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.
I really have to write some kind of mega thread on this backed up by other users here with more knowledge than me on why this doesn't do anything so the tech illiterate can understand. They don't 'block' these websites at all, what they do is they block the http address from your I.P address based on your location in most cases and they get the ISPs to do it for them.
It is ridiculously easy to circumvent, Russia Today for example is still 'blocked' but you can use sites like archive.is to grab specific links and because archive.is isn't blocked it will generate the page for you in an archive and you can read the article from the blocked website. These boomer politicians are either tech illiterate or shameless. The archive.is work around I've written up is one of the easier ways you can get past all this crap, sometimes it even works on paywalled stuff too so pop ups they've put up on boomer net do nothing. These website blocks are done by morons or also possibly IT guys who did it half-arsed.
As others have pointed out already, you could go a more complicated but clever route of using Bitcoin and paying a VPN that accepts it in another country to get around any I.P based blocking anyway if you're really that determined but I suspect a simple proxy server is going to do the trick regardless.
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.
I think I'm veering towards the idea of accelerationism with porn just so I can laugh at the right wingers struggling to explain why nothing they do works.
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.