Porn Ban Problems – It’s The Lefties!

It is, after all, one of the favourite lines used by their unfunny and talentless churnalist Richard Littlejohn, so it should be no surprise to hear yourself think “you couldn’t make it up” in response to the mixture of desperation and stupidity doled out today by the Daily Mail’s deeply unpleasant Glenda-in-residence Jan Moir, who has been ordered over the top on the subject of internet porn.

“Why DO the Left sneer at Cameron's bid to block porn?” she trills, right on cue. What’s the problem, Jan? “How on earth did it happen that a river of pornography merrily flows into every house in the country via a laptop? When did hard core become so ... normalised? I didn't sign up to a national porn programme. Did you?” she bleats, painting a picture that does not exist.

And, as the man said, there’s more: “Yet porn seepage has crept up on all of us - a rising flood water of vile and violent imagery that seemed unstoppable, until now ... Of course, normalcy and acceptance is just what the porn industry wants. It craves respectability. It wants the consumption of porn to be as casual and everyday as the purchase of a packet of cornflakes”. What a load of tosh.

Then we get the attempt to conflate any adult content with child porn and paedophilia: Vincent Tabak leads to Mark Bridger and soon we arrive at the long defunct Paedophile Information Exchange. Yes, we must Think About The Children, and Ms Moir has the opponents to Young Dave’s jolly good scheme in her sights: “Yet some, particularly on the Left, dismiss Cameron's plans” [my emphasis].

So who are these rotten lefties who “sneer” at the attempts to hold back this tide of stuff that most of us have never seen, or even so much as thought about seeing? Well, one particularly trenchant critic of Cameron’s ideas is Mic Wright, who says “David Cameron can't protect us from child porn because he doesn't understand the internet”. Terrible, eh? Except he’s at the Telegraph.

And, not that it seems to matter to the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre, Wright has some idea of the technology involved, as does another critic, Mark Wallace, telling “Claire Perry’s porn filter is fantasy policy making, and it’s coming unstuck”. Except he used to shill for the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, and is writing for ConHome.

On top of that, the tech publications, like TechWeek Europe, not a particularly well known hotbed of leftism, are not impressed. And there is the small matter of Claire Perry, self-proclaimed champion of banning porn, showing herself up this week as technologically illiterate and signally clueless. None of this has anything to do with “the left”. But it has everything to do with folks not knowing their subject.

And that convocation of blind ignorance clearly includes Jan Moir.