New UK data laws could be incompatible with GDPR in the EU | Hacker News Reader

New UK data laws could be incompatible with GDPR in the EU

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57 pointsnemoniac112 comments

As if Brexit wasn't enough damage already; there is always another opportunity for the UK to isolate itself even further if they are keen.

Europe - with 300 million people - can set new standards that others have to implement. The UK, or what will be left of it, not so much.

But the really disturbing thing about the UK is that there are many people in power to whom human rights are less important than "souvereignty". UK experts have lamented for a long time the backwards looking whining and longing for the UK's past glory (ironically, the same backward orietation is what made Russia go to war - glorifying and trying to restore USSR times).

What human rights are you even implying here? Because this sounds like a wild accusation.

The ultras want to sever the UK's ties to European human-rights institutions, such as the ECHR.

But isn't that organization mostly used for political persecution, only under the guise of human rights' interests? Haven't they only gone after politically-unpopular-in-the-west entities, and never after the real egregious human rights violators?

No.

You may have a misunderstanding of what the ECHR is. A party can make an application to the ECHR against a member state of the Council of Europe (not the same as the EU) that that member has breached an article of the agreed European Convention on Human Rights. They don't "go after" individuals.

I see, thank you. I now see with which organization I had confused the ECHR.

I think they're referring to the move to repeal human rights laws in the UK

There is no move to do that. They are moving to make the UK Parliament sovereign.

The Parliament of the UK has an appalling record on human rights in Northern Ireland, where the ECHR has long been the authority to which cases are appealed. Withdrawing from the ECHR both de facto and de jure weakens the human rights protections for residents of Northern Ireland.

Perfidious Albion cannot be trusted when it comes to Northern Ireland, at least.

The UK Parliament ratified the Treaty? How is its sovereignty violated by something it itself agreed to?

It isn't, of course. It's just an article of faith now that anything Europe must be replaced. Anything that particularly gives something to do with Europe power is a threat to them.

During the referendum, it was a different story. Just the EU that was the problem. Nobody is talking about leaving the single market, no sirree!

They gave away powers, now they are taking them back.

This is a point you can make, but it's distinct from sovereignty being infringed. If Parliament is sovereign, it can decide to give away powers, no?

There is literally a move to do that. They are openly campaigning to repeal the Human Right Act and replace it with something that strips away most protections that are currently available to people whose human rights are violated by government.

The main changes being proposed are to give the government of the day more power and less judicial oversight, not parliament. Most changes are about removing people's ability to take the government to court. So it is the government of the day that becomes more sovereign, not parliament.

The changes don't affect parliament at all.

UK parliament is and always was ultimately sovereign on these issues. That was already true, with or without the Human Rights Act, and even when the UK was in the EU. (Otherwise there would have been no need for the UK to create its own Human Rights Act.)

In fact it was the UK parliament that put this judicial oversight of government in place in the first place by passing the Human Rights Act. Fashions change, and the current lot in power want to take the oversight away again.

>> There is literally a move to do that. They are openly campaigning to repeal the Human Right Act and replace it with something that strips away most protections that are currently available to people whose human rights are violated by government.

I don't recognise your characterisation, but that would be the ideal. That is not what is currently in process though.

>> The main changes being proposed are to give the government of the day more power and less judicial oversight,

Well, it gives the UK people more power. The elected government is a proxy for that.

>> UK parliament is and always was ultimately sovereign on these issues. That was already true, with or without the Human Rights Act, and even when the UK was in the EU. (Otherwise there would have been no need for the UK to create its own Human Rights Act.)

Yes, in as much as they decided, as sovereign, to give powers away. They are now as you say taking those powers back.

> There is no move to do that. They are moving to make the UK Parliament sovereign.

Oh I'm sorry, they're just replacing them with ones that can be enforced or ignored at will

For example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/european-cou...

UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights and often express their desire to circumvent it (see the linked Guardian article in another comment), or to remove its applicability from UK law altogether.

Supporters of human rights may find comfort in the fact that the UK is actually bound to the ECHR by various international agreements, including the Good Friday Agreement. This severely limits politicians' ability to scrap its applicability altogether, despite their repeated promises to the contrary. This excellent blog post from June summarizes all this well: https://davidallengreen.com/2022/06/oh-no-not-again-the-stor... .

Most recently the UK government introduced a "Bill of Rights". Despite its name, it changed little with respect to the applicability of the ECHR, but it does make it harder (again) for litigants to rely on the Convention in practice.

