> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.
Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).
I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:
1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.
2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it.
I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.
Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and introduce proportional representation now!
It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3.
In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues:
- Christianity
- Environmentalism
- Racism/populism
- Internet freedom/privacy
- Feminism
- Racism/populism, again
Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism).
I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
I don't think the racist label applied to Ny Demokrati is clear cut. It turned out that some of their elected representatives acted this way, but it was not part of their message or program as they won their seats. I see it as more a side effect of quickly populating a party with members without proper wetting.
As background, this party was founded about 8 months before the election in 1991, almost like a fluke. It was not a grass roots movement, but by charismatic founders that quickly had to build an organisation around some hollow ideas about less bureaucracy and lower taxes.
My point being - i might agree with SDs migration policy and not much else. I might agree on Ms taxcuts etc. etc. But I still have to pick and chose the lesser evil.
Maybe 8 parties narrows the lesser evil down a bit.. But they all end up in coalition anyway so I'm pretty sure i get the same amount of evil as in a 2-party system.
the problem with proportional representation is that nothing gets done, it's a permanent logjam with conflicting ideologies attempting to block or outdo each other.
Admittedly there is a bureaucratic logjam in the UK that hampers any progress but I don't see that going with fptp, I'd anticipate it getting much, much worse under prop-rep.
The christianity party in Sweden could have been classified as "rascist" because that is how they voted many times, but they also had a humanist streak which took over in a lot of issues they engaged in.
I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.
But wouldn’t you agree that both NYD and SD were both founded on populist principles? Apart from racism, neither had any clear cut policies when they started, yet they both got pretty massive boosts from their populist streaks. I think the populist label on them is pretty well established by policy researchers. It’s in the first sentence on both parties’ Swedish Wikipedia pages.
Disagree. If the society is essentially "broken", with little sense of everyone working together to build and secure a positive future, then two-party systems can degenerate into "but they're even worse!" races to the bottom.
But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
(Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
> But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of positive democratic outcome measures, as well as producing a richer national dialogue.
A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much gets permanently stuck there because it works in a two-party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of potential solution sets that are even available for discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search space with greater dimensionality, as well as making “well, they are worse” politicking generally ineffective.
I would say that what you wrote in the first two paragraphs is all equally true of a system with proportional representation. But you’d avoid a lot of problems:
- people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving
- policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies
- the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist
Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more.
Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?
It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone to be able to vote for one that truly represents their views on all relevant topics.
No, in practice I don't find that. In practice I find people actively voting against their interests because no matter who they vote fore the party is going to push for something they don't want.
You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.
Some parts quoted:
> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.
> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]
See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").
He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:
> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?
The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
One of the biggest problems with a lot of the modern theory of democracy is that it sees democratic mechanisms as being not just necessary but sufficient to justify any action undertaken by the state.
Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding principles to distinguish public questions from private ones (or universal public questions from public questions particular to a localized context).
Together these problems result in political processes that (a) treats every question as global problem affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale aggregations of people as means of answering those questions.
This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying that everyone should have an equal say on every question regardless of the stake any given individual might have in the outcome of that question.
And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the first place.
Every question comes down to opposing parties trying to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is why the policy equilibrium in every modern political state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes advanced at everyone else's expense.
Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the particular genius of the American approach has been to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public question open to political answers and what is not. The more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of our institutions will fray.
> Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
And that is exactly how someone like Trump could win (there are worse people than Nigel Farage). I'm amazed people have not thrown out these two parties in the UK already. Yes, the voting system makes it hard, but not impossible. It happened before.
However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.
This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
That was true until recently, but in the last 12 months it's all cracked wide open.
Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are threatening labour from the left on gaza etc.
A long time until the next election but right now it's all to play for
But this essentially has to collapse down to 2 or 3 parties unless these preferences are for graphically concentrated. Which they don’t seem to be. Reform might wipe out the tories with Lib Dem’s cleaning up the scraps, but that doesn’t really move us forward. In fact it’s likely to entrench the moderate left into holding their nose and voting labour?
Yes, with first past the post it will probably get pretty messy. Right now Reform are polling so well they would get a majority, but I'm not sure they'll sustain that until 2029, and whether they'll actually fix anything is questionable.
My gut sense is labour have pissed off people (including or perhaps especially the left) so badly that they are toast at this point. Those left wing votes are up for grabs by anyone who makes a decent case for them
Oh no not Trump. We wouldn't want that, better vote for the other extreme who will end up passing largely the same kind of laws but with slightly different excuses.
They're all using it to virtue signal their hatred of child porn. It's basically religious at this point. You stray from the line and someone just shouts infidel and you get stoned to death.
Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.
That's not necessarily a position you have to fight. You can also take the standpoint that if the UK government can't protect your private data, then how can a data provider. There are many such cases:
The only time a labour majority voted against this bill was when an amendment to make category 1 sites have optional controls for users (something that would have prevented this).
