Google is part of the free press. So hands off, Prime Minister

It is not quite clear what Google did to David Cameron, but the Prime Minister seems to be exacting some sort of revenge. First, he wanted them to keep records of their customers’ emails just in case his officials wanted to snoop later. Now he wants the British government to be the first in the free world to censor internet search results. The causes he invokes are undoubtedly popular ones: confronting terrorists, for example, and thwarting pornographers. But it is precisely in moments of populist outrage that liberties are sacrificed — and only later do we realise what we have lost.

The digital age is bewildering for governments, especially those not constrained by a constitution. How to respond to the explosion of ways in which citizens can express themselves? In Britain, our bias towards free speech — has been supplanted by the post-Enlightenment notion of ‘hate crime’. The police now investigate what people say, not just what they do. In England, officers of the law can knock on the doors of teenagers who post drivel on Twitter or (as was the case in Kent) post a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook on Armistice Day.

Political correctness has morphed into law, and now supplants the sensible principle that the citizen should only be punished for speech inciting murder, arson or another genuine crime — urging on an angry mob, for instance. Instead, we have allowed the authorities to hound people for their ideas — ideas that, while they may well be repugnant, do not directly provoke criminal offences.

Now the Prime Minister wants to extend censorship to internet pornography, and the same fuzziness of purpose is evident. Child pornography is already illegal, and its access should be blocked by all search engines.