(Note that the ECHR, both the court and the convention, are completely separate institutions from the EU.)

> UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights

the European Convention on Human Rights was mostly drafted by a tory

the modern tory party's problem with the ECHR are its ability to create new law that is not subject to democratic oversight, namely around positive obligations

To Britain's ruling class, sovereignty means power; EU rules mean their hold on the nation is weakened. That's why the ultras got so much support from many people who came from political societies in Oxford, where Johnson, Rees-Mogg, etc., started their political careers, despite the case for Brexit being good for the UK as a whole having so many holes.

That may be true of certain political societies such as the local conservatives, I'm not sure.

But Oxford is an anti-Brexit, pro-European place. The academics (there are a large number) and the locals both dislike Brexit and voted against it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3661540...

"Oxford" is being used to reference Oxford University in this context rather than Oxfordshire. I know, thoroughly confusing.

More specifically, the political societies were primarily OUCA (the student association for the Conservatives) and the Oxford Union, but also smaller debating societies like the Canning Club.

It's surprising to many Brits how many of the leading lights of Brexit belonged to these groups as students.

For clarity, most of Oxford University and Oxford the town are strongly anti-Brexit. It's also a very international place.

You might not think this if you heard about all the privately-educated and often wealthy Conservative politicians who came through Oxford University.

So I just wanted to clear up any impression that either Oxford town or Oxford University are like that. They aren't, and most people there are aghast and sad at Brexit.

In contrast, Oxfordshire the region outside Oxford, is more pro-Brexit and much more pro-Conservative than Oxford University and Oxford town. It might have something to do with who owns land.

The same contrast shows up with regard to Green policies, voting Labour, and proportional representation. Oxford town and members of Oxford University (which is a large number) typically vote Green, Lib Dem or Labour, and the Conservatives do poorly. It's politically a progressive place with an international outlook, compared with the surrounding county and the rest of the country.

That hardline Conservatives are not well regarded by Oxford University members is shown by its governing body voting as a protest to refuse Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree when she was prime minister: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jan/30/thatcher-ho...

> Europe - with 300 million people - can set new standards that others have to implement.

the EU's share of world GDP is in terminal decline (down from 30% in the 80s to about 15% today)

its ability to export its legislation will be gone by 2050 (if not sooner)

You seem to be getting a lot of downvoting, which is unfortunate. So clearly your use of the word 'terminal' is nonsense. You have no way of knowing that, any more than you know that China's will continue to grow or any other bit of economic crystal ball gazing, but...

I am interested in your assertion about the actual numbers 1980s vs today. Can you provide a reference for that please? The direction of travel in those 40 years seems plausible to me. After all, China has definitely become a much bigger slice of the world's productivity pie than it was then so others must have a smaller ratio than they did. But the absolute numbers are kinda interesting.

> which is unfortunate

it is simply a.completely non sensical post.

in the 80s Europe was formed by just 12 countries, EU did not even exist, euro did not exist, Germany was two countries, there was a wall in Berlin dividing the city in east and west Berlin, USSR was a global power and we did not calculate in the global GDP more than half of the World.

That's why the downvotes.

Only if that trend continues for that long.

I don't think that will be the case. Most of the decline is not absolute but relative, due to China growing. But they're finding themselves seeing reduced growth now too.

So does US and other developed nations.

US GDP was %40 of the entire worlds economy, it dropped to %30 by the 1985 and today its below %24.

That's simply a function of population and development and in world where every nation reaches property it would be proportional to the population.

If China and India happens to transform itself into prosperous countries, US and EU and everybody else will follow and for the better because this is not going to happen in their current state of affairs.

Do you live in London? It's just that this sounds like a very narrowminded take and one that I tend to hear from people living in London and who are culturally isolated from the rest of the UK.

The UK is neither a small country or a small market. While not as big as the EU, the UK is no where near as irrelevant as you're making out. I could also make the argument that many US sites refuse to comply with EU GDPR regulation so, no, others clearly don't "have to implement" EU standards.

> But the really disturbing thing about the UK is that there are many people in power to whom human rights are less important than "souvereignty".