I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”
I genuinely thought that Farage would finally fuck off after brexit happened. I hadn't really figured that he's in it for the attention rather than the politics
UKIP was dead when BoJo was in power. But of course, the Tories under May, BoJo and Sunak amped up immigration to record levels, so now there's a stronger case for Farage to contest. While UKIP was largely about Euroscepticism, Reform has openly racist undertones in their pitch to voters.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm genuinely interested. I've heard it mentioned before as fact, but a quick search of Hansard[1][2] only turned up one very vocal Labour politician (Alex Davies-Jones).
That's politics/democracy for you. It's broken. It's just a popularity contest and it is this way because people vote for political parties like they're sports teams, rather than voting based on policy.
I feel like during an election, policies and election promises are what should be presented, make it illegal to vote for a specific candidate, or for specific candidates to say what their policies are; they can only register policies with the election process.
Then people vote on the policies/promises they'd like to see implemented and whoever made those then gets in.
If policies and promises are not upheld during an election cycle, then that is illegal and those involved get charged and sentenced, though allowing for mitigating circumstances (say if the Tories promised x houses built in the last cycle, the pandemic would be mitigating circumstance for fewer houses built - but not _not_ houses built).
But meh, nothing will change and I really cannot be bothered with many people out there. Nothing will change the way people act, how apathetic they are.
True but all the other parties are currently saying that they 100% will not reconsider this stupid law[1].
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him to one of the nastiest people in our country’s history.
This is government overreach and they know it.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goals but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud just to access Spotify or wikipedia.
> Don't like Farage. At all
I love the way folk feel they have to apologize to HN users (guess which way the majority lean) when they recognize someone like Farage has a point.
Spotify has my PI already. Wikipedia I was using today as normal.
The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
Just keep porn away from your kids please and let's hope we do better for the next generation.
> The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
Sorry but that misses the point. This isn't about porn or being embarrased about it. It's about having to present identification to gain access many different types of site.
We now have the situation where a site, any kind doesn't have to be porn, can look legitimate and ask for required personal identifcation but actually be a run fraudsters.
You might personally have an issue identifying sites like that many adults will and once they're handed over a copy of their passport or drivers licence they are in for a lot of trouble.
When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of others' on thousands of decisions.
And even then, if both parties want to do something, as in this case, there is nowhere to go.
This is force. If you can't say 'no', this is immoral, coercive force, even if the person or party doing the forcing says it isn't.
And no, the forcer (government) won't give back freedoms (the right to privacy) that it takes away.
In the end, the only moral, respectful and free way to proceed, without force, ie where people opt in. Individuals would opt in/out to paying tax for wars/schools/online safety, etc.
"But it is impossible that everyone should be allowed to only opt in to the decisions they like!" .. is only the case because we think it is normal to endlessly abused by governments and because so many citizens are dependent on its handouts.
They are not, but they are central resource that the citizenry uses. If enough of the internet enters an embargo with the UK, they will probably capitulate because more and more of the citizenry will realize what is happening, be greatly inconvenienced, reduce the UK's GDP and complain. IMO I hope more big websites do block the UK.
True, but in the UK (and many other so-called democracies) it's not fellow citizens/voters who impact our lives the most.
Rather, it's vested and sectional interests who control power and or have the most effective means to bring the citizenry around to their way of thinking.
As Chomsky would put it, these few have the means to manufacture consent.
I never said or implied it was. If Wiki packed up and deserted the UK we'd have an actual measure of the opposition. At the moment we don't.
"When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of others' on thousands of decisions."
I'm well aware of that. Also the argument that a politician when in government gets to see a broader picture than his or her constituency and thus may vote against its (narrower/sectional) wishes.
I'd also remind you of the perils of voting against the wishes of one's constituency. The famous case of the conservative Edmund Burke the Member for Bristol illustrates the point. He was summarily booted out at the following election for voting against the wishes of his voters.
If Wiki leaves it'll polarize the electorate, we'll then see what happens. If Wiki stays with some mushy compromise the issue won't be resolved.
At the moment democracy isn't working properly which allows vested and sectional interests to slip in and rule (and in this respect the UK is arguably the worst).
The other point is nothing frightens government more than truly angry voters. Trouble is, UK voters are so under the thumb of government they're frightened to show who is actually in charge in a democracy. De facto, the gnomes and bureaucrats rule.
The way this works is that the backlash would be directed at Wikipedia.
Your average citizen neither knows nor cares about the legislative landscape - they just know that the daily mail says Wikipedia hates the U.K. and is staffed by communists.
Can't they make it so that anyone from that geographical location is required to prove their identity and log in to view the articles? That seems like it'd be sufficient and sure I'd be annoyed at Wikipedia but if they linked to the law I feel like people would get it.
