| HN Mirror

I appreciate that it has a lot of soft support, however concerned parents won't stop being concerned as a consequence. I struggle to see it as being a vote winner but its clear how its a vote loser to many. That the mainstream press have published many positive articles about it, just demonstrates the bias IMHO. Fleet street is become less and less of a proxy of public opinion over time but our political parties still treat the press like they did in the 90s, which I think can often be a mistake given how different the press is since the advent of the internet and how much more fragmented news now is, and how the electorate now receive it.

IMHO the argument for "doing something" is one of those things that people are noisy about but ultimately care little about at the ballot box. The risk is that the typically politically apathetic are driven to the ballot box as a consequence of disrupting their habit in order to protest. Most governments do very little that actually directly interfere with people and their habits, COVID was a very rare event and Boris Johnson fell in no small part due to circumventing the rules his own government imposed on the populace. There's huge electoral risk in giving so many people consequence.

Given the numbers at play, I just don't see how you can square the huge internet traffic for pron and the intrusion into their "workflows" against some presumed other number of electors that will suddenly vote for you because you allowed this bill to take effect. Irrespective of the ethics of the subject it just doesn't feel like good electoral statecraft in a democracy. This is particularly surprising given that most UK political parties generally veer away from doing things that might lose them any significant amount of votes.