You could just as easily wrap "human rights" in air quotes here. The idea that human rights are universally agreed upon is silly. Further, even when human rights are agreed on there are always conditions to them. Yeah, you have a right to free expression so long as you don't express the wrong things. Yeah, you have a right to liberty so long as you don't do the wrong things. If you're concerned about human rights then you should also be fundamentally concerned about sovereignty because without sovereignty who exactly is deciding on the rights that should be protected? "Rights" that are prescribed upon a population without its consent can be oppressive, and right or wrong, this is clearly how a lot of people in the UK feel towards rules created by lawmakers in the EU.

---

On the this topic more broadly as a Brit I am much less concerned about websites tracking me without permission because there are things I can do to prevent that. If you're concerned about data protection I'd argue you should be more concerned about the perfectly legal real-world privacy violation that you have little to no ability to protect yourself from. For example, in the UK our communication devices (internet traffic, SMS, etc) are monitored, our streets are full of surveillance cameras, supermarket self-serve checkouts implement facial recognition without our consent, the police stalk the public on social media to ensure we're not saying anything offensive. Given all of this why should I care if tesco.com has placed a tracking cookie on their site without my consent? It seems so trivial to the point that it's almost a distraction from the real privacy issues that we face as a society. I'm not going to be locked in a cage because Tesco put a cookie on their website, but what the government decides to do with the data their collecting on me who knows. The only reasonable way I can protect myself from that is by not saying things my government doesn't like online and not attending protests or other real-world events that my government may not approve of.

It's a tired argument really.

The rules that were "imposed" on us by the EU were often written by us. We had a huge hand in setting those standards.

If we want to do business with the huge market next door, we will have to abide by those rules, whether we have a hand in setting them or not.

I guess we can turn inwards and become poorer, both economically and culturally. Or we increase the red tape our businesses have to deal with if we want to expand our markets.

I guess I don't disagree. I've switched between pro-EU and pro-Brexit positions over the last several years so I do get where you're coming from.

If you're optimising purely for economics then I don't think there's any question that remaining in the EU would have been the right decision. And yeah, I agree that sometimes compromise is just the cost of doing business.

The mistake you and a lot of remainers make though is to think Brexit is primarily about economics. Most of my family are on benefits and literally couldn't give a damn about what's in the best economic interests of the UK. I'm not saying that's right, but it is what it is. The problem people from my background have are more related to the social impacts of mass-migration and a lack of economic opportunities for low-skilled workers. From what I could understand that's why most of my family voted Brexit while most of my colleagues and university friends opposed it. I suspect the things that impact mine and your quality of life are different from that of my family.

I do think there's a place for an EU-like political entity that can set trade standards for the continent to encourage cross-border trade. The fundamental issue for me is that the EU as an organisation seems to be heading in the wrong direction. I'd personally prefer power to be more localised and closer to communities, where as the EU as an organisation seems to believe the trend should be in the opposite direction, towards ever more centralised power.

And they have a point.. If every nation state operates by different rules that's not good for multi-national corporations. But perhaps that's okay. Or at the very least it seems to me there's a trade off here. If there are things we can all agree on then it makes sense to have common rules, but enforcing agreement via a political union (or via any other means) generally isn't stable when opinions are too diverse. We see this even within the UK as political entity, but historically it's also clearly been true.

I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps what you see as economic costs have benefits which you might not appreciate as someone who largely agrees with the politics of the EU. It's like arguing to a Scot who dislikes the politics of Westminster that they'll be slightly worse off if they vote for Scottish independence. I think they get that, but they probably see the political opportunities of an independent Scotland as more important even if it comes with an economic cost.

Thanks for your considered reply. It's good for us to understand the different points of view in this.

I am indeed a remainer, although I was not motivated primarily by the economics. I just felt European, and mostly glad to be part of it. I could see problems with it, but nothing is perfect. I believed we would all likely be poorer out of it.

I get the immigration issue was important to many people, although immigration is now higher than it was before Brexit. Just not from the EU.

Everyone had different reasons and motivations at the end of the day, rightly or wrongly as it may turn out. I am glad we can have this conversation though, it's still rare I find.

Edit: tried to find source for my claim migration is higher, as I remember seeing it, but can't find it. ONS says from 2021 it was down a little bit overall.

> If every nation state operates by different rules that's not good for multi-national corporations.

Multi national corporations don’t really care whether the rules are homogenous or not, they’re big enough to do whatever they need to to sell their goods and services in whichever markets they want. The single market was actually more of a benefit for smaller companies, allowing them to sell to 500m people without having to worry about customs declarations, country specific safety certifications etc. There are many many examples of small producers having to stop selling to EU customers after Brexit because of the added cost and bureaucracy.

