> I don't get the point of banning specific pornography niches/fetishes that are otherwise legal.

A typical practice for dictatorships to create a legal system capable of exerting pressure on any opponent.

> Are there not much more objectionable fetishes than this one?

The goal isn't to combat sexual perversions, but to silence anyone the dictatorial regime deems necessary.

You pass a law that's clearly unimplementable, and therefore won't cause much outrage, and then, as expected, the law doesn't work. But when you need to silence someone, a complaint emerges that someone accessed and distributed illegal content (some anonymous on some forum saw their IP-address doing that). In the public consciousness, the violation isn't serious (the law isn't actually implemented), so there's no significant outrage. Meanwhile, you conduct searches of the victim's home, confiscate their computers, laptops, smartphones and other gadgets, and open a criminal case against them.

And then you simply close the case, saying, "Yeah, nothing illegal was found, we are sorry". And the victim (and others) will think twice before going against the dictatorial regime next time. Typical practice, all dictatorships do it

This exactly. I don’t believe the government should be censoring porn, but I have a really hard time arguing that principle against studies that suggest it is normalizing choking and slapping women among the young men exposed to it. Why is this roleplay fetish the beachhead and not something like that?

Not that have reached the top twenty in prevalence at major sites, no. Incest porn has grown (in concert with the typical move-out age increasing due to economic pressures*) from a long-tail niche decades ago to, looking through a certain United States site’s category list today, being approximately 4x as prevalent by quantity than category ‘British’ and 2-10x more prevalent than most other categories. I would imagine that British leaders are particularly hostile to that U.S. cultural export (and we are a, if not the, top exporter in that industry!) for various reasons beyond simple disinterest in it. Monarchies tend to disfavor that which diminishes their ‘above’ness relative to commoners, and export of this now-widespread U.S. fetish into British society certainly could be estimated to have that diminishing effect by British leaders.

* For anyone looking for a controversial Econ/Psy dual-major thesis topic, inflation-adjusted wage and job losses for teens reaching their age of maturity resulted in the ‘moving out’ age spiking, which combined with known U.S. repressionist tendencies, resulted in a corresponding spike in the incest fetish export trade. (psych sidebar about how fantasies serve as an escape valve for being trapped in one's circumstances). (citations needed)

If you really want to know, see the 215 page report commissioned by the UK governments Independent Pornography Review

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-...

I'm guessing that incest porn is apparently so popular in the US that it's made finding anything that isn't incest porn on US porn sites much harder for these perfectly upstanding members of the House of Lords.

Wait, am I still allowed to say upstanding members?

The UK government wants to ban porn entirely. Requiring website users to identify themselves (the age verification thing) is the first step. This is another step.