This is what I wrote in a header in July 2021 about the Online Safety Bill – now the Online Safety Act 2023.

This introduces the novel and alarming principle that internet companies should have a “duty of care” to remove content which “may” cause “psychological harm”. Not will cause. Not content which is criminal. Not a “harm” which is clearly defined. But this vague catch-all which treats the public as little babies to be coddled rather than as sentient adults. If passed, it amounts to one of the severest attacks on free speech we’ve ever had. Any activist group or citizen or lobbyist on any issue of controversy will have every excuse to whip up outrage over anything they dislike, claim that they have been psychologically harmed and get content removed or prevented from being published at all. Internet companies who don’t comply face fines of up to 10% of turnover.

And who is to regulate all this? Why Ofcom – a body whose chair is appointed by the government and who only just missed having Paul Dacre, former Daily Mail editor as chair.

It is a wretchedly sinister bill which will result in censorship of any views someone somewhere does not like, which gives alarmingly wide and authoritarian powers of censorship to government and to unaccountable overseas based technology companies and their algorithms (created by God knows who), which will crack down on the expression of opinions by ordinary citizens on the web, on blogs such as this, while controlling what journalists can say, which does not give the censored any right of appeal and which will be used by repressive governments around the world as justification for their own even worse measures.  It needs strangling at birth not fiddling around with the drafting. Quite how it is even remotely compatible with the government’s Freedom of Speech Bill, intended to make universities give a platform to those with unpopular views is hard to say. It isn’t. 

The government has no understanding or care for freedom, the rule of law or justice – other than as words to be used in some ridiculous culture war of its own imagining. It has no understanding of British values, no willingness to stand up for them or exemplify them. It treats the British public as fools, to be alternately controlled or blamed. It panders to their worst instincts and seeks to make it hard for them to show their best side. This is not how a genuinely patriotic party behaves. These are incoherent, nasty and repressive proposals, performative laws which do little to address real problems but which allow Ministers to pose as strongmen.

Too much to expect the Opposition parties to oppose, I suppose. Too much to expect Tory MPs to wonder if this is what a Conservative party claiming to believe in Britain should be doing. Some like to say that, at heart, the PM [Johnson] is a liberal. On this evidence – and while I can still say this without causing “psychological harm” to his many fans – pull the other one, it’s got bells on.”

We have had many Tory PM’s since then. Labour is now in power but Labour supported this Bill and was at times critical that it did not go far enough. So did the Liberal Democrats. The Act is in the process of being implemented.

Given that one of Labour’s first steps was to stop the implementation of the the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, Yvette Cooper’s decision in November 2024 to expand the recording of non-crime hate incidents (despite the Court of Appeal’s 2021 decision in Miller v College of Policing) and Starmer’s feeble response to one of his MP’s (Tahir Ali’s) demand for a de facto blasphemy law, those concerned by the far-reaching effect of this Act on public debate and on forums, such as this one, can have no confidence in any Labour commitment to free speech.

It may require legal action under the ECHR – under Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion) and Article 10 (freedom of expression) – to remind our Parliament – and a Prime Minister who makes much of his career as a barrister specialising in human rights law – of what the European Court of Human Rights said in the 1976 case – Handyside v The United Kingdom:

“Freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a [“democratic society”], one of the basic conditions for its progress and for the development of every man. Subject to paragraph 2 of Article 10 …it is applicable not only to “information” or “ideas” that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no “democratic society”.

Cyclefree