LONDON — British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his intention to effectively ban adults from accessing legal pornography online, signaling what many believe to be his final attempt at being removed as Prime Minister.
It’s well-known among the political classes that Cameron has been trying to find a way out for years, since he won only 36 percent of the popular vote when elected in 2010 and was thereby forced to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a party with which he fundamentally disagrees. Cameron has tried a number of measures designed to upset and alienate huge swaths of the population – such as removing benefits for 3.7m low-income households and removing disability benefit eligibility for half a million people – but he has so far been unable to push his party into removing him as leader. Pundits note, however, that Cameron would have likely been voted out for countenancing gay marriage had he not made this decision to please Tory backbenchers.
The announcement that customers could have to call their Internet providers in order to opt-in for access to porn because filters will be switched on by default seemed designed to antagonize as many constituents as possible. “If there are two things people really like, it’s restrictions on Internet porn, and having to call utility companies,” said Cameron.
Cameron’s plan incorporates both protecting children from accessing porn online through the default filters, and pressuring search engines on doing more to stop the proliferation of pornographic images of child abuse. But Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), has called the blacklist currently used to filter UK Internet connections for child pornography a “fabulous success.” Given this, political commentator Philip Montague observed: “The only conclusion one can draw from Cameron’s announcement is that he’s just sick of being PM.” Montague added. “I’ve heard that Cameron was weeping into a glass of champagne when he suddenly came up with a way to upset every adult in the country with one fell swoop. I have to hand it to him, if that’s his intention, the man’s a genius.”
Technology writer Jessica Freeman noted the lack of correlation between accessing pornography and child abuse, noting that in the US from 1990 to 2007, cases of substantiated sexual abuse dropped by 53%, and in the 12 years prior to 2005, sexual assault against 12- to 17-year-olds fell by 52%. “There’s no way that someone in a position with that amount of power could have such a fundamental lack of understanding as to how the Internet works, or would deliberately conflate legal, adult pornography with images of child abuse, so the only explanation is that he wants out,” she said. “There’s just no way that anyone could be that cynical, and that big a pillock, simultaneously.”