> The idea that human rights are universally agreed upon is silly.

True. But it's not silly to think that the UK, as a signatory to the EHCR did agree on what human rights are with 46 other countries.

> "Rights" that are prescribed upon a population without its consent can be oppressive

Hm, either those air quotes are doing a lot of work, or we have different understandings of 'oppressive'. The only explanation I can think of for your statement here is that there are fairly limited circumstances in which the rights of one individual result in restrictions on the behaviour of another - for example inciting hatred, threatening violence, spreading untruths. I certainly wouldn't describe any of those restrictions as oppressive. Whether you want to call the limitations 'wrong' or not is ultimately a judgement decision, but for what it's worth, I don't think any of these are wrong.

> this is clearly how a lot of people in the UK feel towards rules created by lawmakers in the EU.

This is also true. But unfortunately displays the ignorance of many people in the UK, as the ECHR is not tied to the EU, so being cross with the EU about "human rights" is, although undeniably a contributing factor to the referendum result, basically a mistake. In fact the recent Rwanda flights were blocked by the ECHR more than two years after the UK left the EU.

> I am much less concerned about websites tracking me without permission because there are things I can do to prevent that

As an HN reader, you're likely more tech-savvy than most. Others may not be as easily able to prevent tracking. Additionally, some of the things you may want to do to prevent tracking may break core functionality. For example, I discovered recently that the Parliament TV website doesn't work if you don't download jQuery from a Google CDN. It seems to me to be an unacceptable requirement that in order to access materials which are produced with tax-payer money and are documentary evidence of our democratic processes, I have to share information with third party companies.

> If you're concerned about data protection I'd argue you should be more concerned about [...]

This type of argument is not helpful. I am indeed concerned about the things that you mentioned, but that doesn't mean that I cannot ALSO be concerned about websites tracking me.

> the police stalk the public on social media to ensure we're not saying anything offensive

Is there something specific you're thinking of here? I'm fairly confident that it is perfectly legal to say things which are offensive on social media. Here's Lancashire police's take: https://www.lancashire.police.uk/faqs/online-safety/someone-.... The CPS also has published guidance on this topic, although it's a bit heavier: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guideline...

> Given all of this why should I care if tesco.com has placed a tracking cookie on their site without my consent?

I'll refer you to the excellent explanation at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters, but I would say that I'm a bit concerned that perhaps you don't really understand what the risk is here (or the technology at play).

Tracking cookies are placed on YOUR computer, not on a site. If you visit tesco.com, log in and do your online shopping, then Tesco might have a cookie set on your computer which contains your user ID. Now, you've finished your shopping, and you go to your local sex shop's website. Now, assuming there's a network request from the sex shop's site towards Tesco.com, they'll be able to see that user kypro accessed https://ilikebigbutts.com. Now, Tesco is not really a big threat here because there's no reason for Tesco to work with the sex shop, but companies like Google or Facebook encourage webmasters to include like buttons or tracking code for analytics etc. in order to gather this data and sell access to you to advertisers.

> not attending protests or other real-world events that my government may not approve of.

This for certain is especially worrying given the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. But I think this is called the fallacy of relative privation in formal terms - just because one thing is bad, and another relatively less bad, does not mean that the second thing is not also bad.

I’m more and more certain than brexit was ultimately a move to ensure the status of London as the world’s money laundering capital

“A radical Financial Services bill, drawn up by former chancellor and Tory leadership contender Rishi Sunak, will be published on Wednesday. It will pave the way for ministers to be able to “call in” regulatory decisions made by the BoE that they do not like.

“Nadhim Zahawi, who succeeded Sunak as chancellor this month, will endorse Sunak’s plan for a more “growth-focused” approach to City regulation in his Mansion House speech on Tuesday.” [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/financialtimes/status/154877322926693171...

[2] https://youtu.be/HDq13Lr2ZWw

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-sets-out-plan-...

Also see Tortoise's excellent investigative reporting on "Londongrad"[0]:

[0]: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/listen/londongrad/

Great, another country with different set of rules that developers need to think about instead of focusing on doing actual work.

Bring in more countries with different set of rules, and lots of technological development will be blocked because of trying to deal with different laws instead of the creative freedom and time to do actual work in good ol' free web.

> the creative freedom and time to do actual work in good ol' free web.

Ironically the good old web would work flawlessly

If you simply send documents and do not retain users data and do not track them, you'll be fine everywhere

Not by default as web-servers generate logs.

not a big deal.

