When I read or hear the likes of Yvette Cooper claiming the Internet needs to be policed by the State it reminds me of what ruling class toadies they are.

Today this woman is at the forefront of the reactionary campaign for the state to police the WWW. Yet when her party leader Jeremy Corbyn was being smeared and lied about daily on the internet and in the MSM she never said a word about that fake news, indeed on more than one occasion she joined the hounds.

She now prattles on about how politicians from all Westminster parties are being targeted and smeared on line. When was it never so whether on the net or via the old media, it doesn’t make it right but it goes with the job and as the saying goes if they cannot take the heat they should get out of the kitchen.

She claims some politicians are intimidated by such behavior, if true which I doubt then they're clearly in the wrong job. Down the years I have been threatened online with dire consequences including death, been bullied and smeared online and off for expressing my political beliefs, but I learnt long ago unless they are an imbecile, if someone wishes to do you real harm which I have sadly experienced, they do not forewarn you, let alone leave a footprint on the internet of them making threats.

What people like Mrs Balls really hate about the Internet is it gives people who had no access to the mainstream media an opportunity to express their opinions and that is what she and her ilk fear. Of course unsavoury elements also use the Web to express their opinions and desires but we already have laws, far to many in my view, and if they break them it is for the police to act.

The fact they rarely do tells us more about the nation we live in than the WWW. The authorities have no problem taking before the courts whistleblowers and hackers who expose the State's dirty dealings, but when it came to the powerful men who were exposed in the latest brouhaha for treating women appallingly by sexually harassing them, as far as I'm aware not one has been brought before a UK court of law.

So much for social media being all powerful.

Besides the world wide web cannot be censored effectively by state agencies and those reactionary governments who have tried have been outwitted by a simply work around.

Mrs Balls claims she is now trying to reign in the big beasts of the Internet, the Facebooks the Google's etcetera, not because they fail to pay their proper share of tax but because she allegedly objects to a tiny amount of their content. It's as if Mary Whitehouse is back from the dead and her name is Yvette.

The bosses of Facebook and Google must be howling with laughter, there they are robbing the national exchequer of billions and she demands they remove what 'she' regards as fake news.

Of course she is doing the ruling classes bidding, she is well aware Britain already has some of the most draconian laws, a bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law last year with barely a whimper, and without any opposition from the saintly Yvette Cooper.

Not once when a government minister did she demand the removal of Britain's draconian anti strike laws. Indeed she and the government she served all but endorsed these laws. Thus the low wages, zero hours contract and poor working conditions of today can be directly laid at the feet of Cooper and her New Labour ilk along with the current Tory government.

Indeed when her boss Tony Blair published his dodger dossier which was full of lies, Cooper had not a word to say about fake news, let alone the down right lies which sent young British men and women to war, to kill and be killed as she voted for war.

Yet now she also wants the state to police the WWW, making it even more difficult for trade unions whistleblowers and the rest of us to get our opinions out there via social media.

This issue is not about left or right but freedom of expression and our human rights, as Voltaire said "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,"

Below is an article by Matthew Parris in which he writes:

"It's impossible to censor social media so we might as well embrace fake news and learn to ignore the insults."

Mick Hall.
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The internet is a jungle that can’t be tamed by Matthew Parris.

Among the wry smiles with which future generations will reflect on early 21st-century thinking, the broadest may be reserved for our alarums over the arrival of the internet. We’re probably right about only one thing: for good and ill, mass, cheap, instant global communication will have a tremendous and growing impact on humankind.

But what that impact will be, how society will respond to it, how it may change us and how it will (as it will) finally bed down in our culture is impossible to predict. How we end up regulating the internet is at this stage equally impossible to anticipate.

Pause, please, at that word “impossible”. It’s at the heart of this column’s argument. By “impossible” I don’t mean problematical: I mean impossible. Pointless, hopeless, a waste of time. We’re no more able to peer even a couple of decades into a future world’s relationship with the internet than in 1440 Johannes Gutenberg could have guessed how, how fast and how completely his printing press would shape the world to come. Did he know where his invention would lead? Of course not. Any contemporary speculation on the future impact of the printing press would have been futile. As futile as our guesses, now, about where the internet will take us.

