– says former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in a Guardian article called “The EU surrendered to Trump over trade tariffs – now it’s in danger of capitulating again”.
It is stirring stuff:
How long are we, citizens of the EU, going to tolerate these threats? Submit to those who want to impose their rules, their laws, their deadlines on us? Surrender to those who now presume to dictate our fundamental democratic and moral principles, our rules for how we live together and even how we protect our own children online? Why and in whose name would we agree to cast aside our twin digital regulations, the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament?
and
Because regulating the information space is not optional: it is a sine qua non for turning the narrow mercantile logic of a few into a genuine contribution towards human progress and the common good.
Throughout history, humanity has managed to regulate its territorial, maritime and airspace. This is the prerogative of sovereign states. It is the essence of sovereignty itself. To renounce, today, the task of regulating the fourth domain – the digital space – by leaving it to a handful of private actors would be a historic abdication of the public sphere, of political will, of the democratic promise.
Sorry, what promise was this? I’ve heard of “the social contract”. Discussion of that has been around for centuries. I’ve heard of “the military compact”, which in a British context is a phrase used to describe the obligations of the government towards soldiers in exchange for them risking their lives on its behalf. However my self-education in political theory did not include this apparently well-known promise made to its citizens by every democratic state worthy of the name that it would interpose itself between them and the horror of seeing Elon Musk interview Donald Trump on Twitter.
Regular readers will recall that Commissioner Breton was a leading promoter of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which has good reason to be described as “the single greatest threat to free speech in Europe”.
By which he means the perogative of feudal overlords such as himself.
I mean this is really getting into the territory of judge John Mervyn Guthrie Griffith-Jones.
The internet is ours. It is truly democratic. Not elected, appointed, chosen by God or whatever but genuinely of the people. It is also policed by those people and, especially, by those with the wit and capability to create the spaces within it. I have been banned from one website for speaking up for AI (of all things). Fine. Their gaff, their rules. By the same token if folks don’t want their kids to see porn* then that is a responsibility of parenting. Leaving the state in loco parentis is laziness that summons totalitarianism. It’s like employing Pol Pot as a baby-sitter.
What scares our (I assume technophobe “elite”) is over five billion people have access to this technology and essentially the equivalent to Guttenberg’s press in their pocket. What scares them is not controlling the narrative.
I have, BTW, briefly skimmed through “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and it is risible (and not in an amusing way). That is all the censorship D H Lawrence ever deserved. He was a bloody dreadful writer.
*Which is the classic, “Think of the childreeen!!!” excuse.
which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament?
Unless I am mistaken the European Parliament lacks the right to initiate legislation and merely runner-stamps the diktats of the unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable European Commission.
Clarity, courage and conviction ROFLMAO, although he would say that wouldn’t he?
John,
I don’t care if they are elected or not. Hitler was elected. So was Keir Starmer.
@NickM
Our technophobe “elite” have never cared for what they should know… they have been getting by with who they know for generations.
In the US, Commissioner Breton’s remarks would be taken as testifying against himself if we were on trial for “over the top totalitarianism”.
We have rules about the State compelling self-incrimination, but when one of the miscreants on the other side does it of their own free will (noting that Breton likely doesn’t believe in free will!), I welcome it!
Wow. A European country fighting for the integrity of its borders!
(I don’t think that phrase means what they think it means.)
This is probably only barely on topic, but I thought this essay was a good explanation for how non-UK’ers see the UK:
https://mrstarstack.substack.com/p/london-bridge-is-falling-down
(Sorry if someone has already linked to this.)
I have, BTW, briefly skimmed through “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and it is risible (and not in an amusing way).
Sorry, both to disagree and to go off topic. Having seen the Golan-Globus movie version from the early 1980s, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” is both risible and amusing.
Thierry Breton is an absolute unmitigated arse of the first water. Saying it while I’m still allowed.
NickM,
Neither do I. It’s often said that the fatal flaw of democracy is people trying to vote themselves other peoples money. While that is a problem, it is not the main one. The most significant problem is politicians simply telling you what you want to hear to get elected and then doing the exact opposite. See Labour’s manifesto for the last election for example.
I dunno. That seems to let us off the hook too easily.
Sad fact is, a huge chuck of humanity WANTS the new and improved life our pols are trying to bring to us. We may be the minority.
But democracy cannot be empowered to overrule individual rights, especially when MPAI.
I always thought that people who vote for socialism deserve to get it good and hard. Not so much when they don’t vote for it but get it anyway.
It’s almost as if America is a “regulatory superpower” 🙂
I’m amused that an EU commissioner would mention the prerogative of sovereign states and the essence of sovereignty itself, particularly as EU membership results in a not inconsiderable surrender of national sovereignty for any nation that joins it.
Stonyground,
Well, fair play! If people want socialism then form their own communes. Fine, whatever. It’s when they attempt to impose it on others that I object.
I just heard about the arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow. So I Googled it…
Various results from assorted news outlets and then this…
Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.
Wow. You gotta love the “some” and “may” there.
@NickM
I didn’t recognize the name so I looked him up. His substack is here:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/i-just-got-arrested-again
Interesting reading.
Yes but where’s the fun in that? The whole point is that some people have more money than they need and we have a duty to steal it and share it out. After we have taken a cut to cover expenses of course.
nbc,
Whilst the arrest story is interesting my main point is what I put in italics. For “reasons” the Google search was truncated.