If I remember correctly by default Apache kept a single log file and didn't log individual virtual hosts

the default log format doesn't save the host being called and the ip address is the one received by the socket, so it might be the ip address of a proxy server

hardly tracking stuff,but can be easily turned off

It's a strange thing to complain that countries have laws. HR has to deal with different local legislations, finance has to do it as well, why wouldn't dev have to do it ? Because it does not scale ?

Same should apply to any online service, including HN and financial services.

It's against freedom.

Yep, fragmentation is horrible. Usually the Brussels Effect takes care of fragmentation issues but on the case of UK, there's this drive of making thinks differently for the sake of making things differently(it's a political chip for those who cater to the Brexit supporters).

It would be OK if UK became more like the US but UK is not USA, in USA people don't usually get knocked on their doors by the police for their tweets. UK politicians have this desire to control the speech on the Internet, they work on stuff like identity verification when visiting porn sites.

People can be for or against Brexit in the context of government size and reach discussions however I don't see UK as getting more "free-markety" like US but more like Northern Europe style control with extra distance between the state and the people. It kind of feels like a combination of worst from the both.

> in USA people don't usually get knocked on their doors by the police for their tweets

when did this happen in UK?

Do you mean people broke the law with their tweets (which is like robbing a bank and showing your id to everyone there) and had to face the consequences of their actions?

It happens all the time[0], for example people get arrested over offensive or racist tweets[0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens...

[1] https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/uk-police-arrest-11-racis...

> over offensive racist tweet

exactly.

they broke the law.

they would be arrested too if they shouted those tweets in public.

no surprises here.

just people stupid enough to break the law in public on a private platform that knows more about them than their parents.

You're not making the argument you think you're making

I think you are the one not making the argument you think you're making.

Nobody knocked on anybody's door.

they have been found guilty of breaking the law by a court.

they have (and had) a right to defend themselves.

Unless you think that UK courts decisions are illegal, everything's looks fine to me.

> they broke the law.

So what? Alan Turing broke the law by doing gay stuff and was legally castrated. I'm sure things happening in Iran, Turkey, DPRK, China and Russia are mostly lawful. Slavery was lawful in many western countries up until a point, which is not too much in the past.

I would't invest too much on the "it's the law" argument outside of the courts. The legal laws are not forces of the nature, they are not like the laws of physics. They are made up.

I'm talking on the approach on the speech control. UK is more like the continental Europe. Let's say EU is using metric speech control when UK working with imperial ones and USA doesn't do that.

> Alan Turing broke the law

please not this again!

it's so tiring!

they broke the law knowing it, but hoping to hide in the anonymity of a tweet.

They hid because their actions were miserable and they knew very well.

stupid people doing stupid stuff and being caught.

no need to use Turing to justify the actions of drunk and violent racists.

let Turing out of it, please.

Anyway, these people have rights, nobody took their right to a defense in a due process away.

they have been found guilty by a regular UK court.

Not by a three letter agency that makes people disappear or the other one that brought Aaron Swartz to commit suicide.

And not in the 1950s, but few years ago.

I very much prefer to prevent it than dealing with it like USA does.

> 'm talking on the approach of the speech control

thanks god UK doesn't allow white supremacists to corrupt the minds on the youths that end up shooting to kids in schools.

Sure, just give me the list of the argument's I'm allowed to make or maybe I can give you my login details so you can write it for me?

> They broke the law

People have been arrested for misgendering people. It’s total control of the speech, but total control of speech is acceptable in democracies because it is what people want. Apprently.

It does happen. Especially if you express gender-critical views. The police (after pressure from, er, pressure groups) are being used to enforce cancel culture.

The solution of course is to have one country - the US - making and decdiding the rules easy-peasy. Sorry for the snark but thinking about different aspects in the world is “actual work”. You don’t find it interesting and creative - fine. But don’t take the moral high horse that your work is more creative than the ones which require thinking about different systems.

I never said US should dictate, their rules suck too IMO.

Web should be free, websites/services shouldn't be wasting time trying to comply with various laws but focus their resources on actual creativity and R&D.

In layman's terms, in my service's/app's privacy policy I should be able to say "I can do whatever I want with your data and keep it forever. Not OK with that, well don't use my service then."

No one's forcing anyone to use anything anyway.