But though our journey into the unknown must be facing backwards, precedent is useful. In the end, all we’re talking about is human communication. Based on the history of communications so far, there are two imperatives I hope this column might impress on you.

First is the need for scepticism whenever someone starts burbling about the “new situation” that social media and internet communication presents us with. Ask yourself what genuinely new ethical or legal dilemma we face and what genuinely new principle is involved. I’ve yet to see either.

So criminals and terrorists can communicate with greater ease using the internet? But all communication opens up opportunities for criminality. The easier the communication, the easier the conspiracy. The railways, the motor car, post and telegraphy, radio, the telephone, television, the mobile phone — each was greeted with the same anxieties, for each enlarged the scope not only for good but evil too. And we learnt this truth fast enough. So each was followed by tweaks in the law, in regulation and in policing, to enable society to monitor new theatres for the same old vices, and pursue and track down the wicked in new places. But the principles remained the same.

And now a new generation will do this too, as the internet develops. In cyberspace I (reluctantly) conclude that for serious crimes like child abuse or terrorism, greater use must be made of undercover sleuthing and the use of online agents provocateurs. Is the structure, calibre and culture of Britain’s numerous geographically based local constabularies capable of adapting to these needs? A new, national body, differently recruited and trained, with an IT-led culture of its own, may be needed. A prototype for such a body already exists but only covers child abuse. Similarly specialist treatment is given to online anti-terrorism work. Internet-centred policing should be brought beneath a single roof as we do with transport policing. A breed of officer who never expects to meet a criminal or experience a car chase may evolve.

Which leads me to the second imperative: never to forget that humans can evolve very fast to adapt to new circumstances. Neither you nor I nor even the present younger generation are looking at Twitter, Facebook or the swirl of new platforms for report and commentary in the way the next generation will.

It’s possible they will learn to dismiss trolling (or the pile-in where a flash-mob of vituperative critics sets upon a single individual) just as the first consumers of newspapers learnt, after an initial shock, to shrug at the coarsened politics and bare-knuckled attacks for which the public prints offered platforms. I certainly learnt quickly to take no notice of personal abuse in the online readers’ commentary beneath columns like this; just as I opted to discard venomous letters arriving in the post. I was stalked for ages by telephone and survived. I could equally survive being stalked online.

I believe the immediate response of my generation — that such things must somehow be stopped by “regulation” — is wrong: first because this is in practice impossible if we’re to maintain platforms on which people can express opinions; the sheer volume of cybertraffic makes mediating (censoring) social media impossible except after the horse has bolted. And second because, perversely, protecting people from nastiness makes them more vulnerable: it impairs the production of the ultimate antibody against abuse, which is learning to take no notice.

None of this is to deny the importance of law. We can prosecute those who incite illegal acts or racist behaviour; we can sue those who libel. We can prosecute those who conspire to pervert elections or referendums. There may well be scope for international action to force social media giants to disclose the identities of those who post potentially criminal or actionable material. But vulgar abuse? Bring it on. Let’s learn to treat it with contempt, not umbrage.

There’s a great truth to be learnt about an essentially open-access, unmediated social media platform, and it’s one the next generation may learn better than mine has. Cyberspace is not like a big, democratic newspaper. It’s a chaos, an infinite tip, much of it rubbish, much of it wrong. For the discerning there’s plenty that’s useful; but you must pick your way through oceans of nonsense, mountains of trivia and a good deal of poison. Unless this could be filtered, cleansed, pre-viewed and regulated — and it cannot — we make people more vulnerable, not less, by feeble attempts to render an inherently dangerous space safer for them.

So bring on the fake news; bring on the slosh of sentiment; bring on the wildfires of anger and accusation. They are windows into the interior worlds of other human beings. Let us learn to see what lives there and make our own judgments. Let us learn to navigate, as we do in the spoken word, in the printed word and in our own lives. Let us learn to discriminate.

More than anything, let us learn who we can trust to separate fact from opinion and truth from lies. Let us get to know our sources and choose our guides.

Matthew is a columnist for the Times.