a part of having such power.