Of course now no one needs to visit Wikipedia because Google has already scraped them with AI so you can just see the maybe accurate summary. Seems risky, as if you should have to log in to use Google since the AI might have forbidden information.
Given the size of Google, I'm not sure if/how they're excluded from this and may actually ask for real identities of UK users they don't already "know" via other means of Google Wallet, etc.
> The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it.
Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in power, it will not be repelled. Even so most likely they will try to wash it down instead of actually abolishing it.
"Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in power, it will not be repelled."
Trouble is, like the frog in warming water, the UK is by a series of steps falling into ever-increasing irrelevancy on the world stage. By the time it wakes up to the fact it'll be too late.
I think something like reversing it in one specific domain (e.g. softcore porn or static images). Then retooling it so it applies to e.g. people viewing info on immigration rights etc. is likely on the cards.
If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as it is.
The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
> I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this.
Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally and culturally stronger, both major parties are virtually identical in what they actually permit the surveillance state to do once they get in office (despite sometimes talking differently while campaigning).
The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings. They keep these presentations secret from public and press scrutiny by claiming it's necessary to keep "sources and methods" secret from adversaries. Of course, this is ridiculous because adversary spy agencies are certainly already aware of the broad capabilities of our electronic surveillance - it's their job after all and they do the same things to their own populations. The intelligence community rarely briefs politicians on individual operations or the exact details of the sources and methods which adversarial intelligence agencies would care about anyway. The vast majority of these secret briefings could be public without revealing anything of real value to major adversaries. At most it would only confirm we're doing the things adversaries already assume we're doing (and already take steps to counter). The real reason they hide the politician briefings from the public is because voters would be creeped out by the pervasive surveillance and domain experts would call bullshit on the incomplete facts and fallacious reasoning used to justify it to politicians.
Even if a politician sincerely intended to preserve privacy and freedom before getting in office, they aren't domain experts and when confronted with seemingly overwhelming (but secret) evidence of preventing "big bad" presented unanimously by intelligence community experts, the majority of elected officials go along. If that's not enough for the anti-privacy agencies (intel & law enforcement) to get what they want, there's always the "think of the children" arguments. It's the rare politician who's clear-thinking and principled enough to apply appropriate skepticism and measured nuance when faced with horrendous examples of child porn and abuse which the law enforcement/intelligence agency lobby has ready in ample supply and deploys behind closed doors for maximum effect. The anti-privacy lobby has figured out how to hack representative democracy to circumvent protections and because it's done away from public scrutiny, there's currently no way to stop them and it's only going to keep getting worse. IMHO, it's a disaster and even in the U.S. (where I am) it's only slightly better than the UK, Australia, EU and elsewhere.
> The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings.
Those politicians who are vocal against mass surveillance tend to change their tune the moment they're in office and I doubt they were all intending to go back on their campaign promises from the start or that they were really convinced by horror stories of terrorists told over powerpoint in closed door briefings.
I wouldn't doubt if they were also giving politicians examples of the kind of dirt they already have on them and their families. This is one of the biggest risks of the surveillance state. Endless blackmail material made up of actual skeletons, as well as the resources to install new ones into anyone's closets whenever needed.
Do what we say or we might get a warrant and find that stash of CP that we installed on your hard drive. How do you even defend against planted digital evidence? It would be easy to fake and very difficult to disprove.
But when it comes to politicians and people with power, I think it's even worse than all of that. It's kind of obvious what Mr Epstein was getting up to with regard to blackmail.
> How do you even defend against planted digital evidence?
With your good name. In the end, it is not important what the politician had or did not have on the disk, but who the public will believe more, the secret services, who claim that there was something there, or the politician, who claims that he is being set up and groundlessly persecuted for the purpose of political pressure.
And as long as public opinion about the special services is what it is, politicians can safely stash CP on their disks without fear that they will be charged with anything even if they are found.
I bet you have never witnessed someone being accused of even a much less severe social taboo. They won't even be given the chance to defend themselves.
You’re dismissing something way more complicated. Many people with good names have supposedly had CP hoards. How would you even go about checking out confirming that it even is CP? You can’t, and would you even want to look into that? No, of course not.
Frankly, it could even just be made up. How would you know? I’m sure in most cases it is true and correct, but with as much corruption in every and all aspects of policing and justice, there is absolutely zero chance that when it involves something with such huge and hidden levers as CP, that there would be zero corruption. Cops still plant drugs on people even though they know they are on body cam and they still shoot people to death for no reason and are simply absolved by the system that protects itself; you don’t think that the black box of CP accusation that no one wants to or can look into is not used for corrupt reasons?
The whole system is rotten and corrupt, why wouldn’t it be corrupt in this case where there is a huge lever and no one dares look into it?
Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.
