“I hope the Government will listen and consider how to avoid the UK ending up having the most restrictive internet speech laws of any Western democracy,” she said.
This week alone, Baroness Fox has raised her concerns twice in the House of Lords about the proposed UK Online Safety Bill. As she noted on Monday, there has been little attention paid to it by the Lords. “I assumed that there would be packed Benches – as there are on the Illegal Migration Bill – and that everybody, including all these Law Lords, would be in quoting the European Court of Human Rights … I assumed there would be complaints about Executive power grabs and so on. But it has been a bit sparse,” she said.
She noted that the UK has a long history of boasting that it is the home of liberty and adopts the liberal approach that being free is the default position. “That free speech and the plurality and diversity of views it engenders are the cornerstone of democracy in a free society.”
A comprehensive piece of law, such as the Online Safety Bill, that challenges many of those norms, deserves thorough scrutiny through the prism of free speech, she said....<<<Read More>>>...