You can’t say/do anything you want to - that’s how society works. If you don’t like it, you can free to not conduct business. No one is forcing you to offer an service or app. The society is fine in making that trade off.

Well, I should be able to create something I want, and society is free to use or not use it.

That is what freedom is, blocking people from creating stuff is not.

No, you shouldn’t. The society can create bounds around what you can create. You are free to not like it that’s the freedom you get from the society.

Yeah, conservatism is great, sure. Good luck with life.

> In layman's terms, in my service's/app's privacy policy I should be able to say "I can do whatever I want with your data and keep it forever. Not OK with that, well don't use my service then."

Ah, okay, so you want to ignore the basic human rights of your users. Data protection legislation is necessary to protect us from you.

If developers and the companies they work for respect the basic human rights of their users, then compliance tends to become a lot easier. Of course, if the business model is to exploit users, then legislation which makes that more difficult seems like an imposition.

> Great, another country with different set of rules that developers need to think about instead of focusing on doing actual work.

Well, to be fair the EU GDPR rules are easily summarised. They basically say: "Don't be an asshole with someone else's data".

Most sane people don't want the sort of filth that data hogging developers and their employers try to insist on imposing on their unwilling victim.

Get rid of the trackers, the un-necessary cookies, don't sell your user's data to the highest bidder, don't spam your users, you know the sort of thing .... and you'll be just fine under EU GDPR.

I think the idea that this matters is pretty fanciful. The unveiling of this bill is actually quite funny - Boris Johnson has announced he's stepping down as PM and there's a leadership election to find his successor going on right now. But the reason he stepped down is that he won a confidence vote amongst his MPs, but then it turned out he knowingly appointed a sex pest as his deputy chief whip - and so everyone who worked for him quit. The reason I'm giving you this detail, is that since he's waiting for his successor to be chosen he still needs people doing all those jobs. So the guy responsible for presenting this bill to parliament has been in place for 2 weeks, because the previous minister quit (hilariously, so many people were quiting the previous minister didn't even write her own resignation letter, she co-signed a letter with 4 other people).

The reason all that detail is important is that the new Prime Minister will select an entirely new set of ministers. So basically, someone new will be responsible for coming up with this legislation and getting it through parliament by the 5th of September.

But surely we could make a lot of progress on this bill in parliament before September?

Well, you would think that's the case, but Parliament goes on their Summer holiday today. Guess when they come back to parliament - that's right! The 5th of September.

The rabid intensity with which the tories are trying to remove any link to EU makes me nervous the government will push through with this, simply for ideological reasons rather than any link with reality. To be fair, that would apply for lots of things the government has done recently.

It's quite scary that the House of lords (unelected peers), previously seen as undemocratic may be the only thing stopping the commons from rushing through legislation as they don't have to pander to public option. Which I guess was always their purpose

Most democracies place buffers between the will of the masses and the levers of power. For very good reasons too.

In UK there is the house of lords and the indirect election of the prime minister.

There's a good chance that Liz Truss will be our next PM. Which, coupled with the opinion polls on the Conservatives makes me believe that there's a good chance that Labour will win the next election. This I think could lead to a referendum to rejoin the EU, which I think would probably win. This is likely to lead to the UK reforming those EU links.

fingers crossed... hopefully they actually let us back in!

> There's a good chance that Liz Truss will be our next PM

Such a horrific plausibility it doesn't bare thinking about, but I suspect the rank and file Conservative members might have a problem putting a brown man in charge, even if the alternative is as incompetent as the incumbent without the "charm".

> This I think could lead to a referendum to rejoin the EU

Unlikely.

> which I think would probably win

Even more unlikely.

Brexshitters would insist upon some sensible rules, such as 70% (or more) in favour for it to pass. I'd guess a vote today would likely be similarly split as last time, only just slightly in favour to rejoin.

> Such a horrific plausibility it doesn't bare thinking about

Just wait until she gives Boris the Foreign Secretary job...

> Unlikely

Agreed - it's all very unlikely but I'm hopeful!

Labour hasn't even ever had a woman leader, whereas the Tories have had two. They are far more diverse than the Labour party.

Of course, back in the real world – "diversity" is not a value which is calculated based on "how many women leaders has the party had". I'm sure you appreciate that to say so would be a silly partisan talking point without any value.

It's not absolute, but it's a "smell". And I was responding to a silly partisan talking point without any value.

I think the idea of the UK rejoining the EU, ever, in its current state is fanciful thinking - and continues this division of remainer/rejoiner vs brexiteer identity politics.