There irony is that people who call politicians stupid are generally not very smart people themselves in my experience,
regardless of various forms of advanced degrees they believe disproves that.
They may be puppets, they may be manipulators, they may be con-artists, they may be liars; but what does it say about oneself if an “idiot” managed to become one of a few hundred most powerful humans on this planet and in all of human history (in the case of an American politician) and you did not?
If these claims are accurate, then the solution is obvious: elected officials who are themselves domain experts in this. They can then explain to their colleagues why these arguments are bullshit.
But, I expect that that won't help because your claims don't tell the while story. Most representatives don't act in good faith and like the government that they're a part of having such power.
The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate.
Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it.
So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians.
My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law - in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.
In parliamentary systems we see fractures and reformation all the time, including in the current political climate in the UK.
Duverger's Law is only really parroted by Americans, who's ballot access and districting is determined by a coalition of two political parties instead of an constitutionally defined apolitical government institution. Don't forget to vote Green or Libertarian! Oh wait, you can't because the dems and repubs struck them from the ballot :(
> main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections
This isn't true most actually gain more power because once you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead of the country you can then take advantage of all the deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start actually making real money and having real influence without the eyes on you.
They do if they are libertarian governments. Although it's popular to pretend they don't exist, there are plenty of examples of governments reducing their power over history. The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power. And Britain has in the past gone through deregulatory phases and shrunk the state.
Unfortunately at this time Britain doesn't really have a viable libertarian party. Reform is primarily focused on immigration, and the conservatives have largely withered on the vine becoming merely another center left party. So it's really very unclear if there are any parties that would in fact roll this back, although Nigel Farage is saying they would. His weakness is that he is not always terribly focused on recruiting people ideologically aligned to himself or even spelling out what exactly his ideology is. This is the same problem that the conservatives had and it can lead to back benches that are not on board with what needs to be done. Farage himself though is highly reasonable and always has been.
>The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power
Since its foundation, has the US government ever actually reduced its powers? It established itself with limited power.. But since then, its power has only increased via amendments, to the point where the President is effectively an uncontested emperor type figure.
If you define the US as the federal government then yes it has rolled back its powers several times:
- The Prohibition was implemented and then ended, i.e. the state gave up its power to ban alcohol.
- The Bill of Rights itself post-dates the founding of the USA. Those amendments were limiting the power of the state!
- Income tax rates were once much higher than they are today. Of course you could argue that this isn't a reduction of its power given that once upon a time there was no income tax. But it has nonetheless fallen from its once great heights.
- The federal government gave up its power to regulate abortion quite recently.
- In the 60s (or 70s I forget) the US government deregulated the airline industry and has never gone back.
- The War Powers veto. One could argue that it's not been effective because POTUSes have ignored it, but in theory Congress took away the ability for Presidents to declare war.
More specifically, for the past 40 years, the US government has mostly been focused on increasing the power of corporations. It has reduced the government's power where it limits corporations, but increased it where it limits people.
> The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power.
This is not an example for an existing government reducing its power. It's rather an example of revolutionaries recognizing this very problem and attempting to prevent it. As we have found out since then, their solution isn't as foolproof as they had hoped.
Sounds like you're Old Left? The left's positions have changed since 1900 you know.
Labour is fully committed to mass immigration and "diversity", refuses to reduce welfare by even a penny despite imminent financial crisis, has implemented big tax rises, has soaked the rich so much they're all leaving, and this article is about it enforcing heavy handed regulation of information distribution. All that sounds very left wing to me, judged by the modern goals the left have.
Censorship has always been more of a conservative thing. But really more of an authoritarian thing, once you manage to get your head out of one-dimensional political thinking.
But if you want left-right, "helping the poor and disenfranchised" is left, "helping the rich and powerful" is right, and while details have moved around, that core never changed. I don't see conservatives anywhere do much for the poor, and they still love disenfranchising people. It's more that formerly left-wing parties, including Labour, have moved to the right since the neoliberalism of the 1990s.
I’m surprised anti-trans stuff isn’t in there with how much airtime they’ve given it, but I guess they feel there’s not enough distance between them and Starmer’s Labour.
Every party says they want to reduce immigration. Labour says they will "stop the boats" etc. Neither have done so, of course, it's all lies.
The Conservatives don't want to reduce spending on benefits. They always defended the triple lock that makes their pensioner base so happy, of course. They are merely slightly more willing to admit that huge cuts are inevitable than Labour is. Labour also tried a tiny reduction in benefits - there's not much difference between them really - but their MPs are in total denial of the scale of the problem and blocked it.
UK benefits are going to evaporate, it doesn't matter who is in power. Tweaking eligibility criteria is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic at this point. It's become a financial inevitability post-COVID, just look at the charts. The austerity that's coming will show the 2010s era as the weak sauce it truly was.
