Spoken on behalf of the Government on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury wants pornography gone from the UK on the basis of protecting women's and girls safety and fighting misogyny in society.
Bear in mind, this is separate from the Online Safety Act about to be enacted and the age verification plan any website not "suitable for children". Also bear in mind VPN's operating in the UK are also required to comply with the law.
The UK Government is about to go to war on pornography and appease both the feminists who believe it is exploitative and harmful to women while turning men into misogynists and the traditional conservatives who also believe it is harming masculinity, encouraging bachelorhood and contributing to the decline in birth rates.
Cut the UK off from the internet and send them back to the stone ages already.
Having someone online constantly trying to steal our right to free speech is like being married to a woman trying to steal your money.
They're importing the stone ages already, no need to kill the net.
If they have such a huge hardon againts thing they dont like just put up a firewall like China does. Why should companies be beholden to foreign laws rather than its home country. I can't believe the UK government is making me defend pornography wtf.
I think they're more envious and inspired by the Kwangmyong internal network in North Korea. However, cutting off the UK from the Internet completely would be overplaying their hand massively to the point they would collapse a good proportion of their economy.
But they are currently using pornography as a central pivot and an easy target for a moral panic around misogyny in society.
Yeah? Maybe the brits will grow some balls and take out the trash then
I suspect the vast majority of people will be happy as long as they can still access the likes of Google, YouTube, Reddit, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, eBay, Facebook/WhatsApp (even without encryption), TikTok and X/Twitter. Which could still happen in a UK intranet with UK based services on UK based servers and restricted Internet access via large corporations as a middle man (not VPN's) if anyone wants anything from overseas. You'll only see backlash if any of those disappear.
"Do this or we will do it" is a pretty retarded threat. It means it would be tricky for them to pull it off, and they want the internet companies to do their work for them.
Also, you have to love the selective logic.
But, remember, if you ban abortion women will literally kill themselves in back alleys with coat hangers! If the logic was consistent, banning porn would just make it more exploitative.
Also, gotta love how everything is about "women and girls." Despite them not being able to define either of those, but that's a separate issue. No matter the issue, it's always, always, always "women most effected."
And, hey, at least this time the government is presumably threatening national companies, not international like they tried with Rumble.
I guess it's a good test case, if nothing else. I fully, fully expect it to backfire though. This will just be more anti-men nonsense, no matter how you feel about porn and its effects, they'll manage to blow this back onto the evil white men.
It's the government doing something, so it will likewise accomplish the opposite; more exploitation, more misogyny, more bachelorhood, more harming of masculinity. Worst of all worlds, they'll manage it somehow.
I don't know if you saw a debate recently on the Minister for Men being suggested by an MP who then got mocked by feminists. A male contributor on BBC Politics Live was defending the MP and was talking about male suicide as a serious social issue that needs to be tackled by Government. What did the other panellists do? Immediately change the subject to "what about the wage gap", "what about sexual harassment" and "what about women". In less than two minutes the issue of male suicide was completely derailed and the original male contributor was left to just agree to everything that was being said by everyone else.
Another excuse for the government to have control over your life. That's all it ever is.
it would be much cheaper for them to implement a great firewall, but they won't.
While also pissing off "sex positive" feminists who make said porn. This is going to be glorious and I advise everyone to stock up on plenty of popcorn. Salt will not be required because there will be ample amounts everywhere.
Women will bitch and moan, but ultimately they will fall in line with authority.
Will some pretend not to, and do the "brave" thing and openly defy the law and make porn? Sure. They'll do so knowing the authorities won't punish them in any tangible manner. If anyone gets punished it'll be men involved in it, either production or purchasing. Just look at the much-heralded "nordic model" when it comes to prostitution. Everything's cool unless there's an opportunity to throw men in jail.
I do wonder what will happen to all the women who make money from OnlyFans if this does go ahead? Maybe they'll adapt to a purely "girlfriend experience" sans anything sexual/nudity to adhere to any potential future law.
This is such a dumb thing that I can't believe I have to defend porn. It always starts with saving the children, or women, or women and children.
You know you won't be able to ban it all, or block it all, and you can't shut the internet off for England, or Great Britain, so this is just saber rattling. Besides, it'll be the ISPs that'll have to block it, not you. So it's just extra work for the IT departments across GB.
So do it then. Turn the internet off for Great Britain to save people from porn. Even though you can't, and it's not you actually doing that work.
I think it will be a election issue that the Tories will use to get one up on Labour to convince the public that they are the party of safeguarding women and children. We are now entering our own electioneering period for a potential election in 2024. They're doing the same thing with the "war on the motorist".
