A Brief (Somewhat Belated) Note on the Online Safety Act and the Peter Kyle / Nigel Farage Spat

Peter Kyle MP / Nigel Farage MP

 

A lot of people are expressing concern about the Online Safety Act (2023); a new set of laws passed to protect children - and adults - from all kinds of online content deemed to be potentially harmful by Ofcom (an independent regulator, albeit one established by Parliament and which is overseen by the Culture Secretary).  

 

Some critics worry about how it might impact on free speech and privacy; others say that it will be largely ineffective at restricting access to content and so is doomed to failure.  

 

To be honest, it's not an issue that particularly excites my interest. However, the moment I hear supporters of the Act pleading with us to think of the children à la Helen Lovejoy [1] - thereby transforming an important and complex question into a simple moral issue in order to effectively shutdown debate - I immediately side with the critics.

 

What does interest, however, is the manner in which everything moral, orthodox and conformist - i.e., everything which was traditionally associated with conservatism - has passed yet again to the political left and that it's members of Keir Starmer's Labour Party who most vociferously support the Act and, indeed, wish to strengthen it still further. 

 

Reform UK, on the other hand - a party on the populist right of the British political spectrum - have pledged to repeal the Act if elected into government, prompting the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, to make the unpleasant and ludicrous accusation that Nigel Farage is on the side of those peddling hate as well as sexual predators like Jimmy Savile.

 

It's ironic that this remark should be made by the Rt Hon. Member for Hove and Portslade, as Kyle is someone who opposes all forms of hate speech and wants the online world to effectively become a virtual safe space; i.e., an inclusive, supportive, and secure environment ideal for monkeys who wish to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. 

 

Why is it that those on the virtue-signalling left are often the ones who spew some of the most vile and vicious invective? 

 

Might it be because they tie hate (disguised as love) to judgement rather than joy, unaware that by so doing they corrode and corrupt their own hearts and turn what begins as a desire for political correctness into a resentment-riddled ideology which "leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others" [2].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post published on 30 Jan 2016 in which I discuss this 'think of the children' ploy: click here. 

 

[2] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826. 

      I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 130, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and a Tale of Two Parliamentarians

D. H. Lawrence - Sir W. Joynson-Hicks - Lee Anderson

 

 

I have to confess, I was surprised to hear Lee Anderson mention the name of D. H. Lawrence in his speech to the Reform UK National Conference at the NEC in Birmingham yesterday ...

 

I know the MP for Ashfield is from the same neck of the woods and has a similar working-class coal mining background as Lawrence, but, even so, I was not expecting to hear England's most controversial author of the early twentieth-century namechecked by someone once described by the Daily Mirror as the worst man in Britain. 

 

Celebrating English culture, Anderson arguably revealed his Romantic nature by referring not only to Lawrence, but also to Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron [1]. Just how familiar he is with these writers I don't know; although in his maiden speech to parliament in January 2020 Anderson did claim to have read Lady Chatterley's Lover several times [2]. 

 

It might also be noted that, the following year, Anderson stood up in the Commons to thank the Government for the extra funding they had given to the D. H. Lawrence Centre in Eastwood and to ask whether the Secretary of State would support his bid to get a Lawrence statue erected in Eastwood in order to celebrate the author's life and works [3].     

 

Times have certainly changed: a 100 years ago Tory members of parliament such as Sir William Joynson-Hicks were openly calling for the censorship and destruction of Lawrence's work ...

 

 

II. 

 

Best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government (1924-29), Joynson-Hicks (or Jix, as he was called) gained a reputation for moral authoritarianism. Not only did he clamp down on nightlife, but he vigorously opposed what he regarded as indecent literature. This included, for example, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Lady Chatterley's Lover. 

 

Postal workers - acting under instruction from Scotland Yard and the Home Office - intercepted copies of the latter being sent into Britain from Florence (where the book had been privately printed). Even more outrageously, the Postmaster General also opened another parcel which Lawrence had sent (by registered post) to the London office of his literary agent, containing two typescripts of a collection of poems entitled Pansies. 

 

The typescripts, confiscated (and eventually destroyed) on the grounds of indecency, gave Joynson-Hicks another chance to attack Lawrence in parliament as part of a relentless secret war waged by the authorities against Lawrence since 1915 and publication of arguably his greatest novel The Rainbow [4]. 

 

Lawrence was understandably enraged by this. However, despite being mortally ill in late 1929, he summoned the strength to go on the attack: "the Pansies seizure inspired him to keep up his campaign against hypocrisy and censorship" [5], memorably describing Jix as a censor-moron and a "miserable mongrel" [6].

 

One can't help wondering what he'd think of Lee Anderson and whether or not he too deserves to be thrown down a well of loneliness ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Anderson's list of a dozen British literary greats seemed somewhat random and lacked chronological consistency. It ran in full: D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Jane Austen, Ian Fleming, C. S. Lewis, and George Eliot. 

[2] For those who are interested, the text of Anderson's maiden speech in the House of Commons (27 Jan 2020) can be read by clicking here. 

      Anderson is mistaken to say that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover in his home region - he wrote it in Italy - although it is based in and around the village of Teversal. Lawrence had made his final visit to what he called the country of [his] heart shortly before he began work on the first version of his novel in the autumn of 1926, so he was certainly in the process of assembling ideas.  

[3] Anderson's contribution to parliamentary debate on 16 September 2021 can be found in Hansard: click here. According to Nigel Huddleston - the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who responded to Anderson's request - there were "many D. H. Lawrence fans" in the House - which, if true, is another great surprise to me.  

 

[4] Readers who think this sounds overly-dramatic might like to see Alan Travis, 'The hounding of DH Lawrence', in The Guardian (10 April 1999): click here. 

      The key point is Joynson-Hicks misled his fellow MPs when he informed the House of Commons that the package containing Lawrence's typescripts had been sent via the 'open book post' and had been subject to a random search to ensure the contents had been charged at the correct rate, when, in fact, it had been registered and Lawrence's mail was routinely checked as part of a long-running police surveillance operation. 

 

[5] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane, 2005), p. 389.

    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Juliette Huxley [12 January 1929], The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VII, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 132.