The Online Safety Act: A Slippy Slope of Control

Moral blackmail, ID culture, and the digital surveillance state.

The British government's rollout of its online age verification law, the Online Safety Act, has already begun to stray into familiar territory. Nowhere was that made more clear than in the grotesque statement by Labour’s Peter Kyle, repeated by Heidi Alexander, that Nigel Farage was “on the side” of child predators such as Jimmy Savile for voicing concerns about the act.

Now, let's be clear about this.

Nigel Farage is a loathsome creature. His racist rhetoric, his manufactured nostalgia for empire, his faux-pub nationalism are built of small-minded spite and a need for personal advancement up a ladder he believes he’s entitled to ascend. And, for a moment, it might even be darkly satisfying to see him compared to an even more monstrous individual like Savile, whose crimes place him on the list of most grotesque Britons ever to live.

But it’s not funny really, is it?

Because this isn’t about Nigel Farage, this is about the British government's attempt to silence critics of authoritarianism with accusations of supporting paedophilia. It is moral blackmail and is straight out of the far-right playbook. It is not resistance to Farage’s politics, but a mirror of them. After all, how many times have defenders of immigration been called “nonce” by some shiny-headed thug in an England shirt?

“Won’t You Think of the Children”

But this isn’t the first time governments and authoritarians have used the old “won’t you think of the children” mantra. Children, as innocents, are the perfect tool to be wielded to back right-wing conservative policies. After all, what kind of monster wouldn't want to protect children? Nobody wants to be implied as a danger to kids.

• In the 1980s, the Video Nasties moral panic led to mass censorship of horror films and a new censorship regime under the BBFC. Titles like The Evil Dead and Cannibal Holocaust were banned not because they were dangerous, but because they threatened the illusion of public decency.

• In the 1990s and 2000s, politicians and tabloids waged war on video games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Grand Theft Auto, claiming they would corrupt youth and turn players into killers. They didn’t, but the fear justified media regulation and surveillance.

• Post-9/11, we saw the same model: "terrorism" replaced "children" as the rationale, but the results were the same: expanded state power, gutted civil liberties, and blank cheques for tech surveillance infrastructure.

• More recently, the government has returned to the mantra of protecting children with the vape ban. They cited public health and the environment while defunding the NHS and pumping sewage into our rivers. Make it make sense? It doesn’t because the vape ban was about forcing people to buy cigarettes instead, filling the coffers with lovely tax revenue.

It’s the oldest trick in the book. And it’s being weaponised again — this time not against video nasties or gory video games, but against you. Against your data. Against your right to exist online without handing over your biometric soul to Spotify, Pornhub, or Domino’s Pizza, or some other faceless capitalist entity.

The Real Endgame

So, what’s the real endgame this time? As is always the case, further authoritarianism. It’s the thin end of the wedge, designed to push toward normalising ID culture and digital control of daily life. After all, we can’t have ordinary people say what they like online. Then things like mass rejection of genocide happen.

• MPs across parties are pushing for Digital ID schemes

• Keir Starmer’s Labour is proposing facial recognition technology on an unprecedented scale

• Banks may be required to monitor the accounts of “vulnerable customers” — a euphemism for economic profiling.

• And meanwhile, foreign companies with appalling data records are harvesting your data through this new Online Safety Act.

There are plenty of effective ways of protecting children online that don’t involve massive and invasive control: parental filters, school education, platform-level content warnings. But those methods require decentralised responsibility, not the dystopian top-down authoritarianism that Starmer seems to love.

If this were really about protecting children, why are there reports of people needing Face ID now to order pizza? Why is Wikipedia warning that it may block access in the UK over the intrusive nature of compliance demands? Why is Spotify now threatening to delete accounts unless users undergo age checks?

What possible child protection rationale justifies biometric verification to listen to Taylor Swift or eat a margarita?

This isn’t about safeguarding children. This is about normalising surveillance. It’s about control. And it’s designed to fail.

The government knows the current “age verification” system is full of holes. Gizmodo admits VPNs, shared credentials, or mirror links can easily bypass it. Kids already know this. Think back to your own teenage years. You’d have known every trick in the book to view some porn. 14-year-olds will be fine. But 70-year-old citizens trying to read Wikipedia without uploading a passport scan? Not so much.

But that’s the point, it’s not meant to work. Because the next step will be a “solution”:

Digital ID will be followed closely by National ID cards and Full biometric integration. This is Tony Blair’s authoritarian wet dream, resurrected through Keir Starmer’s cosplay strongman routine. He is a leader so obsessed with being seen as "serious" and "in control" that he’s willing to roll out policies that wouldn’t look out of place in V for Vendetta.

It is a slippery slope, and we are already slowly sliding down it in the name of children, safety, and national security. Again, we’ve been here before during the “war on terror” and the “need” for surveillance to “keep us safe.”

Authoritarian tools are never shelved. They are expanded, and eventually turned on activists, journalists, immigrants, trade unionists, minorities, and you. Keir Starmer’s government has already targeted pro-Palestine journalists. He has already targeted pro-Palestine activists. This is just the beginning.

They are not protecting children. They are expanding on a system that treats everyone like a threat when they don’t think or act the way they want. They want the architecture of total visibility. And they will use it. Not to protect you. But to control you. It is the slow death of dissent. Of privacy. Of autonomy.

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