The Ghost of Tony Bliar hasn’t quite left the Labour party yet. Prize knob-end Andy ‘Angry’ Burnham, the Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports has displayed, and combined, his unique talents for a headline grab, a reactionary authoritarian neo-Labour policy and an ill-informed poorly thought out & researched ‘policy on the hoof’ idea. Burnham is going to save the Internet by introducing new standards of decency. Mr Burnham is hoping for the Daily Mail headline:
“Andy Burnham saves our children from indecency on the Internet; removes rudeness from the World Wide Web. Daily Mail readers DEMAND this hero be made Prime Minister NOW! Join our campaign”
The real headline:
“Halfwit Andy Burnham falls into lake full of Chanel no 5: emerges smelling of pigshit; then trips and falls into bed of Chelsea prize winning roses: emerges also smelling of diseased skunk rectum.”
Burnham’s central thesis is that the Internet is a dark scary place deliberately designed to be out of government control (a red rag to any right-wing bull) and must be made a decent place for decent people. Andy: 1995 sent you an email, it would like its Internet moral panic back please. Clueless Andy’s wheeze is to label all websites with a film-style web rating (Geeklawyer would aim for ‘R’ as an absolute minimum); increase the ease with which websites can be knocked down with a cease & desist; improve the ability to sue for on-line libel (because if there is one thing we need more of it is prior restraint on speech); implement Chinese style filtering to ‘protect the children’. Throw in a bit of copyright protection bollocks, vague ‘public interest’ justification for limiting what people can and can’t say and you’ve pretty much got the panoramic scope of his ‘fresh thinking’.
All these would be responsibilities imposed on ISPs who really really want to have to act as the Government’s eyes and ears. If there isn’t much more detail than that its because he has thought about it much more than that. Nanny Neo-Labour will, of course, decide what is ‘decent’ and whether you should be able to see it because you are just not equipped with the intelligence or moral fibre to do it yourself: you’ll just watch watch porn and youtube fart videos. This is not censorship of course, oh no — that would be a bad thing, rather it is ‘striking a balance between your rights and the the right of society to stop harm’.
Geeklawyer once shook Angry Andy very firmly by the hand. This was not a social politeness: he was sufficiently drunk that his patented Death Grip missed Burnham’s throat by being about 18 inches too low. Fuck.
shame — the little i heard of burnham he looked like he migt not be a tosser. oh well.
but really is it even a patch on the evil of 2004/48, which is a part of our existing domestic law…
Shame on you Geeklawyer, you had a chance to throttle a NuLab control freak and missed it.
Please, don’t bust my balls, how do you think I feel?
Geek,
It sounds like a job creation scheme.
Former DPP Sir Ken Macdonald is now definitely one of my favourite people: “the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people.”
Burnham and company can jog on. We don’t want their censorship.
Daresay it’s not your organ of choice GL — actually, your organ is probably not the best topic — but the luminaries of the Grauniad editorial team agree with you for what it’s worth.
Guardian editorial
I am not a right wing libertarian nut job whatever some people might think. Am actually a lefty hand-wringing sandal wearing type — so I rather approve of Grauniad generally. Editorial was a bit tame though if totally right.
how does one describe the politics of a man who constantly exhorts us to kill tony blair?
‘Sensible’?
you have to read the blog backwards for the secret coded message, as ‘iwanttonytobeworlddictatorpleeeeeese’ discovered. only the specially gifted can do this.
What a load of fucking bollcoks. I bet he would like us all to apply for blog licenses before creating websites too.