The Inquirer

Surprise! UK gov's unworkable porn block will be delayed indefinitely

Premature legislation

Surprise! UK gov's unworkable porn block will be delayed indefinitely
Probably need to add 'snap election' in there, too
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Update: The official government position is that the porn block has been delayed a further six months. Given, the government may quite plausibly have collapsed by then, we're not holding our breath.

WELL, WHO COULD have seen this coming? After multiple delays, it looks like the government is set to throw in the towel in its long-running battle with pornography. Hopefully said towel will be thrown straight into a nice, hygienic 70-degree wash.

Dead? Not quite, but very much not alive either. Sky News reports on multiple sources saying that the porn block is "indefinitely delayed", but to us, that sounds like a delay in the same way the INQ team is delaying setting a world land-speed record: technically possible, but somewhat unlikely.

Sadly, this isn't a victory for common sense - have you met our current parliament? - but bureaucratic ineptitude. Apparently, the government failed to tell the European Commission about key details, "undermining the legal basis of age verification."

So it's nothing to do with the high likelihood of data leaks and blackmail, or the even higher chance of people adopting VPNs to avoid the embarrassment of purchasing a porn pass from their local Asda. No, it took an administrative error to "indefinitely delay" one of the worst thought out bits of policy ever devised.

Somebody should probably check whether we put stamps on our Article 50 notification.

Don't expect to stop reading about the porn block, though, even if it never seems to arrive. The British public are very strange, and are largely in favour of the policy, while also largely accepting it won't work. Doesn't that just sum up politics in 2019 for you?

Culture secretary Jeremy Wright will apparently inform the House of Commons of the news today, although who knows who'll be around to hear it? Parliament is currently going through its own 'last day of term' period while we wait for another Tory leader to muff up Brexit.

Still, at least we'll have mucky movies to take us all the way up to that 31 October deadline, and the highly probable autumn snap election. µ

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