For a start, rejoining would mean (committing to) adopting the Euro and joining Schengen, which as a Brit living in the Schengen/Euro Zone I don't really see any advantage of and even less public support from within the UK.

Hopefully when the Conservative party, or at least its own current state, burns itself out, the cooler heads (from whatever party is in power) will move to something like the famed Norway/EEA model. It won't be framed as rejoin/remain, more just economic and trade policy, and it'll take the best part of a decade - but I consider that the most sensible 'optimistic' view on the future.

> fanciful thinking

Yep, I agree, it's all very unlikely but I'm hopeful.

> rejoining would mean (committing to) adopting the Euro and joining Schengen for a start

I know I'm in the minority here but I'd absolutely love this. It just makes so much sense. We have such an island mentality.

I'm not sure that the EU would allow the UK to rejoin. If they did the terms would probably be a lot harder than what the UK used to enjoy, including switching currency to the Euro, for example. So I don't think that rejoining will happen soon. But one could move towards closer cooperation with the EU.

You're probably right the terms would be harder. Personally I don't care. Even if it means I have to pay more in taxes.

At least we'd be part of a progressive union, even if its run by bureaucrats.

It may seem small minded but having to change currency, go through passport control, pay more import duty for shipments from mainland EU, reform the progressive data protection and human rights laws and renegotiate trade deals with the whold world is just all such a personal pain. A pain that I feel isn't alleviated by any benefits. Naming a single definit benefit of brexit is difficult - the Leave campaign was built on lies and the current "Brexit Opportunities Minister" Moggins isn't achieving anything noteworthy.

Have to demonstrate the benefits of liberating ourselves from the stifling EU rules!

Now we can have two different sets of rules to comply with if we do business with the EU.

It is entirely ideological.

I mean, the temptation is to say "this is just posturing by someone who's getting their few weeks as a minister, it'll never come in, no need to worry about it". But it's worth noting that another thing that started off as posturing was Brexit (at the time Cameron promised a vote, a Tory majority would have seemed rather implausible, so really it was just electioneering). The Tories have a track record of accidentally backing themselves into a corner and having to do the silly thing they talked about.

Whilst thats true, Brexit was monumentally bigger and had a lot more public support. If there were a GE now and the tories silently dropped this from their manifesto, I doubt many people would notice or care.

I've heard a few people saying things like "something should be done", but nobody outside of tech circles (and even many people within it) I've spoken to supports this bill, in fact none of them have even heard of it.

> I mean, the temptation is to say "this is just posturing by someone who's getting their few weeks as a minister, it'll never come in, no need to worry about it"

I'd say: if they're saying that they don't understand how the political system in the UK works

Oh I'm quite certain that the new UK data laws are going to be a total shit show and there's absolutely no possibility that they'll be compatible with EU regulations causing a massive spike in red tape. But I'm certain of that because that's the entire direction of the tory party since they expelled everyone to the left of Mussolini in the 2019 election. I'm just saying the details of this particular draft are moot.

Honestly, you could remove the resignation, the chaos, the summer holidays (over a month off is a bit rich, but thats another matter), all of these details, and I'd still doubt they'd ever happen.

Remember when the plan was simply to add ID checks to adult websites, and how 2 years later that still didn't happen? If they couldnt get something that unambitious through, in years that were, relative to now, fairly stable, theres no chance they'd get this monster of a bill through. And thats before you add in all those bonus factors you mentioned.

There are some benefits to an incompetent government.

British politics never cease to amaze.

That said, isn’t there a significant probability that this gets voted in September anyway with nobody having bothered to read it?

The UK is not in the EU, so why does it matter?

And Brexit was specifically about whatever EU does they'll do the opposite, so it's fine. Next is health care, the food safety standards, and the rest.

As Bruce Sterling wrote in 2016: https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-St...

> Great Britain is becoming Little Britain. The UK is like a giant Cayman Islands in 2016. They used to be the wise and perfidious grownups in the geostrategic room, but now it's all about squalid, petty things like Brexit, Scottish secession, anti-immigration; British political extremes are thriving and the middle is dead as mutton. They've lost their soft-power by the bucketful; people who used to beg for their wise counsel now ignore them. What do they want -- to be Airstrip One for any creep with a trailer-truck full of cash? I've never seen them think so small.

