You can't measure it, but Ofcom can jail you for it.
David Davis MP talks to GB News' Mark Steyn about the draft Online Safety Bill.
February 7th 2022
Mark Steyn:
Is this online harms bill actually going to happen?
David Davis:
Oh, it's going to happen.
We thought frankly that we had taken out the worst bit - there was a piece of it which talked about stopping the platforms carrying material that was legal but "harmful", and then leaving "harmful" as a huge judgment area for one of the regulators to decide on. We thought we'd sort of cured it by getting rid of that. But there are still lots of bits and pieces of it which are still aiming to control things that are, well, "psychologically harmful", for example or "deliberate misinformation." How the devil you tell that? I don't know.
[These are] crimes that are in the eye of the beholder. And it's always dangerous if you render illegal, or you render improper to put out something which you can't actually measure. You know, you can tell the murders taking place; you can tell if a burglary has taken place; you could tell if a fraud has taken place. But you can't necessarily tell if something I've said to you has proved psychologically harmful to you. How do you tell that? Go to your psychiatrist and ask their opinion? I don't know.
Mark Steyn:
Well, we're creating a category of law for things that are not legally measurable....I felt afoul, a decade or so back, of Canada's Human Rights Commission - in which unlike any other Canadian court or any court in the English world - the truth is not a defense.
As you said, it's strictly according to whether a person takes offense. And these things, as bad as they are, have generally been introduced by left-of-centre governments to protect their preferred identity group. So if a muslim takes offense at something somebody says you can't really do anything about it because only only the the plaintiff knows whether the offence is genuine or not. Why would a Conservative government be wanting to introduce that principle, and expand that principle, in the UK?
David Davis:
Well, you're right. I used to live in Canada, and it fills me with grief to see what's happening there. It just reminds me of the old saying that there's no intolerance like liberal intolerance. It is the worst sort in many ways.
But to come back to come back to this piece of legislation: it sort of started with a good intention. You have bodies like the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), who are very, very, very concerned about some quite narrow but very significant issues - for example children being encouraged to self-harm, or told how to carry out self-harm.
Now, there are small pieces of this bill that fit into that. In my view, if that's all the bill contained I would be perfectly happy with that. But what governments tend to do is try and build things up, and be seen to be doing something. The urge to be seen to do something is one of the great dangers of modern politics. We've got to be seen to fix this, seen to fix that.
And actually if you look at the bill ... two bits of it [are okay]. There's encouraging or assisting self-harm or assisting suicide: I'm perfectly happy with that; Offenses relating to revenge pornography or extreme pornography: I'm happy with that. Everything else on the list - other than committing something which is "harmful but legal" - is already in the law. Hate crime, public order offenses, drug-related offences, weapons offences - you name it, they're all already in the law.
What they've done is build this bill up out of other offenses, and then added little bits in at the edge. It's quite dangerous creating law that way, because what happens is people miss it. People don't see it. They think, Oh, most of this is sensible stuff.
Actually, in the middle of it is this idea of a harm which is in the eye of the beholder. This is a very, very dangerous element in British law, because it hands over to some other body - like Ofcom, for example, or like the body you faced in in Canada - to make a judgment. That judgment, frankly, is made on the mores of the day. And that can be quite fashionable, as we've seen in the battles over the trans issues recently. These are not set down in clear guidelines. They're things that have changed really even in the last 10 years.
And so it's very dangerous, if you create law like that. What you're doing is handing to an official a series of powers which can be quite destructive of people's lives. These laws will allow you to send people to prison, even for the lesser offenses, for 51 weeks.