Labour are engulfed in major online safety furore

The National

4 days ago

It worked for rapper Kendrick Lamar; why not Technology Secretary Peter Kyle?
Kyle delivered a quite extraordinary, spittle-flecked response to critics of the Online Safety Act on Tuesday morning.
Nigel Farage is on the same side as paedophiles, Kyle spat. Not just any paedos either, the minister said that Farage would be on the same side as Jimmy Savile, were he still alive.
Going even further later on, he said that anyone wanting to overturn the controversial legislation is 'on the side of predators'.
That includes more than 400,000 people who have signed a petition calling for the Act to be repealed and could expand to organisations like Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Index on Censorship and the parent companies of Facebook and Wikipedia.
Even Ian Russell, the chair of the Molly Russell Foundation, a child protection charity, said that the Act was not up to snuff and had to be replaced by something even tougher. Who knew paedophiles had so many allies?
Quite why Labour are defending a Tory piece of legislation – the Act was passed by the Conservatives but is only coming into force now – is a question with a couple of answers.
The first is a political one. 'Protect our children' has become a potent rallying cry for the right, identifying bogeymen in everyone from asylum seekers to drag queens. This is Labour's counterblast: You're putting children at risk. If you're against us, you're on the same side as child abusers.
READ MORE: Labour respond as 400k demand repeal of Online Safety Act
As a strategy it could work. Many parents will doubtless be glad to see the Government come down hard on the worst bits of the internet.
It will certainly be welcomed by many that unregulated social media companies will be held responsible for removing content like child pornography and blocking children's access to sexual content or instructions for committing acts of self-harm or suicide.
There is unlikely to be great amounts of sympathy for arguments about the sanctity of end-to-end encryption or free online speech.
The flipside: are Reform UK railing against the Act – which this week enforced age restrictions on adult content – as a means to target the porn-addicted, misanthropic young men likely to make up its youth base at the next election? Quite possibly.
(Image: James Manning/PA)
The other reason that Kyle and his Labour comrades so aggressively back the Act is that they genuinely believe in it.
They do not care about warnings that by introducing strict age checks, people might be pushed into downloading software to evade restrictions and access the darker corners of the internet. Demand for virtual private networks, which allow people to browse the web away from the prying eyes of regulators, is soaring.
Kyle, as a rational being, must consider it plausible that the Act could have unintended consequences, though he shows no signs that he does.
He seems to believe that the intention of legislation is its effect. He appears to care only about why laws were introduced, not how they work.
Keir Starmer's response to criticism of the Act earlier this week took a similar approach: 'I don't see that as a free speech issue, I see that as child protection.'
It surely cannot be beyond him that the two are not mutually exclusive.
So it was with the SNP's doomed Named Person Scheme. Ministers were warned in 2016 that while the aim of the policy was 'unquestionably legitimate', it would violate people's human rights. It took another three years before it was officially ditched by the Scottish Government.
With Donald Trump's sidekick JD Vance threatening consequences for governments insufficiently amenable to his definition of free speech, perhaps Starmer and co might catch up with the laws of unintended consequences sooner rather than later.