Globalizing Britain
Brexit really starts now. It was easy to forget, during the dramas that accompanied the passage of the Withdrawal Agreement and the disruption of the pandemic, that the really serious question had still not been answered: given full control, what would Britain do with it? What is a reshaped "independent global Britain" going to be when it grows up? Now is when we find out, as this government, which has a large enough majority to do almost anything it wants, pursues the policies it announced in the Queen's Speech last May.
Some of the agenda is depressingly cribbed from the current US Republican playbook. First and most obvious in this group is the Elections bill. The most contentious change is requiring voter ID at polling stations (even though there was a total of one conviction for voter fraud in 2019, the year of the last general election). What those in other countries may not realize is how many eligible voters in Britain lack any form of photo ID. The Guardian that 11 million people - a fifth of eligible voters - have neither driver's license nor passport. Naturally they are disproportionately from black and Asian backgrounds, older and disabled, and/or poor. The expected general effect, especially coupled with the additional proposal to remove the 15-year cap on voting while expatriate, is to put the thumb on the electoral scale to favor the Conservatives.
More nettishly, the government is gearing up for another attack on encryption, pulling out all the same old arguments. As Gareth Corfield explains at The Register, the current target is Facebook, which intends to roll out end-to-end encryption for messaging and other services, mixed with some copied FBI going dark rhetoric.
This is also the moment when the Online Safety bill (previously online harms). The push against encryption, which includes funding technical development is part of that because the bill makes service providers responsible for illegal content users post - and also, as Heather Burns points out at the Open Rights Group, legal but harmful content. Burns also details the extensive scope of the bill's age verification plans.
These moves are not new or unexpected. Slightly more so was the announcement that the UK will review data protection law with an eye to diverging from the EU; it opened the consultation today. This is, as many have pointed out before dangerous for UK businesses that rely on data transfers to the EU for survival. The EU's decision a few months ago to grant the UK an adequacy decision - that is, the EU's acceptance of the UK's data protection laws as providing equivalent protection - will last for four years. It seems unlikely the EU will revisit it before then, but even before divergence Ian Brown and Douwe Korff have argued that the UK's data protection framework should be ruled inadequate. It *sounds* great when they say it will mean getting rid of the incessant cookie pop-ups, but at risk is privacy protections that have taken years to build. The consultation document wants to promise everything: "even better data protection regime" and "unlocking the power of data" appear in the same paragraph, and the new regime will also both be "pro-growth and innovation-friendly" and "maintain high data protection standards".
Recent moves have not made it easier to trust this government with respect to personal data- first the postponed-for-now medical data fiasco and second this week's revelation that the government is increasingly using our data and hiring third-party marketing firms to target ads and develop personalized campaigns to manipulate the country's behavior. This "influence government" is the work of the ten-year-old Behavioural Insights Team - the "nudge unit", whose thinking is summed up in its behavioral economy report.
Then there's the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts bill currently making its way through Parliament. This one has been the subject of street protests across the UK because of provisions that permit police and Home Secretary Priti Patel to impose various limits on protests.
Patel's Home Office also features in another area of contention, the Nationality and Borders bill. This bill would make criminal offenses out of arriving in the UK without permission a criminal offense and helping an asylum seeker enter the UK. The latter raises many questions, and the Law Society lists many legal issues that need clarification. Accompanying this is this week's proposal to turn back migrant boats, which breaks maritime law.
A few more entertainments lurk, for one, the plan to review of network neutrality announced by Ofcom, the communications regulator. At this stage, it's unclear what dangers lurk, but it's another thing to watch, along with the ongoing consultation on digital identity.
More expected, no less alarming, this government also has an ongoing independent review of the 1998 Human Rights Act, which Conservatives such as former prime minister Theresa May have long wanted to scrap.
Human rights activists in this country aren't going to get much rest between now and (probably) 2024, when the next general election is due. Or maybe ever, looking at this list. This is the latest step in a long march, and it reminds that underneath Britain's democracy lies its ancient feudalism.
Illustrations: Derbyshire stately home Chatsworth (via Trevor Rickards at Wikimedia.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.