I can’t stand Nigel Farage… but he is right about one thing. In fact, rather like a broken clock is right twice a day, he’s actually right about two things. Firstly, though he hardly ever mentions it these days now Reform’s riding high in the polls and he thinks his rabble might get a majority under first past the post, Reform’s official policy is to back a fairer, more proportional voting system for Westminster elections, something which has been Lib Dem policy for a century. But that’s not what I’m writing about today, you’ll no doubt be very pleased to hear.
So, before turning to the single other issue I have at least a level of agreement with Nigel Farage on, let me just stress just how much I think he’s been one of the most destructive and divisive figures in British political history. From Brexit to immigration and from the NHS (which I strongly believe he’d privatise in a heartbeat if he got the chance) to banning Pride flags from the council buildings Reform now controls, my liberal politics couldn’t be any more opposed to his populist politics if I tried… and believe me I have.
Which means I’m very surprised indeed to be writing, and in the Daily Express no less, about an issue in which I agree with Mr Farage much more than I agree with the supposedly much more moderate Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. So what issue do I refer to?
Our mutual opposition to the Online Safety Act (OSA), at least in its present form. Now let me say straight off, of course we need to do all that we can to ensure children are protected from genuinely harmful content (though you might think parents and guardians have a bigger role in ensuring this than does the state) but however well-intentioned the OSA may be, we’ve seemingly ended up in the bizarre situation where certain Wikipedia articles and even some MPs speeches are being blocked for young internet users.
This is using a bulldozer to crack a nut. It’s an overweening, overpowerful, nanny-state restriction of the civil liberties of our youngest citizens to, with the supervision of responsible parents/guardians, engage with potentially conflicting ideas, thoughts, and worldviews and begin to learn what they believe.
The battle of ideas is the very basis of our democracy. And, indeed, in perhaps the biggest irony of all, it is this Labour Government that is legislating to extend the franchise and give 16-year-olds the vote, a move myself and the Lib Dems have been campaigning to achieve for many years.
So, on the one hand Labour wants to empower young people but on the other it doesn’t trust them and those who care for them to access competing political ideas and then be able to make up their own minds about what they think.
As we’ve learnt to expect from this Labour administration, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. And this is far from the only problem with this legislation.
As Lib Dem group Liberal Reform has pointed out, these laws could in fact see children placed in more danger if they use VPNs to get around age verification.
Liberal Reform says: “However VPNs are often closely tied to the dark web meaning that children (may) work around the ban and (potentially) access even more extreme material.”
So Nigel Farage is right when he calls this government over-reach and says that “it begins to look as though State suppression of genuine free speech may be upon us already.”
In case you think this is all Labour, by the way, a timely reminder that the Act was actually phased in under the Conservatives in 2023 and is now coming in to full effect.
Tech companies should, of course, do all they can to protect children from genuinely harmful content but that must not include diminishing a genuine battle of ideas, of conflicting worldviews, and political positions. I’m not a free speech absolutist.
We all, quite rightly, live within the boundaries of the law and also of social norms, and there’s certainly no free speech without potential consequence if those boundaries are crossed.
But, within that framework, we must be allowed to engage with different ideas and debates, to have a broad perspective of politics, policies, and principles.
It’s perhaps never been truer that you sometimes find yourself with unusual bedfellows in politics and I certainly didn’t expect to be writing about agreeing with Nigel Farage.
But on this he, and people in my own party, are right to hold this weak and woeful Labour Government to account and to call for it to urgently make changes to this legislation, to ensure a better balance between protecting the young from harm and removing their opportunity to engage in and learn more about the politics of the day.