Well, here it is, as expected, the Digital Economy Act. It starts getting interesting on page 5 (page 8 of the PDF). If you wanted further evidence that both of the two biggest political parties just don't understand the Internet, this is pedantic, but they spelt it with a small "i" throughout.
I, like tens of thousands of others, am obviously gutted that this is now becoming law, but I would just like to say kudos to Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, who fought vocally against this draconian piece of ignorant rubbish right from the start.
Aside from the awful content of the act itself, the complete lack of debate in the House of Commons on this bill was summed up pretty well by Don Foster, Liberal Democrat MP for Bath during the debate itself. He said:
We are often concerned about why members of the public hold us in such low regard, but anybody observing our proceedings tonight will not be convinced that this House is doing its job of holding the Government to account. We have spent more than an hour discussing just one clause of a 50-clause Bill in the knowledge that we have less than an hour left to cover all the remaining clauses-that is hardly evidence that we are doing our job properly. It is frankly totally disgraceful that a Bill of this complexity has been given so little time for debate in this House.
Only 40 MPs voted against the bill, including Foster, Watson and my current MP Lynne Jones, who had already written to me to let me know that she would. My current Labour candidate to replace Lynne Jones, Steve McCabe, voted for it despite admitting to me that he didn't think it was a great idea. Well he's lost my vote now.
In case you're interested, the full voting record is available as usual in Hansard, here (pages 96-99 of the PDF are the relevant ones).
Oh, and by the way, the act itself is probably a copyrighted document, with that crest and everything, so you probably don't want to download and read it from here.
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