Freedom Association Council member, Lord Moylan, spoke in the Second Reading debate of the Online Safety Bill in the House of Lords on 1st February 2023. All of us want children to be safe from predators; however, this Bill goes well beyond that and is a huge threat to freedom of speech. Lord Moylan makes this point succinctly.

Click below to watch the speech. Scroll down to read it.* 

My Lords, it is hard to think of something new to say at the end of such a long debate, but I am going to try. I am helped by the fact that I find myself, very unusually, somewhat out of harmony with the temper of the debate in your Lordships’ House over the course of this afternoon and evening. I rather felt at some points that I had wandered into a conference of medieval clerics trying to work out what measures to take to mitigate the harmful effects of the invention of moveable type.

In fact, it probably does require an almost religious level of faith to believe that the measures we are discussing are actually going to work, given what my noble friends Lord Camrose and Lord Sarfraz have said about the agility of the cyber world and the avidity of its users for content. Now, we all want to protect children, and if what had come forward had been a Bill which made it a criminal offence to display or allow to be displayed to children specified harmful content—with condign punishment—we would all, I am sure, have rallied around that and rejoiced. That is how we would have dealt with this 50 years ago. But instead we have this; this is not a short Bill doing that.

Let me make three brief points about the Bill in the time we have available. The first is a general one about public administration. We seem to be wedded to the notion that the way in which we should be running large parts of the life of the country is through regulators rather than law, and that the independence of those regulators must be sacrosanct. In a different part of your Lordships’ House, there has been discussion in the last few days of the Financial Services and Markets Bill in Committee. There, of course, we have been discussing the systemic failures of regulators—that is, the box ticking, the legalism, the regulatory capture and the emergence of the interests of the regulator and how they motivate them. None the less, we carry on giving more and more powers. Ofcom is going to be one of the largest regulators and one of the most important in our lives, and it is going to be wholly unaccountable. We are not going to be happy about that.

The second point I want to make is that the Bill represents a serious threat to freedom of speech. This is not contentious; the Front Bench admits it. The Minister says that it is going to strike the right balance. I have seen very little evidence in the Bill, or indeed in the course of the day’s debate, that that balance is going to be struck at all, let alone in what I might consider the right place—and what I might consider the right place might not be what others consider it to be. These are highly contentious issues; we will be hiving them off to an unaccountable regulator, in effect, at the end.

The third point that I want to make, because I think that I am possibly going to come in under my four minutes, is that I did vote Conservative at the last general election; I always have. But that does not mean that I subscribe to every jot and tittle of the manifesto; in particular, I do not think that I ever signed up to live in a country that was the safest place in the world to be on the internet. If I had, I would have moved to China already, where nothing is ever out of place on the internet. That is all I have to say, and I shall be supporting amendments that move in the general direction that I have indicated.

*Source: House of Lords Hansard

In a Freedom Association webinar held on Tuesday 4th May 2021, we discussed, “What's the BBC for? Should it be defunded or reformed?”

The panellists were:

Andrew Allison: Andrew is Head of Campaigns for The Freedom Association.

Nick Ross: Nick is a broadcaster, journalist, and campaigner. He became a household name in the UK launching breakfast TV, Watchdog and Crimewatch and flagship radio programmes including World at One, PM and The World Tonight.

Lord Moylan. Daniel was appointed a Conservative Peer in 2020. He was chairman of the London Legacy Development Corporation, deputy chairman of Transport for London, and chief airport adviser to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. A lifelong listener of BBC Radio 3, he has described the radio channel as being "infected by a sort of relentless wokeness".

The webinar was chaired by David Campbell Bannerman, Chairman of The Freedom Association and a former Conservative MEP from 2009-2019, representing the East of England.

Click here to become a member of The Freedom Association. Click here if you would like to make a donation to support our work. 

Please join us for our next webinar on Tuesday 4th May at 6.00 pm. We have a great panel ready to discuss, “What is the BBC for? Should it be defunded or reformed?”

Confirmed panelists are:

Andrew Allison: Andrew is Head of Campaigns for The Freedom Association.

Nick Ross: Nick is a broadcaster, journalist, and campaigner. He became a household name in the UK launching breakfast TV, Watchdog and Crimewatch and flagship radio programmes including World at One, PM and The World Tonight.

Lord Moylan. Daniel was appointed a Conservative Peer in 2020. He was chairman of the London Legacy Development Corporation, deputy chairman of Transport for London, and chief airport adviser to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. A lifelong listener of BBC Radio 3, he has described the radio channel as being "infected by a sort of relentless wokeness".

The webinar will be chaired by David Campbell Bannerman, Chairman of The Freedom Association and a former Conservative MEP from 2009-2019, representing the East of England.

To register, click here. 

TFA member, Lord (Daniel) Moylan questioned the Government last Tuesday over its decision to close places of worship for public worship. Here is his question is full:

"To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the official guidance to address the COVID-19 pandemic issued following the Prime Minister’s remarks on Saturday 31 October, whether they will now produce the evidence that justifies the cessation of acts of public worship in places of worship."

The following was written for this series of essays, published in January of this year, by Daniel Moylan, a former adviser to Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, and who could take charge of Brexit policy if Boris becomes Prime Minister. 

London has long shrugged off the brooding sense of resentment other parts of the country sometimes feel at its dominance of national political and economic life. After all, the capital, with over eight million people, is a social eco-system of its own, caught up in its own affairs and confident that its net contribution to the Government coffers (over £26 billion a year) is sufficient answer to any regional chippiness.