Musings of a Libertarian

  Parliamentarians have recently been working on a new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, ostensibly designed to safeguard children in education. It is therefore more than a little strange that discussion around the Bill has quickly turned to VPNs — a democratising technology primarily used to preserve individual privacy online and to circumvent censorship. The excerpt below reveals proposals to make the use of a VPN contingent on age verification. This is not a minor technical adjustment. It fundamentally destroys the purpose of VPNs altogether. A VPN exists to decouple an individual’s online activity from their real-world identity. Requiring adults to identify themselves in order to use privacy-preserving technology renders that technology meaningless. Age-gating VPNs does not simply “protect children”; it creates a permission-based internet where access to privacy is conditional on state-approved identification. Once normalised, this framework can be extended effortlessly: f...

  Joey Barton, Jeremy Vine, and the Criminalisation of Speech Last week saw the news that Joey Barton is seeking to appeal his conviction for offensive social media posts targeting Jeremy Vine and football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko. Barton was found guilty of sending “grossly offensive electronic communications” and handed a suspended prison sentence, along with an order to pay more than £20,000 in costs. To be clear, Barton’s comments were moronic and vile. He implied that Jeremy Vine was a paedophile and subjected Ward and Aluko to crude, sexist abuse, questioning their competence and legitimacy as football pundits on the basis of their sex. None of this reflects well on Barton. While Vine may be guilty of deliberately goading motorists in order to garner social media hits, this does not warrant the torrent of abuse Barton unleashed upon him. Jeremy Vine was right to open litigation proceedings. This was clearly a case of Barton peddling falsehoods — defamation. However, “g...

  Last week saw the budget – an outrageous assault on working people, but something we've sadly come to expect of our socialist government. Darker, and far more insidious, is Labour's timing in announcing proposals for the curtailment of trial by jury – the day before the budget, knowing full well that it would take the limelight off this most egregious assault on our civil liberties. Since 1215, under clause 39 of the Magna Carta, it has been law that “No free man shall be… imprisoned… except by the lawful judgment of his peers.” Labour have just advocated throwing out a fundamental safeguard of our liberties that has been law for over 800 years. Under their proposals, the right to trial by jury for many “either way” offences will be removed. What is especially alarming is the direction of travel this implies for the near future. Once the government normalises trying a broad class of offences without a jury, there is nothing to prevent the scope from expanding further. Either-...