David Cameron came into power promising to roll back the State. Yesterday he announced what has to be the most Nanny State measure in history. I concerns my wife, your wife and pornography. It shows Call Me Dave at his very meddling worst.
As ever with a politician seeking to allow the state to intrude into your private lives, Call Me Dave comes up with a claim that he is fighting an evil so wicked that anyone who opposes him is by definition evil themselves. In this case the evil Call Me Dave is fighting is not terrorism but paedophiles.
Stage one of Call Me Dave’s fight against online nonces is to get Google and other providers to remove certain search terms from their web engines. Stage two is that from late 2014 anyone wishing to access adult content via an ISP will have to opt in to do so. In other words, according to Call Me Dave, you will have to ask the Mrs if she minds you downloading porn.
Of course this is all spurious. Nonces do not access kiddy porn by doing a search on google but via obscure peer-to-peer image sharing exchanges in the murky outer-0reaches of the web. Will CMD’s measures stop one single nonce from engaging in online porn downloading? No.
As to folks having conversations with their partners about downloading porn well you may well argue that you should not have secrets from your better half so what is the problem with CMD’s plan? In a sense I agree about the secrets. The issue here is that the State is once again dictating what, totally legal material, you can or cannot access. That is wrong.
Nanny State should not be wasting taxpayers cash tell ordinary citizens which legal activities they should or should not engage in. It is a slippery slope and it is a costly waste of money that tackles no actual crimes.