Coffee House Shots: the Online Safety Act vs free speech
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Is the Online Safety Act protecting children – or threatening free speech? Michael Simmons hosts John Power, who writes the Spectator's cover piece this week on how the Act has inadvertently created online censorship. Implemented and defended by the current Labour government, it is actually the result of legislation passed by the Conservatives in 2023 – which Labour did not support at the time, arguing it didn’t go far enough.
Michael and John joined by former Conservative MP Miriam Cates who defends the core aims and principles at the heart of the Act. They debate the principles of Big Tech, the risks of government overreach and whether freedom of expression is under threat.
Produced by Megan McElroy and Patrick Gibbons.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. |
| 0:09.9 | Today we're going to be discussing the cover story of this week's magazine, which is about |
| 0:15.7 | the online safety act that's just been rolled out. To discuss that, I'm joined by John Power, who's written |
| 0:23.0 | this as his first cover for The Spectator, and Miriam Kates, who is Senior Fellow at the |
| 0:29.3 | Centre for Social Justice and a presenter on GB News. Now, John, you've written this cover story |
| 0:36.2 | about the act that's just been rolled out in the last few weeks. |
| 0:40.5 | You're fairly critical of a piece of legislation that at its heart is meant to be about protecting children, |
| 0:46.9 | about stopping them accessing porn or other harmful material. |
| 0:51.7 | Isn't this a good thing? |
| 0:53.1 | Well, as I outlined in the piece, I'm not sure the real reason |
| 0:56.8 | for the legislation is that people are trying to protect children. I think the purpose behind it |
| 1:01.8 | is slightly more sinister than that. The real appetite for reducing online harms begins in the late |
| 1:08.9 | 2010s. It begins after Brexit and it begins with Donald Trump. |
| 1:12.2 | That is when the what you might call the establishment or the elite in Western society really |
| 1:16.7 | sours on the internet. They were very optimistic about the internet in the 2000s and early |
| 1:21.1 | 2010s. They thought Facebook would be the social revolutionary platform. But when it became clear |
| 1:26.8 | that the social media could actually be an engine for social change |
| 1:31.5 | or political change, it became very unpopular. |
| 1:34.7 | The online harms paper, which preceded this legislation, which was first published in |
| 1:40.5 | 2019, I believe, under Theresa May, It was partly to really, one of those main |
| 1:46.6 | focuses was to reduce abuse MPs were feeling, what we're facing on social media. This has been a |
| 1:52.9 | kind of maniacal, one of maniacal obsession of both the commentariat and MPs, especially of a certain |
... |
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