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> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer

by bArray 1y ago

> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone". Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some. > In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety. Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully). I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result: 1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them. 2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
drawfloat 1y ago
The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it. 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.
- adamm255 1y ago
  If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as it is.
  - weavejester 1y ago
    The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
    - petre 1y ago
      They will reverse it when politicians visiting pron sites are exposed through a leak or something. Everybody else uses VPNs.
      - tomkarho 1y ago
        Politicians already use VPN and even expense it. They've got their ducks in a row.
- mrandish 1y ago
  > I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this. 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.
- autoexec 1y ago
  Governments do seem to hate weakening their power over the population.
  - hilbert42 1y ago
    If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.
    - verisimi 1y ago
      Wiki isn't the citizenry. 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.
      - novok 1y ago
        They are not, but they are central resource that the citizenry uses. If enough of the internet enters an embargo with the UK, they will probably capitulate because more and more of the citizenry will realize what is happening, be greatly inconvenienced, reduce the UK's GDP and complain. IMO I hope more big websites do block the UK.
      - bratbag 1y ago
        The libertarian fantasy where its possible to exist without the choices of others impacting you, doesn't work in the real world.
- monooso 1y ago
  Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it. 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.
  - Jimmc414 1y ago
    > 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.
    - ozim 1y ago
      Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
      - MrGilbert 1y ago
        > Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future. Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
        bigfudge 1y ago
        Surely gut feelings are how we get populists voted in? I’d prefer people sat and thought carefully for a while than trusted their gut!
        1y ago
- stephen_g 1y ago
  What? I can't imagine anybody who was paying attention through any of this would have expected that Starmer's Labour would reverse this...
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  > The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it. 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.
  - hilbert42 1y ago
    "Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in power, it will not be repelled." 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.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  They voted against it because they thought it was not strong enough [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pledges-toughen-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...
- captainbland 1y ago
  I think something like reversing it in one specific domain (e.g. softcore porn or static images). Then retooling it so it applies to e.g. people viewing info on immigration rights etc. is likely on the cards.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada. The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  Reboot doesn't mean improvement.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin... It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing constitutional law there for hundreds of years. Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.
  - jkaplowitz 1y ago
    And a significant part of the Canadian constitution is now codified and entrenched in ways that no single one of the federal or provincial parliaments across Canada can freely amend, albeit not in a single document, even though Canada shares the same King as the UK. No reason the UK couldn’t do it - the UK Parliament itself even enacted the fundamental constitutional structure that Canada now has, at Canada’s request, and in the same act removed its own power to legislate for Canada going forward. (Canada had previously deferred its assumption of the power to amend its own constitution without asking the UK to do it until it figured out what replacement arrangement it wanted, which took half a century and the requesting Canadian government still very controversially did not win the assent of or even consult Quebec before proceeding.) With that said, there is an important structural difference: Canada is a true federal state rather than a unitary one like the UK which merely has some nonexclusive and constrained devolution to three subordinate parliaments within specific scopes. Every single bit of the Canadian constitution is indeed freely amendable by enough of the eleven Canadian federal or provincial parliaments working together. Certain specific parts can indeed be amended unilaterally by one parliament, but many parts need a much larger level of consensus, up to and including unanimity. This means that the Canadian situation is not really a counterexample to the claim that the UK parliament would necessarily retain full amendment rights if it did codify a constitution, since the UK parliament is most similar in authority not to the Canadian federal parliament but to all eleven federal or provincial Canadian parliaments combined, which collectively do retain full amendment flexibility if they can all agree as required. However, some provinces refuse to ratify amendments without a referendum, and the country has a lot of trauma from past failed attempts to make major constitutional amendments such that they mostly don’t attempt them any more, so the eleven parliaments have de facto lost some of their collective parliamentary supremacy even if they have not lost it de jure.
varispeed 1y ago
> It creates a safer online world for some. The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and lure businesses with attractive fees. In that sense it is safer (for criminals).
Ntrails 1y ago
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments. It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line. It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
- llbbdd 1y ago
  They should just do the same thing many governments the world over have done - adopt a version of the US constitution. Easy, clean, and only massively ironic.
  - vkou 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - clarionbell 1y ago
      Constitution is pretty clear on that question. The problem is that in order to persecute president you need congress to act. The constitution simply doesn't account for a situation, when congress willingly ceases vital functions. To be fair, it took over 200 years for this edge case to occur. If this was a software we would marvel at its stability.
      - foldr 1y ago
        200 years isn’t a very long time in British historical terms.
      - vkou 1y ago
        > Constitution is pretty clear on that question. Given that all three branches of government seems to be moving in lockstep on it, (with the military, the secret police, and the police all behind them), you are right - it is clear on that question. It's clear to all them that, no, anything he does goes, and no, the 14th doesn't actually mean anything. That's not how I parse it from a cursory reading, but who am I to nay-say the king?
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.
- Ericson2314 1y ago
  The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate. Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
  - nickff 1y ago
    Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
    - pmontra 1y ago
      There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it. So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
      - yard2010 1y ago
        This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians. My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.
onetimeusename 1y ago
Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume) constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court. Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so maybe that points to why.
- milesrout 1y ago
  None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
  - onetimeusename 1y ago
    No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have been under Gordon Brown.
brigandish 1y ago
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments. As an repetition of and an aside to all those pointing out that there is a constitution, what may find gaining some momentum after this are calls for a Bill of Rights, something England used to have[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
- foldr 1y ago
  The Bill of Rights was never repealed, so there’s no “used to” about it.
  - brigandish 1y ago
    That's a sophist's argument. There's a reason it's qualified as the 1689 Bill of Rights, because it doesn't exist as a bill of rights any more. Parts of it were subsumed by other laws, parts of it repealed - where is your right to bear arms?
    - foldr 1y ago
      > That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law. This part of it could hardly have been retained unaltered.
SwtCyber 1y ago
Wikipedia's not perfect, but its transparency and edit history make it a lot less susceptible to the kinds of anonymous abuse this law is supposedly targeting
cs02rm0 1y ago
>> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone". >Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some. Does it even do that?
- account42 1y ago
  It's safer for those in power who don't want their actions criticized.
traceroute66 1y ago
> People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them Yeah, its hilarious if you watch or listen to BBC output you would think VPNs don't exist the way the BBC promote it as some sort of amazing new "think of the children" protection.
account42 1y ago
> 2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. This is way too optimistic. Maybe they'll make it as a campaign promise but in all likelihood they'll be happy to have it without being blamed directly and the law will stay unless people put up enough of a stink that it's clear the alternative would be violent revolution. Increasing government control over the population is not a partisan issue.
3abiton 1y ago
Someone else said it, but oneconspiracy theory is that the UK is doing this to instill more "internet" literacy in their population (given that they'll go out of their way to do the free internet). I doubt that is the case, but that's a better cope for many than a dystopian government.
hnfong 1y ago
What do you mean, the UK always had a constitution! </S>
jalapenos 1y ago
People will use VPNs, but no the next government won't remove it - the power hungry don't give up powers, and there's already a constitution.
kenny239 1y ago
I was reminded of this article from a better time of the internet: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/ http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/ Back then people were kinda just complaining about the centralization of Wikipedia. The bar keeps getting lower. Is everything going to be encrypted behind a VPN protocol in the future?

