Britain's Berlin firewall

An act of national self-harm

One of the most disconcerting social developments of our age is the upending of the traditional relationship between age and knowledge. It used to be the case that, stuck by an absence of know-how, we asked our elders, wisdom which might have saved our lives; now, with the ubiquity of tech in our everyday lives, the relationship has been inverted. My mother comes to me me when she has a problem with her laptop; I ask my own children. These technological changes have played some part in the wider erosion of parental authority.

This new dynamic often shows itself in the approach of lawmakers to the internet, often confused and scared by a complex sector which requires brainpower sadly lacking in most elected representatives.

Many MPs don’t understand how tech works and are unable to grasp the consequences of legislation restricting it - one result of which is the Online Safety Act, cooked up by the last Tory government but now being implemented and defended by their Labour successors.

It began with good intentions, in particular as a response to the tragic death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life after exposure to suicide and self-harm websites.

In The Critic, Melisa Tourt of the the Centre for Policy Studies recounted how the law came into being, following a white paper in April 2019, since when it has ‘been overseen by eight Secretaries of State, three Prime Ministers, and two different sponsoring departments.’

She wrote that: ‘The resulting 303-page Act, and the thousands of pages of codes of conduct that accompany it, is a quite remarkable piece of legislation. Remarkable because it sacrifices both freedom of expression as we know it, and Britain’s hopes of sustaining a world-leading tech industry to protect the innocence of a theoretical child in Tunbridge Wells.

‘But it turns out that pioneering comprehensive regulation of the internet when you don’t actually really understand the internet is not exactly best practice. With nowhere to look to understand what worked — and, crucially, what didn’t work — campaigners and policy experts attempting to argue that certain elements of the Bill would have awful unintended consequences had few case studies to point to. So their warnings about the risks were simply not accepted.’