The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and lure businesses with attractive fees.
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line.
It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
They should just do the same thing many governments the world over have done - adopt a version of the US constitution. Easy, clean, and only massively ironic.
Biggest mistake the Americans did was codify their constitution. I'll probably be pilloried for that but look at the evidence:
- US is about to have military on the streets during peacetime with no terror threat within a codified constitution
- UK has had military on the streets in response to terrorism in Northern Ireland (a real threat) and not for decades. The UK constitution is uncodified and spread over many (10+?) documents ranging from Magna Carta in the 1200s to the Bill of Rights in the 1600s to documents written in the 1800s and then more modern Acts of Parliament.
Importantly the UK constitution can slowly change which means the UK has never had a revolution and never will do. Whereas the US constitution is rigid which achieves the opposite: when it does change it'll be dramatic and as a result of another violent revolution.
Why do you think that the UK having an unwritten constitution means that revolution cannot happen? Of course putting aside the fact we did have a revolution in the 1600s, and the almost constant revolution happening in Ireland until the 1930s. A fluid constitution is no use when the government is intransigent, and very little can protect a democracy from half the voters voting for a coup.
A written constitution only really protects (or affects at all) the things it very specifically enumerates. And when I look at the judicial tools we have that do bind the government (the ECHR for instance) they seem on the whole to make a good difference. A UK constitution that enshrined certain rights (healthcare, free speech, and so on) would make me feel a lot more secure about what future governments could do. It might also provide a better example than the American constitution in the respects it is lacking.
The revolution in the 1600s was reversed - as far as I know the UK is the only country in the world to have reversed a revolution.
If you want more healthcare security you're more likely to get that in an uncodified system like the UK. Yes your healthcare rights can be reversed but better that, than never happening at all like in the US.
A codified system also hands vast power to lawyers. The US is a lawyer's paradise of everyone suing everyone, rising political violence due to inflexibility, and more risk of revolution.
> Yes your healthcare rights can be reversed but better that, than never happening at all like in the US.
Do you really think that the thing standing in the way of universal healthcare in the US is its codified constitution? When I look at the constitutional cases that result in lawsuits in the US, they are almost universally cases that move the dial in favour of people's freedoms. Liberally interpreted, the US has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century in many respects. The undermining of civil liberties we see in the US right now are in spite of the constitution, not because of it (and you can tell, because everyone opposing it is appealing to the constitution, and everyone supporting the coup is ignoring it).
only country to reverse a revolution? uhh, that's almost like a required stage of every revolution, haha. it's almost more remarkable when a revolution sticks.
While the US consitition is not agile a like a git log of a popular js project it does have over 10k declined PRs, I think the record is 100 years waiting for review. It does change, it has to change.
It was, repeatedly. It's a very important historical document that defined negative rights (congress shall pass no law) and inspired most modern constitutions.
The problem is the US never bothered to address it's technical debt, so it's patch on patch on patch. An updated constitution would probably cut through a lot of the bullshit in American politics, e.g. the interstate commerce clause being the entire justification for the federal government lol.
Political systems do not exist in a vacuum, but integrate into a specific ethnic, cultural and geographic landscape. In a nation of immigrants with frequent demographic changes, having a written constitution anchors the country and prevents some capture of the government.
The UK and US are both equally nations of immigrants in 2025 at about 16% of the population being born abroad. The UK constitution is written but uncodified and unites the country under the King. The constitution can slowly change to deal with immigration, but in the US they're stuck with either what you have or violent revolution...
I was referring to when the political systems were set in place. When the UK became a parliamentary monarchy, no one could dream of becoming "a nation of immigrants," while in the case of the US, it was obvious that it was and would be for the next century, at least.
The US political regime was designed for stability by lawyers, which has worked quite well for the country so far. In the case of the UK, the lack of a constitution can also be quite dangerous as it allows abuse and doesn't guarantee any protection of basic rights or even democracy. This can work well if the country is mono-ethnic, with elites and plebeians sharing a common culture. It can also easily derail in pluri-cultural settings where ethnicities compete against each other to impose their standards or acquire resources from the state. This is what happens in Africa, for instance, and one of the reasons for the weakness of the state there.
Im glad not to be confined by historical rules invented by people who could not hope to predict the future, and would not choose to put that kind of burden on my descendents.
Constitution is pretty clear on that question. The problem is that in order to persecute president you need congress to act.
The constitution simply doesn't account for a situation, when congress willingly ceases vital functions. To be fair, it took over 200 years for this edge case to occur.
If this was a software we would marvel at its stability.
Given that all three branches of government seems to be moving in lockstep on it, (with the military, the secret police, and the police all behind them), you are right - it is clear on that question.
It's clear to all them that, no, anything he does goes, and no, the 14th doesn't actually mean anything.
