Naddine Dorries’ Online Safety Bill U-turn

Nadine Dorries, who is one of the architects of the Online Safety Act, has called for the law’s repeal, following complaints by her new buddies in Reform UK.

Apparently, the hard-right party’s perfectly normal proposals to build concentration camps – sorry, ‘detention centres’ – in Green-voting wards keep getting flagged as ‘hate speech’… for some strange reason.

On 17 May, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s unelected, non-MP, non-shadow-cabinet ‘home affairs spokesperson’ posted that:

Labour is using the “Online Safety Act” to silence political opponents, and TikTok is doing their dirty work.

Undeterred by the complete lack of evidence of Labour’s involvement, Yusuf complained:

First, TikTok removed my video announcing Reform UK’s new policy to place secure illegal migrant detention centres in non-Reform constituencies, prioritising Green ones.

TikTok explicitly cited the Online Safety Act as the reason for its removal.

This is hard evidence of this draconian legislation being weaponised to silence political opponents.

As the Canary reported recently, the previous Tory government introduced that ‘draconian legislation’. Then-digital-secretary Nadine Dorries actually championed the law throughout its passage. And what party is Dorries part of now? Oh yeah… it’s Reform UK.

Dorries: It wasn’t me…

Then, on 18 May, Dorries wrote for low-quality toilet paper supplier, Daily Mail:

Why we must scrap the Online Safety Act I helped bring to life

Of course, the Tory-Reform turncoat tried to claim that she only had a hand in the ‘good’ bits of the Online Safety Act. She wrote that:

The Act was designed for the simplest of reasons: to protect children from harmful online content such as material relating to suicide, violence and pornography.

As culture secretary from 2021 to 2022, I signed off its most striking provision: that if an online publisher such as a social media giant breached the Act, it would face a fine equivalent to 10 per cent of global turnover, which could be in tens or even hundreds of millions.

However, Dorries claimed that those darn meddling lawmakers then muddied the waters of her beautiful child-protecting bill. She claimed that:

What I hadn’t accounted for was that once the redrafting of the Bill got under way, so many MPs would want to bring their own issues to hang on it.

Before long, ever more provisions were being added that had nothing to do with protecting children and were instead about restricting the free speech of adults (especially ‘hate speech’), widening tools of censorship, surveillance and the harnessing of personal data, and including every other pet project one MP or another wanted to bring.

Don’t you just hate it when laws stop you from voicing hate speech? Oh, sorry, ‘hate speech’, with the scare quotes. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking you were against all that antisemitic bile your new overlord Farage definitely didn’t say, but which would also be fine if he actually did say it after all. Free speech!

A vast archive of violence and pornography

But wait, why did Dorries accept all these terrible additions to her masterwork? Well, you see, she was figuratively fighting for her legislative life. In her own words:

I was referring to it as the ‘Christmas Tree Bill’ to my staff, as every new issue from MPs seemed to be hung on it like baubles as time went on. There was precious little I could do, because every bauble that was demanded came alongside a threat from the MP that they wouldn’t vote for my Bill if I didn’t include their provision.

Frankly, I was held to ransom. These MPs made the Bill unwieldy, intrusive and, I sensed over time, unusable.

Oh that poor soul. Fortunately, she’s now safe in the party of MPs who don’t even turn up to vote half the time. Thankfully, there’s no danger of being held to ransom by a no-show colleague!

Unfortunately, the former digital secretary seems to have forgotten that, as well as being a vast archive of violence and pornography, the internet is also a repository for the lying hypocrisy of politicians.

You see, when the Online Safety Act first passed, Dorries seemed thrilled with the extra provisions:

We don’t give it a second’s thought when we buckle our seat belts to protect ourselves when driving. Given all the risks online, it’s only sensible we ensure similar basic protections for the digital age. If we fail to act, we risk sacrificing the wellbeing and innocence of countless generations of children to the power of unchecked algorithms.

Since taking on the job I have listened to people in politics, wider society and industry and strengthened the Bill, so that we can achieve our central aim: to make the UK the safest place to go online.

Wait, Dorries “strengthened the Bill” herself now? Here’s us thinking she was being forced to curb free speech by those nasty MPs and their votes.

Just who is the public meant to believe? The Dorries of 2022, who seemed so proud of her achievements, or 2026 Dorries, who deeply regrets the restrictions she placed on the definitely-not-hate-speech posted by her new friends on the far right?

In the words of one of the great social commentators of our age: