Unusually, at least for these days and in this country, the British government has struck a blow for freedom. The Government has abandoned plans, pushed heavily by the previous government of Theresa May, to abandon plans for Britons to acquire a licence before they could watch online porn.

This much maligned and much mocked policy would have seen porn users have to either use an online age verification system of dubious security, or purchase ‘porn passes’ from their local newsagent. The idea attracted criticism from campaigners for digital privacy and free speech for forcing Britons to have to declare to an overseas based company their personal data and outing themselves as porn customers at their local shop.

In addition, this scheme looked as if it was the first step to a system where people’s opinions online could be controlled or monitored by the government. Many of us saw this ‘porn licence’ scheme as a prelude for later policies to clamp down on dissident opinion online. Such a worry is especially relevant for Britons who live in a nation with no constitutional guarantee of free speech and a country that is beset with ‘hate speech’ laws that privilege some groups over others and already make people fearful of expressing dissenting views. Any opinion licensing scheme that grew out of this now dead porn licence idea would have made it much easier for the police to find and prosecute those who express opinions that differed from those that make up the state’s approved narrative.

The worries about the porn licence scheme go way beyond merely impinging on a Briton’s ‘freedom to fap’ but also touched on hot topic areas such as freedom of speech. If this scheme had come into being I have little doubt that it would eventually have been extended to cover political discussions online as well. It would have taken just a small amount of tweaking of this system to make it a requirement that a licence is required before accessing sites such as the Chans or Gab or even those run by social media giants such as Facebook. This would have given a government a tremendous amount of power to silence dissenters and also to intimidate people into not speaking about matters that may concern them but which may be considered controversial.

This porn licence proposal was excused on the grounds that it would be a ‘child safety measure’ which is an excuse used by many a political scoundrel who is desirous of censorship. It probably would have not prevented teenagers accessing online porn because firstly technically savvy teens would be able to evade the controls and secondly there would be an almost immediate black market in fraudulent porn passes. The porn licence scheme would have ended up as an expensive and intrusive disaster with a great number of implications for freedom of speech and freedom of expression inherent in it.

I am glad to see this scheme finally ditched. I’m glad of this not because I’m a massive consumer of porn, but because it is wrong for the government to try to play the puritan game like this. This disgraceful scheme would have at first gone after the low hanging fruit of porn users before going on to what the censors really want to tackle which is dissident opinion.

So fap away in freedom because at last, at least on this occasion, the British government has seen sense and stepped away from a policy that would not only have made Britain the laughing stock of the free world, but could easily be warped by any future government into opinion control. This was a bad idea, badly executed and one that would have further impinged on the rights of British subjects to express themselves.