And a while ago the Tory party's Russian donors problem was in the news, including the son of an ex-KGB Gazprom owner who got a peerage. Whose party in Italy Boris Johnson the then foreign minister went to, alone. God damn, what a corrupt bunch.

Every day I get more convinced that most contemporary right wing politics is just collective narcissistic personality disorder.

Well, because for a short while, it was assumed that UK would just follow the same rules as EU does, and thefore UK companies could be given an easy pass operating in the EU, or when interacting with EU citizens. For instance there is/was no need to inspect any items coming from UK into the EU, since the general assumption is that the standards are still the same as they were pre-brexit, so they don't need to be treated like coming from a country like China or India.

However, this is all changing now. UK is keen to get rid of regulations it inherited from the EU, making it a much less attractive place to do business with, from the EU perspective. We can no longer assume that companies hosting EU citizen's data on UK soil will play nice and follow the same rules - it will be treated with caution initially, and (hopefully) with eventual hostility towards it, as UK seems to be going full on surveilence mode with government and its agencies having access to everything at all times with no warrants needed.

So yes, it "doesn't matter" only if UK isn't interested in working with the largest trading block on the planet. If they truly want to go that path, then sure, whatever.

> For instance there is/was no need to inspect any items coming from UK into the EU, since the general assumption is that the standards are still the same as they were pre-brexit, so they don't need to be treated like coming from a country like China or India.

This was never assumed under the current deal; the UK was given a grace period, which has now expired, before full enforcement, but on day one it was clear that inspection and/or barring of some goods (particularly food) would be necessary.

Because if we don't comply with the GDPR then we can't deal with EU citizens. Which is a massive market right next to us. So now companies have two parallell data protection regulations to deal with, which is extra cost.

Because of data sharing over international borders.

Can't send EU citizen data to a data centre in London if the EU says the UK's standards aren't high enough.

At best, extra cost for UK companies with EU customers, at worst, being excluded from certain sectors.

Because some of the people living in the UK would prefer stronger, EU-like data protection regulation. It's a big deal to relax the regulations in that sense.

Honestly if this law ever gets approved, the best way to comply is just to block the UK, its seems to be made to make compliance impossibly expensive if you are not big tech or a UK focused company.

Of course they will. That’s why any company with a brain’s been looking to transition to EU data centers, with the UK told not to bother running.

The EU cookie legislation is so out of date, made by bureaucrats rather than technocrats. There are so many ways to track users now including html5 canvas thumbprinting, URLs etc.

Isn’t that the whole point of brexit? Introducing incompatible changes - supposedly beneficial ones

Feels like more of the same schroedingers brexit BS - “we want things to change but also stay the same”

Brexity politicians still half-arsing it, I see.

I think this is just the blatant protectionism that the EU is well known for.

... The UK threatening to adopt a variant watered-down GDPR is... EU protectionism? Truly, the powers of these Brussels bureaucrats know no bounds, using EU Mind Control to make Britain self-sabotage.

...The EU using an update to a rule as a pretext? Yeah, never happened ever.

Yes, ok, we all voted for Brexit largely because of those infuriating cookie popups that EU bureaucrats imposed on us, pointlessly ruining the entire web experience. The constant annoyance of government-imposed cookie pop-ups, click after click, hour upon hour, day after day, must have resulted in millions of aggregate hours of lost productivity across the union.

For me, it caused the death of the European dream by a million tiny little cuts.

But surely it's possible to get rid of cookie popups without also giving away all of our digital rights?! Is this really the price we have to pay?

That’s a new one. Cookie pop ups caused Brexit, you say? Interesting because the Brexit vote happened in June 2016 and GDPR came into effect two years later in May 2018.

But what’s funny is, you’re right in a way. Many of the criticisms of the EU were just elaborate fictions concocted by right wing tabloids. We can add “GDPR caused Brexit” to that pile of falsehoods.

To be fair (not that it's needed), cookie popups were EU law before GDPR

Worth noting that the "cookie popup" law was older than GDPR.

Cookie popups have been around since long before the GDPR. They started with the EU ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) passed in 2002 and amended in 2009.

So although people now associate them with the GDPR, cookie popups were already an annoyance for many years before.

Unfortunately, the UK seems to be taking advantage of the (rightful) public backlash against cookie popups to also try to revoke many of the good parts of the GDPR.

Only consent is needed for cookies that aren't strictly necessary.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

If a site is asking for consent, they're either idiots who don't understand what the law requires of them or they intend on tracking their users.

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