by bArray 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

drawfloat 1y ago

The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it. 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.

adamm255 1y ago
If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as it is.
- weavejester 1y ago
  The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
  - petre 1y ago
    They will reverse it when politicians visiting pron sites are exposed through a leak or something. Everybody else uses VPNs.
    - tomkarho 1y ago
      Politicians already use VPN and even expense it. They've got their ducks in a row.
mrandish 1y ago
> I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this. 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.
autoexec 1y ago
Governments do seem to hate weakening their power over the population.
- hilbert42 1y ago
  If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.
  - verisimi 1y ago
    Wiki isn't the citizenry. 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.
    - novok 1y ago
      They are not, but they are central resource that the citizenry uses. If enough of the internet enters an embargo with the UK, they will probably capitulate because more and more of the citizenry will realize what is happening, be greatly inconvenienced, reduce the UK's GDP and complain. IMO I hope more big websites do block the UK.
    - bratbag 1y ago
      The libertarian fantasy where its possible to exist without the choices of others impacting you, doesn't work in the real world.
monooso 1y ago
Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it. 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.
- Jimmc414 1y ago
  > 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.
  - ozim 1y ago
    Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
    - MrGilbert 1y ago
      > Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future. Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
      - bigfudge 1y ago
        Surely gut feelings are how we get populists voted in? I’d prefer people sat and thought carefully for a while than trusted their gut!
        1y ago
stephen_g 1y ago
What? I can't imagine anybody who was paying attention through any of this would have expected that Starmer's Labour would reverse this...
ExoticPearTree 1y ago
> The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it. 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.
- hilbert42 1y ago
  "Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in power, it will not be repelled." 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.
gpderetta 1y ago
They voted against it because they thought it was not strong enough [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pledges-toughen-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...
captainbland 1y ago
I think something like reversing it in one specific domain (e.g. softcore porn or static images). Then retooling it so it applies to e.g. people viewing info on immigration rights etc. is likely on the cards.

mathiaspoint 1y ago

A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada. The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.

