[michaelt]

Well, it all depends if the politicians actually care if this works.

You see, this bill was passed in 2023, under a Conservative government; then a Labour government was elected in 2024, before the bill came into force.

A nice little time bomb, set by the outgoing government - impractical and illiberal, but labelled all over with 'children' and 'cyber-bullying' and 'violent pornography'

So if the Labour government keeps the legislation, they look like heavy-handed censors silencing LGBT voices and local hobby/community forums, yet if they repeal the legislation you can criticise them for wanting children to have access to violent porn.

A Labour politician who thought this was shitty legislation, but who didn't think going on record as a pro-pornography voice would help his or her re-election prospects, might be entirely happy for age checks to be easy to bypass.

[vidarh]

Labour, if anything, mainly had issue with the Online Safety Act not being strict enough, and Labour has already gotten itself massively unpopular with a range of LGBT groups and do not seem to care.

[SXX]

I really hope you are right. I'm not UK resident now, but I lived enough there, have family there and know enough about local politics to understand that when it's comes to privacy and freedoms there is very little difference between Conservative and Labour.

[zahllos]

I'd say more like none at all.

The last Labour government (1997-2010) passed the counter terrorism act and had multiple public arguments about how long suspects could be detained without being charged or released in their future legislative attempts - see "prolonged detention" in this: https://www.jrrt.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rules_of_.... They similarly passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which amongst other things includes compelled key disclosure (or compelled decrypt). They also had the national identity register planned as part of ID cards.

For fairness/balance, the tory government passed multiple acts. Online Safety Act was one, but the Investigatory Powers Act another - this did some relatively mundane things like call security service hacking "equipment interference" and say they were legally allowed to do it, but it was the act used on Apple to mandate technical capability to access iCloud e2e (act written by Tories, but TCN probably by Labour home office I would guess based on timing).