The Online Safety Act is not perfect but it’s one of the less silly things to appear this summer - David Behrens
The summer holidays are known in the news business as the silly season. With parliament in recess and MPs set free with their buckets and spades, there are fewer copper-bottomed stories so reporters have to make do with the occasional tinpot one.
This week saw a new low, with the widespread publication of a report beseeching us to spare a thought for one of society’s apparently most hard done-by groups… the independently rich.
Many people who earn more than £100,000 with no parental wealth to fall back on feel trapped by their financial commitments, according to a survey commissioned by a firm of money managers I will not dignify by naming. Nearly half the poor dears are so badly burdened with commuting costs, private healthcare and school fees that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from (Waitrose, I should imagine).
It’s hard to know what reaction they expected other than outright mockery. Before you know it, rich people will be on the streets selling magazines. “Buy a Big Issue Glyndebourne edition, guv’nor?”
It wasn’t the only story this week that left me open-mouthed: Donald Trump, on his flying golfing visit to Scotland, strung together two sentences that actually made sense.
“Politics is pretty simple,” he told Keir Starmer in the condescending manner of Oliver Hardy lecturing Stan Laurel. Anyone who lowered taxes, kept us out of wars and ended immigration could win an election. Easier said than done, of course, but Trump was not wrong.
He thought the next UK poll would be a two-horse race: Labour against Reform. All Nigel Farage has to do to prove him right is find 650 sensible candidates in the next four years. So far he has roughly none.
This was abundantly clear when the ragbag of councillors, mayors and four MPs who constitute the entirety of Reform UK managed to make a political hot potato of a generally welcomed new law.
The Online Safety Act, which came into force last weekend, protects children from the hateful and harmful content that has driven so many of them to radicalism, despair or self-harm. Reform is somehow against the idea.
We have until now taken a quaintly British attitude to online safety, with an officially designated ‘Information Commissioner’ acting like a hotel doorman on a revolving door of personal data. He has a staff of 1,000 and runs a department like Sir Humphrey Appleby’s Ministry of Administration in Yes Minister.
The new law sidesteps all that. It’s the most far-reaching in the world and an important first step in holding social media companies accountable for illegal content and the safety of their users, especially children.
What politician wouldn’t welcome that? Zia Yusuf, for one.
The dithering former Reform chairman, who resigned and then unresigned last month before they’d even taken his name off the door, said the new law was a dystopian infringement of free speech that would “force social media companies to censor anti-government speech”.
He clearly hadn’t thought it through. Anti-government censorship has nothing to do with protecting children. Reform, on the other hand, has somehow reconciled letting 16 year-olds roam unsupervised in the darkest corners of the web with its other policy of insisting they’re too young and foolish to be allowed to vote.
Yusuf also banged on about ‘virtual private networks’, online modesty screens which, for a fee, will protect your identity while you’re looking at something you shouldn’t. These, he said, circumvented the new rules which require you to prove you’re 18 before visiting risky sites.
Okay, but the same could be said for having a speed camera alarm in your car; or using an offshore tax scheme to help with those burdensome school fees. If it’s too easy to evade the law, the law should be toughened, not removed. Reform, supposedly the party of law and order, should know that.
But Yusuf and Farage have a vested interest in allowing everyone unfiltered access to the sewer of social media, for that is where their support is fermented. The lies are their lifeblood.
Besides, free speech is a uniquely American obsession. It has constitutional significance to Trump’s followers because he has told them it’s under threat. Here, even Reform’s most unreconstituted supporters would accept that protecting children is more important. Wasn’t it the very reason they were trying to flush out those asylum hotels?
The Online Safety Act is not perfect. It is a first draft and will have to adapt to the changing internet. But even as it stands, it’s one of the less silly things to appear this summer.