Stonyground,
Part of the point is that certain (most) governments have a very low bar on “more money than they need”. They also believe they can spend our money more wisely than we can. It is turning us into kids getting pocket money (to be spent on the “correct things” – for doing chores and such.
All this analysis of the problems of socialism are distracting us from the thesis of the original post: Whether or not “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” is both risible and amusing, or just risible.
So “… a genuine contribution towards human progress and the common good…” now requires censorship. Who knew?
CayleyGraph2015,
D H Lawrence was a socialist of the most appalling sort. He hated the “lower orders”* and wrote (no, I can’t find the exact quote though I’d lov to see it again) about euthanising the proles. He was an utter git.
*He had an enormous chip on his shoulder that he never had the Latin to get a degree.
“the common good” is one of the vague phrases now used to justify state action – others being “reasons of state”, “the public interest” and, infamously in American context, “the general welfare”.
These phrases are not vague by accident – they are vague by design, which is why the Tenth Amendment was insisted on in the United States in case the words “common defense and general welfare” were ever ripped from their context, the PURPOSE of the specific powers granted to the Congress by Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution, and used as some sort of obscene “general welfare spending power” – unfortunately intellectually corrupt judges have, basically, nullified the Tenth Amendment and a de facto “general welfare spending power” is held to exist – which must lead, eventually, to monetary and financial crises and breakdown.
In a European context I am reminded of the Papal Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII in 1891 – which claims, in its very first paragraph, that capitalism has led to an increase in poverty and immorality (both these claims were false – indeed wildly false – in reality there was less, not more, poverty at the time than there had ever been before, and the idea that there was more “immorality” in 1891 than, say, in 1491 is just utterly wrong) and, as a response to this FICTIONAL rise in poverty and immorality, calls for state intervention – without setting any clear limit on how much money the state may spend or what regulations it should impose. Nor is there any logical argument showing how such state intervention will lead to less, rather than more, poverty than would otherwise be the case.
Long before Marxism became influential among politicians in the United States one can see the influence of this encyclical in such men as Mayor Curley of Boston, Mr Sullivan of New York, and-so-on.
And this “Social Teaching” (really economic teaching) is influential among the non Marxist parties of Europe – giving rise to a false “choice” between total statism, the Marxists, and a move to more and more statism over time – the supposed “alternative”.
Pope Leo XIII also wrote an Encyclical on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech – but I am afraid I do not understand it, so I can not say whether the Gentleman supported Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion or not.
However, it is quite clear that the “international community” (the United Nations and so on – and various international corporations) is deeply hostile to Freedom of Speech and other basic liberties – and the European Union (like the British government) shares this hatred of liberty – and that they use such praises as “the common good” to justify their censorship and persecution.
It is true that Ludwig Von Mises de facto supported the Austrian Christian Social Party – but the alternatives were the Marxists and the Nazis, so even though he knew their “common good” philosophy would lead to a decline in liberty over time (both economic liberty and civil liberties such as Freedom of Speech) – the alternatives were worse.
Sometimes “Clerical Fascism” (as it was sometimes called) is the least bad alternative – if the other alternatives are the Nazis and the Communists.
But we should still want a pro liberty alternative – and work to create one.
Nor I am in any way “an anti Catholic bigot” – indeed in the war of pamphlets between Dr Luther and Dr Erasmus I think Erasmus has the better of the argument.
As for Britain…. it has been pointed out many times how the philosophers and legal thinkers (Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Sir William Blackstone, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and others – NONE of them Catholic) fashionable with the establishment, lead in the direction of tyranny – as they both place no clear limits on state power, and undermine the vital principle of humans as beings – as free will moral agents.
Even after the 1979 General Election none (none) of the pieces of legislation attacking Freedom of Speech and other basic liberties, were repealed in the United Kingdom. There was, after 1983 (not 1979) some rolling back of the economic intervention of the state – but no rolling back at all of its attacks on Civil Liberties.
And after 1990 (the squalid, unprincipled, coup against Margaret Thatcher) the people in control of the Conservative Party stopped being interested in rolling back even the economic interventionism of the state – let alone its race laws and other attacks on basic Civil Liberties – under “New Labour” from 1997 onwards this state effort to undermine basic Civil Liberties intensified, and (tragically) there was no repeal of “New Labour” anti liberty legislation from 2010 to 2024.
Such things as the Equality Act remained very much on the Statute Book. Just as there was no repeal of such things as the 1965, 1968 and 1976 Acts from 1979 to 1997.
It used to be well understood in Britain that the mark of a free person (in both Germanic Common Law and in the law of Ancient Greece and Republican Rome) was the right to keep and bear arms – and there as massive National Rifle Association in Britain and a network of Constitution Clubs.
This liberty was NOT destroyed all at once – there were a series of Acts (starting in 1919) gradually chipping away at it – and there was an intense campaign of indoctrination over many years.
Now most people in Britain are totally ignorant of the fact that legal firearms used to be common here (millions of people had firearms and were considered, even by socialists such as “George Orwell”, the foundation of liberty – now all this is considered “American” and, therefore, evil. Only people who want to murder children, we are told, could possibly believe in a right to keep and bear arms.
There is a similar process, both legal and in terms of indoctrination, to undermine Freedom of Speech and other basic liberties.
The state, and the establishment generally, never sleeps – they are constantly seeking to destroy liberty, in the name of “the common good”.