u/Ambitious-Raise8107

So something that has awakened/radicalised a lot of people of my age group (mid 20s) into paying more attention to politics in the UK and even joining political parties has been the passing and enforcement of the Online Safety Act. No matter where you stand on the spectrum with relation to it, it cannot be denied that it has brought about uproar from the younger generation.

Make no mistake. The OSA is a terrible piece of legislation in terms of its execution that the Green Party has said they will move to repeal should they come to power. What I worry about is that the far-right parties (Reform and Restore, notably) have been dominating the space with regard to opposing it. Take a look through YouTube, Reddit, Insta or anywhere you may fancy, Reform and Restore are gaining ground on this issue that means a lot to the younger generation. Something that we need to capitalise on when you consider the potential that the younger electorate is potentially going to get much bigger before the next GE.

The Green Party's issue on this front is that our current stance on it is not penetrating through our communications strategy. The number of videos I have watched or conversations I have had with people about what the Greens stance on the OSA is has been dominated by misinformation and cherry picking that favours the right.

- Citing elements of the 2024 Manifesto that no longer reflect our beliefs and stances.

- Saying that 'oh the Greens have no plans about it and what they do have is vague and non-committal.'

- Conflating Labour's introduction and abuse of it as a sign of that being what all left-wing governments would pick. Conveniently ignoring that Labour under Starmer is Hard Right at best.

So what is our stance?

Per the last conference:

“The Green Party is concerned with the civil liberties, censorship and privacy concerns with the implementation of the Online Safety Act (OSA). On July 26th, the OSA came into effect, and began to limit access to important communities for domestic violence support, drug harm reduction, and LGBTIQA+ communities online.

This is affecting all organisations, including those that do not cause harm. On August 11th, Wikipedia lost a legal challenge against Ofcom, which could see it labelled as a Category 1 service, which comes with the highest level of restrictions.

We recognise the data protection and privacy concerns associated with the OSA, with no centralised data processing, leaving the sensitive personal information of millions of British residents open to data breaches.

The Green Party is strongly opposed to the above, and would endeavour to repeal the Online Safety Act. We do recognise that there are harms caused online, including misinformation, and the Green Party would endeavour to support ways of curbing that harm that do not involve censorship, or infringe on civil liberties.”

Clear and concise. We want to repeal it because, as it stands it is not fit for purpose.

But we NEED to get that message out. We need it on the party site. We need it pumping through podcasts and YouTube comments and any other means we have. Because right now the general public understanding of what the Greens think of the OSA is "Oh they said some vague stuff they probably don't mean."

This WILL lose us votes and support if that narrative is allowed to persist. Get the truth of our stance out. Get it in writing. Get our activists and prominent party members to disseminate it to the public; otherwise, we are willingly ceding a very large potential voting base before the starting gun is even fired.

Results as of right now (5034/5036)

Reform UK: 1,453 councillors (1,451 councillors gained)

Labour: 1,068 councillors (1,496 councillors lost)

Liberal Democrat 844 councillors (155 councillors gained)

Conservative: 801 councillors (563 councillors lost)

Green Party: 587 councillors (441 councillors gained)

Independents: 245 councillors (43 councillors gained)

Residents Association: 36 councillors (31 councillors lost)

London Specific Councils:

• Barking and Dagenham - Labour hold
• Barnet - Labour loss to no overall control
• Bexley - Conservative hold
• Brent - Labour loss to no overall control
• Bromley - Conservative hold
• Camden - Labour hold
• Croydon - Remains no overall control
• Ealing - Labour hold
• Enfield - Labour loss to no overall control
• Greenwich - Labour hold
• Hackney - Green gain from Labour
• Hammersmith and Fulham - Labour hold
• Haringey - Labour loss to no overall control
• Harrow - Conservative hold
• Havering - Reform UK gain from no overall control
• Hillingdon - Conservative hold
• Hounslow - Labour hold
• Islington - Labour hold
• Kensington and Chelsea - Conservative hold
• Kingston-upon-Thames - Liberal Democrat hold
• Lambeth - Labour loss to no overall control
• Lewisham - Green gain from Labour
• Merton - Labour hold
• Newham - Labour loss to no overall control
• Redbridge - Labour hold
• Richmond-upon-Thames - Liberal Democrat hold
• Southwark - Labour loss to no overall control
• Sutton - Liberal Democrat hold
• Tower Hamlets - Aspire hold
• Waltham Forest - Green gain from Labour
• Wandsworth - Labour loss to no overall control
• Westminster - Conservative gain from Labour

Per the BBC, the projected national vote share goes as follows

- Reform 26%

- Greens 18%

- Labour 17%

- Tories 17%

- lib dems 16%

So, forgive me if this has been brought up before, but as someone relatively new to the party (3 months as an official member) I thought I might as well break my silence by talking about one of the primary issues that drove me to join the Green Party.

The borderline Orwellian dismantling of our freedom on the internet here in the UK.

I'm quite sure I don't need to relitigate the grand scope of everything that's been rammed through over the last decade or so, first under the Tories and now under Starmer's Labour but it has been with a creeping and terrible dread that I have watched what should be a bastion of freedom and creativity slowly but surely be walled off into a truly dread inducing apparatus of surveillance and censorship done in the name of 'online safety'.

Because, no matter how draconian the use and true intent of such practices and legislation are, it is almost impossible to fight back against the thought-terminating justifications of "we're doing it for the children" and "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear."

It can be the Online Safety Act and its endless list of problems as it closes like a noose around people's ability to access information and extra-legally censors what a sitting government finds displeasing.

Or perhaps the encroaching shrinking away at what the government considers 'acceptable' pornography, a designation that shrinks in size by the year.

We're less than a month away from the government telling us of its intent to install age verification for Social Media and likely VPN's as well.

I don't even need to touch on Palantir and all the other nanny state spyware that the oligarchical ideologues and demagogues that keep the status quo afloat force upon us all fallaciously, just because they happen to shove capital into Parliament's pockets.

The point I am trying to make is, if the UK Greens want to make major inroads into catching the attention of and securing the vote of the younger voting groups, we really should take steps to make a free and open internet our policy. It is a relatable issue which is deeply evocative for all sides of the political spectrum within the UK, and I feel that if we can champion it into policy, we can really translate that into party growth and message spreading.

So what are we doing so far? I know that there have been statements regarding the potential repeal of the OSA should the Greens take power, as well as condemnation of the more insidious erosion of our internet freedoms, and while that is good, there is so much more we could be talking about and doing.

So tell me, what are we doing, and how can we take a single issue that could unite a generation behind us?