That's not how I parse it from a cursory reading, but who am I to nay-say the king?
Wikipedia's not perfect, but its transparency and edit history make it a lot less susceptible to the kinds of anonymous abuse this law is supposedly targeting
> 2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
This is way too optimistic. Maybe they'll make it as a campaign promise but in all likelihood they'll be happy to have it without being blamed directly and the law will stay unless people put up enough of a stink that it's clear the alternative would be violent revolution.
Increasing government control over the population is not a partisan issue.
>> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
>Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
As an repetition of and an aside to all those pointing out that there is a constitution, what may find gaining some momentum after this are calls for a Bill of Rights, something England used to have[1].
That's a sophist's argument. There's a reason it's qualified as the 1689 Bill of Rights, because it doesn't exist as a bill of rights any more. Parts of it were subsumed by other laws, parts of it repealed - where is your right to bear arms?
Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume) constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court. Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so maybe that points to why.
None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
Someone else said it, but oneconspiracy theory is that the UK is doing this to instill more "internet" literacy in their population (given that they'll go out of their way to do the free internet). I doubt that is the case, but that's a better cope for many than a dystopian government.
> People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them
Yeah, its hilarious if you watch or listen to BBC output you would think VPNs don't exist the way the BBC promote it as some sort of amazing new "think of the children" protection.
A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada. The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.
And a significant part of the Canadian constitution is now codified and entrenched in ways that no single one of the federal or provincial parliaments across Canada can freely amend, albeit not in a single document, even though Canada shares the same King as the UK. No reason the UK couldn’t do it - the UK Parliament itself even enacted the fundamental constitutional structure that Canada now has, at Canada’s request, and in the same act removed its own power to legislate for Canada going forward.
(Canada had previously deferred its assumption of the power to amend its own constitution without asking the UK to do it until it figured out what replacement arrangement it wanted, which took half a century and the requesting Canadian government still very controversially did not win the assent of or even consult Quebec before proceeding.)
With that said, there is an important structural difference: Canada is a true federal state rather than a unitary one like the UK which merely has some nonexclusive and constrained devolution to three subordinate parliaments within specific scopes. Every single bit of the Canadian constitution is indeed freely amendable by enough of the eleven Canadian federal or provincial parliaments working together. Certain specific parts can indeed be amended unilaterally by one parliament, but many parts need a much larger level of consensus, up to and including unanimity.
This means that the Canadian situation is not really a counterexample to the claim that the UK parliament would necessarily retain full amendment rights if it did codify a constitution, since the UK parliament is most similar in authority not to the Canadian federal parliament but to all eleven federal or provincial Canadian parliaments combined, which collectively do retain full amendment flexibility if they can all agree as required.
However, some provinces refuse to ratify amendments without a referendum, and the country has a lot of trauma from past failed attempts to make major constitutional amendments such that they mostly don’t attempt them any more, so the eleven parliaments have de facto lost some of their collective parliamentary supremacy even if they have not lost it de jure.
The Thai monarch actually has power though which makes the constitution meaningful. A constitution between two parties where one has no power is meaningless.
We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written constitution:
> The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules
that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships
between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the
state and the individual.
These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document.
Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and proposed a written constitution. But other definitions include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For example:
> It is often noted that the UK does not have a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. It is true that most countries have a document with special legal status that contains some of the key features of their constitution. This text is usually upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not possess a single constitutional document of this nature. Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK’s constitution is spread across a number of places. This dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and understand. It is found in places including some specific Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the system should operate (known as constitutional conventions); and various decisions made by judges that help determine how the system works.
Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.
In the UK that would probably be the Magna Carta [0] which is a written document that constrains the monarch's power, and the monarch was the state at that time (1215).
Do you mean in the USA, perhaps? It's used more prevalently there, I think it's more likely for an average citizen to refer to a document than a collection of laws and customs. But I don't think that contex overtakes the original meaning.
The GP comment specifically refers to the contemporary connotation, and at least in English there is some consensus around constitutional governments in this modern sense (e.g. Ireland, India, Germany, etc.) as opposed to those that aren’t.
The UK has had many such laws and still does. During its time of EU membership the British constitution effectively gave up most of its power to a foreign government. The echr still binds parliament and the courts, again to rulings of a foreign Court.
The most likely outcome by far at this point is the continuation of disconnection from European institutions by leaving the echr. In effect this would mean the rolling back of parts of the British constitution. It would be a good thing because the equivalents of the American Constitution are much more vaguely written, and in practice do nothing to protect anybody's rights whilst allowing left-wing judges to rampantly abuse their position by issuing nonsensical judgments that advance left-wing priorities. That's why reform and Nigel farage have been pushing for many years on leaving the European institutions, which is in effect a rollback of the Constitution. And this position is very popular.