The porn sites should replace their landing page for British visitors with one saying "your government has blocked this content, overthrow it to get your porn back". It probably won't accomplish anything but it'd be funny
Since her government has no interest in banning Muslim immigration to the UK to at least stop making the problem worse, and she didn't use this platform to argue that they should, she is clearly acting in bad faith.
It has all come full circle. The only way to nullify the degeneracy is to embrace the madness and invert it by its own edicts.
UK government: “we want to protect women”
Same government:
https://youtu.be/I6wMnilK0J0
(IGNORED a 10 year old girl who was raped. Because the rapist was muslim. Despite a foetus which proved he raped her.)
Oh please tell me how you want to keep women safe. While importing millions of men from the most barbaric and misogynistic cultures.
This is one of the most idiotic things I've seen a UK MP say, and that's a high bar. I know my debate was about getting rid of it using real actors because AI is getting better was lively but ban it all is just election suicide.
They have done NOTHING to stop the sexualization of the education so the normies are now used to porn thanks to their 'non-effort'. I'm calling it, this is WORSE than when Neocons before 2022 said they should push to ban abortion at a federal level, it's handing the election to Labour unless smaller parties can break through in enough numbers.
I'm not sure it is. I suspect most people in society think pornography = bad, relationship = good. And they would believe that doing this will straighten "misogynists", "weirdos" and "perverts" - the outgroup of the current moral panic - out into dating, marriage, protect women and that will get them votes away from Labour who will try to out-do them as we're now entering into an election campaign season.
As a video I am currently watching says, pornography is a symptom of a societal problem that we're not acknowledging at best, at worst, we're diverting attention away to others.
Like I say, it will only deal with the symptoms and not the cause. And then what will happen if it's successful and men have no outlet and no chance of success in the dating market? Now you have men with nothing to lose. And that is a grim prospect for society that will bite everyone in the backside.
I can imagine a lot of entrepreneurial car boot sellers selling USB sticks from overseas full of content, no questions asked, should VPN's be completely blocked or banned.
Pretty much the 70's and 80's all over again. With a shitty and subpar cyberpunk veneer.
Reminds me of how comically weird some of the B-movies on that kind of subject were, like back in the 80's especially. Yet somehow even those cheap productions couldn't paint as bleak or shitty of a backdrop as we're seeing now.
Also, I'll have to correct myself. Porn legality went sort of back and forth in the US during the 70's and 80's, but mostly veered towards excessively legal. I mostly just think back to that era because of how extra cheap and shady shit seemed back then. Plus there were a lot of stories about a lot of seedy underground productions/distributions during that era as well.
All of that kind of gave a weird impression of stuff going on beneath the radar as a result of heavy regulation and bans, when in reality, it was because of a lot of other reasons (IE, pre-Internet meant localized distribution which was a lot less profitable for such niche products that were already not popular with the most of the general public).
We are in neo-puritan times where moral panics and witch hunts are the order of the day.
I have a sneaking suspicion it'll end up like prohibition only more authoritarian because they'd need to monitor communications EVEN more to ban pornography and even bigger criminal element with how weak police and authorities are in the UK.
The only way the Conservatives can win the next election is either ALL of Labour are caught having a pedophilic orgy at their next party conference or they deploy the military to the coast to stop any boats with force if they don't turn back.
The fact the former seems more likely out of the two shows how screwed they are so they're throwing everything at the wall to pander than do the obvious.
You want accelerationism? This is accelerationism. Bring it on lol, let see where the experiment goes. I'm very anti-porn but I'm bracing myself for the British apocalypse.
Oh no. Englishmen will have to rely on their imaginations to masturbate. Expect an increase in subscriptions to Victoria's Secret catalogues.
Victoria's Secret went woke so they'll have to find something else.
Park your first sentence for the future, particularly if you live in Scotland.
All the muzzles won't be so happy once their goat porn is off the net.
what does any of that have to do with finance?
why is the financial secretary to the treasury giving opinions?
She used to be the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding - one of their remits is "tackling violence against women and girls" of which pornography is included. It is also a conservative thing to promote safety and purity to the public, something Labour has also aligned with.
Lol... itll be funny if ban of porn causes civil war.
Honestly it should be up to the state to block content they want blocked. Whether pornography or disallowed speech on twitter, the government shouldn't be able to force companies to do moderation work for free.
And if the restrictions put in place by technically illiterate boomer politicians don't actually work, all the better.
The reason why they like private companies to do it is so that if any charge of censorship comes their way, they will just point at the private companies and state they didn't do it.