It is a great honour to follow my noble friend. I completely agree with her that this is a powerful discussion and there are big problems in this area. I am grateful also to my noble friend Lord Moylan for raising this in the first place. It has been a very productive discussion.
I approach the matter from a slightly different angle. I will not talk about the fringe cases—the ones where there is ambiguity, difficulty of interpretation, or responsibility or regulatory override, all of which are very important issues. The bit I am concerned about is where primary priority content that clearly demonstrates some kind of priority offence is not followed up by the authorities at all.
The noble Lord, Lord Allan, referred to this point, although he did slightly glide over it, as though implying, if I understood him correctly, that this was not an area of concern because, if a crime had clearly been committed, it would be followed up on. My fear and anxiety is that the history of the internet over the last 25 years shows that crimes—overt and clear crimes that are there for us to see—are very often not followed up by the authorities. This is another egregious example of where the digital world is somehow exceptionalised and does not have real-world rules applied to it.
4.30 pm
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, quite reasonably asked me about Andrew Tate. That matter is sub judice; the noble Lord, Lord Allan, referred to it and I do not want to drag the conversation into dangerous
legal territory. However, she makes the good point that we sometimes see, particularly in the online abuse of women, offences that are quite clearly crimes; they are crimes of rape, violent abuse and child abuse. It would not take any of us long to find videos that showed clear examples of crime, but very often they are not followed up with the energy and determination that they could or should be, because things on the internet somehow do not seem to touch the authorities in the way they should do.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services—