Hacker News Reader

Comment by arrowsmith | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what this recent vote is about. The original Online Safety Act was introduced and passed by the Tories in 2023 (although it's only coming into effect now, obviously.)

So the Tories, who created this awful bill in the first place, are now voting against it? Clown country.

View on HN

That happens all over the place, conservatives pass a time bomb bill, they lose control of congress/house, time bomb is about to become effective, they now fight to overturn it and place the blame on the current ruling folks.

Except this bill was first introduced in March 2022, when the Tories hadn't imploded and there was no strong reason to expect they'd lose the next election.

It wasn't a "time bomb". They introduced this legislation because they wanted it.

> March 2022, when the Tories hadn't imploded and there was no strong reason to expect they'd lose the next election.

Under Boris Johnson?

Well, I suppose we have the benefit of hindsight.

Eh, I mean, the polls were looking fairly dire for them by that point.

Not nearly as dire as they were a year later.

If it’s really a time bomb, I’d expect the supposedly responsible party to defuse it. So why haven’t they?

This isn’t one of those cases. It was a well intentioned Bill that passed with Labour’s support but was very badly planned and written. Hell, it wouldn’t even have helped counter the misinformation being spread last summer and this summer to try and instigate more race riots!

“Well intentioned” hahahaha yeah right, good one.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If that were true, why do laws get amended when politicians see impacts they don't like? A famous example that college students are taught at A-Level Law is the law on bigamy where it stated "a married person who gets married again." This isn't possible (in the UK, you can only get married to one person at a time), so the court had to rewrite the legislation on the fly to get the intended effect.

Labour thought Tory version was not going far enough.

Labour appear to be talking about wanting to repeal the OSA judging by this morning's news: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/jul/29/uk-pol...

Nigel Farage isn't part of Labour.

You're right, I misread. I'm terrible in the mornings - apologies.

Many such cases

Reply on news.ycombinator.com