Parliamentary Porn!

By Tom Penn

Never mind the smutty nature of the online content MP Neil Parish was caught watching on his phone in the House of Commons, and that a fellow Tory MP tried but failed to capture the transgression using her own phone, whether tractors or knockers, just what on earth are all these ministers doing on their phones in the first place? Have they invented a new category of hybrid post-pandemic employment – go to work but imagine you are working from home? Is there nothing better to do in there?

In fact, I’d be rather more inclined to think it odd that Parish was (supposedly) initially browsing agricultural machinery rather than porn (interpret that label as you will in Woke Britain), as according to Ofcom’s 2021 Online Nation report, half of the UK adult population visited an adult content site in September 2020, the most popular being Pornhub.com, for which the UK is the third highest source of traffic (77 per cent of which came from mobile phones). Unsurprisingly, equivalent data for the John Deere and Massey Ferguson sites was lacking.

But is time spent in the House of Commons really so boring that sneaking peeks at heavy plant  provides effective enough distraction? Most likely. Perhaps if a breastfeeding Stella Creasy had been present that day, or if Parish had been sat opposite Angela Rayner, he wouldn’t have had to go looking for some other way in which to occupy himself online?

Vulgar as it is, Pornhub say the average UK visit duration to their site is 10 minutes and 20 seconds – the time it apparently takes therefore, to bash the Bishop. Therefore could Parish not have expelled his demons beforehand and then opted for a cheeky post-exorcism snooze tucked away on the backbenches instead? After all, the Prime Minister himself was snapped power-napping in plain sight during COP26, in his defence likely the most tedious summit in the 2021 calendar of any politician, so obviously impossible is Net Zero. Maybe he sensibly elected to take care of business prior to hunkering down for a protractedly dull presentation on climate change, rather than risk a fellow head of state (not sleepy Joe, of course) capturing his bored fingers switching clumsily from Peppa Pig on CBeebies, to blue movies on CBoobies. 

Government representatives both male and female need not be ashamed to employ such a tactical aphrodisiac however, as according to Ofcom: ‘If you’re one of those people who takes their phone to the loo, then you’re in good company – with almost two-thirds of people admitting that they do so.’ Little wonder there appear to be fewer and fewer comedic phalli scrawled upon the doors of Britain’s public toilets. We’re all too busy researching, err, the latest and most eco-friendly, err, hay balers, aren’t we?

What on earth did MPs do to distract themselves in the days pre-smartphone and pre-work from home? I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have smuggled copies of Razzle into the House of Commons, and risk a fellow minister catching them on a shoulder-mounted VHS camcorder. Perhaps they simply paid more attention to the future of their country back then.

As part of the Online Safety Bill, adult content providers will be forced to prevent underage access to their sites. Yet if watching online porn remains for both adults and the millions of under-18s who will seek it out by other means, our acceptable new national pastime (regardless of its often exploitative and harmful nature, and the measures being drawn up to restrict access to it, Ofcom’s report does not refer to adult content in a negative light) then what does this tell us about British society? Likely that we are growing increasingly disinterested in our external environment, every excursion outside the home requiring intermittent bursts of web-surfing to distract us Parish-style from taking responsibility for our collective reality, pandemic or no pandemic, at work or at play.

In short we are the generations ushering in the Metaverse of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – the domain wherein I dare say that by 2040 or thereabouts, MPs shall hold all of their debates; the less interested of them free to attend naked from the waist down, perhaps from the corner of a local farmer’s barn should they so choose, that they may lecherously eye-up a coy, vintage stump-grinder.

The Online Safety Bill serves little other purpose of course, than to crush the virus of so-called disinformation – the infodemic – conjured up over the course of the pandemic so as not to hamper progress of two of the key vehicles to the concretisation of said revolution: public health and climate change. I’m sure that as far as governments are concerned, the more time the public spend watching adult content online the better, as they’ll then be far less inclined to resist yet more of the very tangible restrictions on life heading their way, of a society reimagined to suit the ideologies of Big Tech’s visionary billionaires.

So one wonders just what the new senior leader of Ofcom’s Online Safety Policy team, Jessica Zucker’s brief shall be? I’m betting that the former leader of Meta’s (formerly Facebook’s) Misinformation Policy team in Europe will be focused almost exclusively on the erosive rebranding of freedom of speech and expression on behalf of the Transhumanist pioneers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, than in addressing the nation’s addiction to smut. 

Most will be on board with implementing some form of control on effortless access to pornography by children. Except for the fact that the age verification measures proposed shall by default then apply to everyone, not just under 18s, and include such things as entering credit card or passport details – a highly useful flow of personal information itself then open to exploitation by hidden agents.

We all know full well though, that it will not start and end with credit card details, and that such protocols will rapidly spread to all sites deemed harmful by the Nanny State. And in light of its nutty eco-war, maybe these may include such as JCB.com, or travisperkins.co.uk – give Nanny your vaccination status or bank details and she’ll tell you not only whether you may proceed with your construction works at all, but exactly which electric mini-digger you are permitted to hire.

Neil Parish resigned in disgrace over his parliamentary peeking at pornography, not tractors – both however, muck-spreaders of sorts in the case of their being ogled at in the House of Commons; and in the sense that content aside it is becoming apparent that the dignified running of the country is increasingly secondary in importance to the sideshow of infantile sleaze in turn pornography to the gutter press; and therefore by extension the general public who feed their filthy machinery.

Let’s not forget that Johnson, who elected to abuse the nation on an unprecedented scale with his predatory pandemic laws, lacked both the courage and moral compass to then resign over his breaking of said laws. Laws which saw the public locked away in their own homes, the resultant boredom, anxiety and depression of which then precipitated a manifold increase in traffic to porn sites as a form of temporary escape. In many ways Parish should be commended for his penitent actions, not hypocritically rebuked for his by-comparison somewhat trivial online misdemeanours. To King of the farmyard Johnson on the other hand, such things as morality and the law do not apply.

And so perhaps the House of Commons is exactly the right place for MPs to watch porn. After all, who can forget the dirty parliamentary japery of October 2021, which saw ministers laughing theatrically at a devastating extension to the Coronavirus Act sans vote, as if it were all but a cheap and vulgar pantomime. Such a sordid scene was commensurate with the same lusty feelings of power and control as those engendered via consumption of pornography. The camera panning away to reveal a backbencher distracted either with a toy Tonka tractor or in cavorting with Lady palm and her five lovely daughters, would actually have quite befitted the orgy of control that continues to be post-Covid Britain.