Queen's Speech Promises State Censorship

ALERT: UK Government Consultation on Further Anti-Porn Law

When attacks on civil liberties are announced by governments, they are usually sold under the guise of “tackling terrorism” or “protecting children”. Today, we have an example of the latter.

The UK government today announced the start of a consultation on protecting children from the insidious effects of online pornography. This might seem a little like Groundhog Day to many observers, who have repeatedly seen British porn laws and regulations added and extended over the years, always to “protect children”.

So, it turns out, all of the previous exercises in child protection weren’t enough. Now we need yet more action, since (unsurprisingly) companies based outside of the UK are ignoring our regulations. Since the UK is the only country in the world to implement such a ludicrously large raft of anti-porn laws, this is hardly surprising.

The latest proposals are to implement a new law that can be used to attack those naughty foreign porn sites that ignore the UK’s (pointless) age verification regulations (in other words, all the porn sites in the world). The planned means of attack will to cut off UK revenue streams to porn services, via pressure on services such as payment providers and advertising companies. It is not made clear whether hosting companies or ISPs will also be targeted.

The government document is deeply dishonest in its presentation of evidence that porn is harmful, for at least one good reason: as far as we know, it isn’t. Even the government’s own research suggests that porn access is broadly beneficial to society, rather than harmful. The document ignores this basic fact with skill, and even reprises the discredited ‘research’ from the NSPCC that this campaign challenged last year.

According to research (Kendall), porn use among 15-19 year olds is responsible for a decline in rape among that age-group; yet this is the very group to which the government seeks to switch off access (the government considers everyone under 18 to be a ‘child’ when it comes to pornography).

The document also claims that only 100 sites constitute 77% of UK porn traffic; yet it fails to make the obvious point that if these 100 were somehow blocked, users would move to other sites. So the regulator would have to target another 100, then another 100, and so on. In fact, there are many millions of porn sites (not to mention millions of others that are not pornographic, but which the UK government considers unsuitable for children anyway).

Sex & Censorship will, of course, be submitting a response to this consultation, and begin a campaign of public education to demonstrate how dishonest – not to mention dangerous – this government’s anti-porn campaigns are. We call on supporters to also submit your own responses.

Readers are also asked to consider donating to this campaign – even just a few pounds/euros/dollars can help – to support our work. Think of it as an investment to protect your right to watch free porn.

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9 thoughts on “ALERT: UK Government Consultation on Further Anti-Porn Law

  1. i thought the new eu law on net neutrality prevented the blocking of websites? could myles jackman explain?

  2. there is no right too Free Porn
    Pay for it and support the Industry
    I support Age Verification by means of
    Credit Card payments
    and hope to see all the tubesites die out
    due to lack of traffic and go back to the
    days of the only porn available was Porn you
    had to pay for
    #PayForYourPorn

  3. I don’t know whether Jerry or anyone else here has seen the NCROPA archives which are available online. It was an anti censorship campaign founded by actor David Webb in 1975. He thought he could achieve success in a few years, but in fact things got far worse, to the point where the Tory manifesto of 1992, partially the work of a young David Cameron, could boast ‘The UK has the toughest legislation against pornography of anywhere in Europe and we intend to keep things that way’.

    Nothing seems to change in this country on this subject, including the attitudes of some in sex entertainment themselves. In the Eighties and Nineties, they concluded that censorship had the advantage of eliminating any competition, in particular from the US, and so were happy to go along with it. It was only with the expansion of the Net, they decided they would have to do something to challenge it. There was no Brit version of Larry Flynt in sight.

    And we now have some vocal feminists who want to be Mrs Whitehouse too!

    1. I agree
      “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”
      they found something they cant censor atleast not easily

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