Do we really want to give internet giants more power over our speech?

The next big battle over civil liberties will be over the Online Safety Bill, writes John Rentoul

This bill was originally designed to get the law to catch up with technology (iStock/Getty Images)

Civil liberties used to be more of a left-wing issue than a right-wing one. The defence of free speech, as part of the whole, likewise. It was the left that campaigned against the old censorship laws, and it was the Labour Party that legislated to make the European Convention on Human Rights enforceable in British courts.

This made sense because it was the establishment and the powerful who seemed to have an interest in restricting free expression in case it should allow persuasive demands for the dismantling of their power. Long before Tony Blair came to office, though, things had started to become complicated. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 split the left between free speech absolutists and those who saw The Satanic Verses as an attack on the oppressed.

Then, after Labour came to power and did good civil liberties things such as the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out that Blair himself didn’t believe in any of it. The Labour government set off on a long march back down the liberal hill, as Blair tried to legislate for identity cards and then for anti-terrorist measures that horrified what had now become a civil liberties establishment. Indeed it horrified much of his own party. The former prime minister was still at it yesterday, incidentally, telling my students at King’s College London that biometric ID is even more necessary now than it was when he was in Downing Street 15 years ago.