catlikesshrimp 1y ago
Reboot doesn't mean improvement.
Y_Y 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin... It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing constitutional law there for hundreds of years. Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.
- jkaplowitz 1y ago
  And a significant part of the Canadian constitution is now codified and entrenched in ways that no single one of the federal or provincial parliaments across Canada can freely amend, albeit not in a single document, even though Canada shares the same King as the UK. No reason the UK couldn’t do it - the UK Parliament itself even enacted the fundamental constitutional structure that Canada now has, at Canada’s request, and in the same act removed its own power to legislate for Canada going forward. (Canada had previously deferred its assumption of the power to amend its own constitution without asking the UK to do it until it figured out what replacement arrangement it wanted, which took half a century and the requesting Canadian government still very controversially did not win the assent of or even consult Quebec before proceeding.) With that said, there is an important structural difference: Canada is a true federal state rather than a unitary one like the UK which merely has some nonexclusive and constrained devolution to three subordinate parliaments within specific scopes. Every single bit of the Canadian constitution is indeed freely amendable by enough of the eleven Canadian federal or provincial parliaments working together. Certain specific parts can indeed be amended unilaterally by one parliament, but many parts need a much larger level of consensus, up to and including unanimity. This means that the Canadian situation is not really a counterexample to the claim that the UK parliament would necessarily retain full amendment rights if it did codify a constitution, since the UK parliament is most similar in authority not to the Canadian federal parliament but to all eleven federal or provincial Canadian parliaments combined, which collectively do retain full amendment flexibility if they can all agree as required. However, some provinces refuse to ratify amendments without a referendum, and the country has a lot of trauma from past failed attempts to make major constitutional amendments such that they mostly don’t attempt them any more, so the eleven parliaments have de facto lost some of their collective parliamentary supremacy even if they have not lost it de jure.

varispeed 1y ago

> It creates a safer online world for some. The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and lure businesses with attractive fees. In that sense it is safer (for criminals).

Ntrails 1y ago

> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments. It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line. It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!

llbbdd 1y ago
They should just do the same thing many governments the world over have done - adopt a version of the US constitution. Easy, clean, and only massively ironic.
- vkou 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - clarionbell 1y ago
    Constitution is pretty clear on that question. The problem is that in order to persecute president you need congress to act. The constitution simply doesn't account for a situation, when congress willingly ceases vital functions. To be fair, it took over 200 years for this edge case to occur. If this was a software we would marvel at its stability.
    - foldr 1y ago
      200 years isn’t a very long time in British historical terms.
    - vkou 1y ago
      > Constitution is pretty clear on that question. Given that all three branches of government seems to be moving in lockstep on it, (with the military, the secret police, and the police all behind them), you are right - it is clear on that question. It's clear to all them that, no, anything he does goes, and no, the 14th doesn't actually mean anything. That's not how I parse it from a cursory reading, but who am I to nay-say the king?

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.

Ericson2314 1y ago
The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate. Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
- nickff 1y ago
  Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
  - pmontra 1y ago
    There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it. So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
    - yard2010 1y ago
      This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians. My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.

onetimeusename 1y ago

Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume) constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court. Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so maybe that points to why.

milesrout 1y ago
None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
- onetimeusename 1y ago
  No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have been under Gordon Brown.

brigandish 1y ago

> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments. As an repetition of and an aside to all those pointing out that there is a constitution, what may find gaining some momentum after this are calls for a Bill of Rights, something England used to have[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

foldr 1y ago
The Bill of Rights was never repealed, so there’s no “used to” about it.
- brigandish 1y ago
  That's a sophist's argument. There's a reason it's qualified as the 1689 Bill of Rights, because it doesn't exist as a bill of rights any more. Parts of it were subsumed by other laws, parts of it repealed - where is your right to bear arms?
  - foldr 1y ago
    > That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law. This part of it could hardly have been retained unaltered.

SwtCyber 1y ago

Wikipedia's not perfect, but its transparency and edit history make it a lot less susceptible to the kinds of anonymous abuse this law is supposedly targeting

cs02rm0 1y ago

>> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone". >Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some. Does it even do that?

account42 1y ago
It's safer for those in power who don't want their actions criticized.

traceroute66 1y ago

> People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them Yeah, its hilarious if you watch or listen to BBC output you would think VPNs don't exist the way the BBC promote it as some sort of amazing new "think of the children" protection.

account42 1y ago

> 2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. This is way too optimistic. Maybe they'll make it as a campaign promise but in all likelihood they'll be happy to have it without being blamed directly and the law will stay unless people put up enough of a stink that it's clear the alternative would be violent revolution. Increasing government control over the population is not a partisan issue.

3abiton 1y ago

Someone else said it, but oneconspiracy theory is that the UK is doing this to instill more "internet" literacy in their population (given that they'll go out of their way to do the free internet). I doubt that is the case, but that's a better cope for many than a dystopian government.

hnfong 1y ago

What do you mean, the UK always had a constitution! </S>

jalapenos 1y ago

People will use VPNs, but no the next government won't remove it - the power hungry don't give up powers, and there's already a constitution.

kenny239 1y ago

I was reminded of this article from a better time of the internet: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/ http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/ Back then people were kinda just complaining about the centralization of Wikipedia. The bar keeps getting lower. Is everything going to be encrypted behind a VPN protocol in the future?