Author Archives: Brian Paddick

Like a dog that has been let off the lead after five years under Lib Dem restraint, this Conservative government is all over the place with its legislative programme and that’s before we even start on Brexit.  To add to the list of obnoxious new laws such as the new offence of ‘driving while being a suspected illegal immigrant’  and giving the police unfettered access to innocent people’s web histories, the Tories have waded into the swamp of online pornography and they are completely out of their depth.

The Digital Economy Bill, another universal answer to everything they couldn’t get through when we had one hand on the reins of power, professes to protect children from online pornography.  Even those like me whose access to porn when I was younger was the top shelf magazines in the newsagent, know that, as with other forms of prohibition, those determined to get their hands on it will succeed.  It is far better to educate children how to deal with online pornography when they come across it rather than, Canute-like, trying to keep it away from them.

Nonetheless, if we are to prohibit access to online adult material unless there is an age-verification solution in place, the privacy of those who are being forced to part with their sensitive personal information in order to verify their age, must be protected.  We have already seen user databases for a couple of major porn sites, containing sensitive personal information, being hacked and the details traded on the dark web.  When details of users of the Ashley Madison site were leaked, it reportedly led to two suicides.

Databases containing personal details are honey-pots for hackers, with the potential for sensitive information to end up in the hands of criminals or in the public domain. Hot on the heels of the Investigatory Powers Act, which now requires your internet service provider to store your web history (Internet Connection Records) for 12 months, the Government now wants to create more databases containing highly sensitive personal information.

Liberal Democrats did everything we could to stop the worst attacks on individual liberty and privacy in the Investigatory Powers Bill but with Labour support and little help from the media, every significant measure passed into law. No doubt emboldened by the absence of an effective Official Opposition, the Digital Economy Bill brought forward by Government has the potential to create massive databases containing the details of every adult in the UK who, quite lawfully, wants to access adult material on the Internet.

The average age of the House of Lords is about 70 years old. Yet it has been left up to us to scrutinise, amend and improve the highly technical and technological Investigatory Powers Bill after its easy ride through the House of Commons.

Today, in the Bill’s Second Reading, I urged peers from all sides to not shy away from the technical nature of the Bill and to tackle the issues it raises head on and with gusto. Fundamentally this Bill will govern what powers our security services and law enforcement agencies have, under what circumstances they will be allowed to use them and how the use of these powers will be overseen. In all of this there is a balancing act to be done – it is the responsibility of the police and the security services to ask Government for the powers they believe they need in order to be effective and it is the responsibility of Parliament to balance those requests against the tests of necessity and proportionality.

I have just been watching Marr on BBC1 and there appears to me to be a theme developing.

In the paper review, Trevor Phillips said the rise of UKIP was really about voters´ perception that “Westminster politicians” were not listening to their constituents. He also suggested immigration is not the real issue for many British people but fear of change. He claims that rapid change is unsettling for people and a party that represents the past like UKIP is understandably popular. I guess a progressive, forward thinking and radical party like ours might be unpopular for the same reason.

Next up is Douglas Carswell, former Tory, now a UKIP, MP. He talks like a Lib Dem. He is clearly a dedicated constituency MP, just like a Lib Dem, who does not take his constituents for granted, just like a Lib Dem, and he sees representing his constituency as far more important than what happens at Westminster. He appeared to me to be so unlike a Tory MP or a Labour MP in a safe seat and so like a Lib Dem.