>> During its time of EU membership the British constitution effectively gave up most of its power to a foreign government
It's nonsensical statements like this that lead to brexit.
Some(very very very few) rules were delegated to EU institutions. UK retained full autonomy in almost every area, it could have always limited immigration or how bananas are shaped if it wanted to. To say that "most of the power" was given to a foreign government borders on Russian trolling, it's just so extremely untrue.
Both Eurosceptics and pro-federalists routinely claim that 80% of all European law originates at the EU Commission - the exact number surely depends on the precise definition of law, but if both sides of this argument agree on a number as high as 80% then summarizing it as "most" is the right wording.
And if 80% of your law is coming from the EU Commission, then it's correct to say most power was given up to a foreign government. Because the EU is a government, according to its own fiercest proponents.
>> That's why reform and Nigel farage have been pushing for many years on leaving the European institutions.
> Which one? And with whom?
All of them. You may have noticed he won the referendum to leave the EU and now his party is the most popular party in Britain according to the polls, largely due to his policy of leaving the ECHR too.
The European institutions are captured by an ideology that there can be no compromises on mass migration ever. This position is insane so they can't win votes on this platform, and therefore their strategy is to abuse various supra-national institutions that were sold to the public as doing other things and then written into the constitution so their decisions can't be overruled.
>>And if 80% of your law is coming from the EU Commission, then it's correct to say most power was given up to a foreign government. Because the EU is a government, according to its own fiercest proponents.
The crucial part you are missing here is that EU Commission doesn't set laws in any EU member country. They set directives, which if approved by the elected EU Parliment every member country should implement as they see fit - or not implement at all, the penalty for not doing so is so laughable even smaller newer EU members routinely ignore it. UK has always had that power - if it chose to implement EU laws within its own legislative framework then it was by choice and it wasn't forced upon it. So no, no power was given away to any foreign government here, just like British parliment isn't giving away any power to anyone when it uses one of its own many comissions to draft legislation. This is the lie that people like Farage kept peddling here - that anything has been forced on the UK in this relationship, when it couldn't be further from the truth.
>> largely due to his policy of leaving the ECHR too.
Citation needed, seriously. To me it seems it's largely due to Tory party self imploding(finally) and Labour being completely incompetent and walking back on most of their own promises which angered a lot of people. I bet most Reform supporters wouldn't even know what ECHR is, nor do I see why it should matter to them - in all of 2024 ECHR has issued exactly one rulling against the UK, and it was about Daily Mail winning a case against the UK government. If anything they should love it, but of course there's still some idiotic propaganda about ECHR blocking deportations and such when in reality the UK government is just simply incompetent on that front and cannot agree a simplest deal with France on that topic.
>>The European institutions are captured by an ideology that there can be no compromises on mass migration ever.
Which is why this is such a debated topic within the EU all the time and countries are implementing their own laws around it, right? You say it like there's some dogma that has to be obeyed - which anyone can see is not true, with major fractures along this exact point within the EU itself.
>>and then written into the constitution
Which consitution? EU doesn't have one, and I don't recall anything being added to the consitution of my native country for a very long time now - where exactly are these things you speak of written into?
>>so their decisions can't be overruled.
EU doesn't have any insitution that "cannot be overruled". Every member state retained full legislative and judiciary independence from every EU institution. ECHR is a sole exception to this, but it's not an EU insitution, and again, there are no real penalties for ignoring it nor does it have any impact on a country like the UK.
If the best thing you can say about the EU membership is there were lots of exceptions, that is an argument for leaving, not staying.
In reality the exceptions were mostly a work of fiction. For example, the UK was originally assured that the human rights principles they'd originally proposed as a vague set of aspirations would never be made into law, because they weren't suited to be law. Then the EU did that anyway, so the UK got a "carve out" written into the treaties, and it was reported as such to the public. Then the ECJ ruled that it wasn't allowed to have such a carveout and would have to enforce ECHR and ECJ rulings on human rights anyway.
In other words: people were lied to. There was no carveout, not even when every country signed a treaty that spelled out one clear as day. This is how the EU rolls.
>>If the best thing you can say about the EU membership is there were lots of exceptions, that is an argument for leaving, not staying.
Having the best deal out of all members states in a union is a reason to leave that union? Are you even listening to what you say, or do you just say it so quickly it doesn't process? If you negotiate with your employer to have the best working conditions of everyone at your company, according to you that's the reason to leave - why? You tell me.
>>For example, the UK was originally assured that the human rights principles they'd originally proposed as a vague set of aspirations would never be made into law, because they weren't suited to be law.
Can you give a specific example of a human right principle that wasn't suited to be a law please?
The UK "didn't have much" of all the things it didn't want. But plenty of the things it did want. That is a great deal, Trump would be proud. Plenty of Brits too dumb to understand that though.
The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU, and the EU refused to even consider the possibility of an exception, so the UK left.
It's not complicated, it's old history, and the fact that people are still describing this as "brits dumb hurhur" is racist and abusive. The idea that it could have got an exception, by the way, is yet more federalist lying. Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting member states, begging them to grant such an exception, and they refused. He returned with his "deal", presented it to the country and never mentioned it again during his campaign because it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.
>>The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU,
It was never unlimited and it's yet another lie peddled by Farage and the Brexit campaign.
UK could have always at the very least enforced the basic of the EU free movement principles in terms of limitations - namely that anyone without a job or means to provide for themselves for over 3 months can be kicked out. That would have solved most of the discontent around the issue. Similarily, UK not being in the schoengen zone could have interviewed everyone arriving from the EU - why are they coming here, do they have funds, do they have a job and turn around people it suspected are coming for benefits etc. It chose not to do that. It was entirely legal at the time and it could have been done. But instead politicians lied about UK being "forced" to accept unlimited immigration, which was never true.
It's not even about exceptions - it could have just used the existing laws that were there.
>>Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting member states, begging them to grant such an exception
You and I have a very different understanding of how that visit worked.
>> it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.
It's just really funny to me how after Brexit yes, migration from EU has gone down but it was replaced entirely by migration from former British Empire instead. So I'm not sure if the "concerns of voters" was really respected here either way.
The concerns of voters were absolutely not respected, you are completely right about that. The political class is completely bought into mass migration being a moral good, which is why getting it under control requires a complete replacement of that political class.
There were lots of things the UK could have done in theory which wouldn't have had any impact in reality. You can interview people and ask, do you have funds? Do you have a job? They say yes and go in, that's the end of it. There isn't a way under EU law to just say no there are too many people already, you can't come.
>>You can interview people and ask, do you have funds? Do you have a job? They say yes and go in, that's the end of it.
How do you think this works now then? Or how it worked with non-EU people before Brexit? You asked them and they had to provide proof. If they couldn't they were turned around. It's not rocket science.
>>There isn't a way under EU law to just say no there are too many people already, you can't come.
And again, the existing legal ways of removing EU immigrants would have helped with that, but it was easier to take the entire country of the EU than just use them.
>>The political class is completely bought into mass migration being a moral good
Which political class? Tories which have been in power for forever? the same Tories who ran the "hostile environment" company against immigrants? Or Labour, which is now making it much harder and more expensive to both get in and stay in this country legally?
The best part of Brexit is that the EU protected us from the worst of destitute economic migrants. The southern EU countries were dealing with most of them, we just had to give them some cash to help. France also was more willing to deal with them for us.
We got internal migration from other EU countries (eastern Europe, Spain, Italy mostly) with much higher living standards. EU migrants are much more likely to return to their home countries after a period saving some cash and practising English.
But even that was too much for the poor old Brits.
Now we have people from African war zones and Indian villages and they are NEVER going back voluntarily. France isn't bothered any more because we behaved like spoiled children during Brexit, they wave them off on the Normandy beaches.
After burning bridges with Europe the only solution for the illegals is to go full Nazi and sink their boats in the channel like Farage wants to. Even if he somehow became PM I don't see that happening.
Anyway, legal migration is by far the biggest source, and those are mostly Indian villagers that are happy to have an inside toilet and not be fried by 40c+ heat most of the year. They are here forever too. BTW, a lot of Indians in the UK at the time were really happy about Brexit, i wonder why...
The EU had many things that didn't benefit the UK, which happens when you don't share a mainland with the rest of Europe. e.g. Schengen area didn't make as much sense for UK,
The UK got to not adopt the euro, but then it's currency was particularly strong in the first place. The Rebate is usually what is spin as the great advantage given to the UK, but was mostly justified by the fact that the UK didn't benefit as much from agricultural subsidies.
The Schengen area is only loosely connected to the EU. Not all EU member states are in the Schengen area, and not all Schengen area member states are in the EU.
Mostly just for geographical reasons, no? If you have a free travel area covering a large swathe of continental Europe then it's inevitably going to include mostly EU member states. AFAIK there has never been any substantial objection to Ireland and (formerly) the UK opting out of Schengen, which obviously wouldn't make sense for those countries given where they're located.
Ironically, while I am absolutely not a monarchist, it provides a kind of stability to British democracy, because it mostly transcends party politics, unlike other presidential systems.
Indeed, the founding fathers of the US identified political parties as a threat to their republic.
And yet, there were defacto political parties in the delightfully misnamed federalist and anti-federalists. It was this divide that led to the first political parties.
No, I meant in the newborn US. The OP founding fathers reference is Hamilton and the Federalists who feared the harms of political parties, but ultimately couldn't reconcile with the anti-federalists who ultimately formed the democratic-republican party.
Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.
Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).
I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:
1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.
2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...