Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

You can have the same issues with more than two parties. Only big-enough parties matter and as long as they have the same opinion it's going to be that way. I mean that is not bad in the general sense. Imagine if there were disagreement about whether money should exist in every election. Society can only function if some basics are simply accepted by everyone.

I don't believe the Online Safety Act does require that. RIPA did.

But again, most Brits are using WhatsApp anyway; end-to-end security is wholly meaningless in that context.

I don't really recognise this "branded a child molester" accusation either, TBH. That seems fantastical but I suspect you are not British.

There are plenty of people on the right (e.g. in Reform) making reasonable points about the burden of requiring adults to identify themselves to access legal material and people are not branding them child molesters (not least because that sort of screeching typically comes from the right).

The simple reality is that in the UK the majority don't think it's that troublesome, in general, that adults should have to prove they are adults to access adult material (or use a VPN, which the government is actually not acting to ban or add new regulations to). We already have default adult content blocks on mobile data, for example (and the adult content block, once disabled, can therefore be used as a way to identify adulthoot).

I tend to find that foreign observers, especially American foreign observers, always tend to conjure up really abstract arguments about inalienable fundamental rights, reduce everything to freedom of speech, whatever.

Life is messier and more complex and despite our more nuanced, complex set of laws, they are more moderate than various laws from US states, and it is not the UK that is the first to run headlong into fascism: that is happening in the USA, which voted for it.

British law is untidy. Life is untidy. We aren't fucking idiots or ill-informed children. We just draw the lines differently.

Yes, they would have to prove that there was incriminating data on the phone. However, destroying potential evidence before there is suspicion of a crime is also a crime if done with intent to undermine a future investigation.

It's quite unadvisable to destroy data in front of any sort of law enforcement. Last ditch effort? Sure, you better your odds but it's not ideal. If you have evidence of a crime, you know, wipe it way before you need to hand things over for examination and be in the position of having to destroy data as they knock on your door.

I favour random selection. You end up with a perfectly representative parliament.

> A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain.

But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages and disadvantages of being in one state or another.

There is a symmetry here, one you remarked on earlier, but it maps the Brexit referendum not to itself with roles reversed but to earlier EU-related decisions that were made without referenda. You could absolutely argue that, say, signing the Treaty of Maastricht was a major change that the individual states involved shouldn't have made without consulting their populations. I'm not sure I agree -- see below for why -- but it's definitely the same sort of issue as with Brexit.

The reason why I'm not sure I agree is that the entry of the UK into the EU was done gradually. The UK joined the EEC (without a referendum at the time, but there was one a few years later on whether to stay, which a large majority voted for, suggesting that joining without an explicit referendum was maybe a reasonable step), which was a substantially less major change than joining the EU would have been if it had existed then, and then the EU gradually increased its scope: Maastricht, Amsterdam, Lisbon. The combined effect of all those things was large, but each individual step was smaller, less risky, and (maybe) more undo-able.

(I do think, on balance, that probably each step should have been subject to referenda in the countries affected, with rejection triggering a rethink of how much European integration to aim for how quickly.)

If the proponents of Brexit had been able to divide Brexit into phases, each much smaller, less risky, and more undo-able than the whole, then that would have had many advantages and the downsides of a simple-majority referendum would have been less, though they'd still have been big changes and I think should still have needed more than a bare plurality of votes. I don't know whether any such thing could actually have been done, and kinda suspect not.

> If a majority vote isn't a majority vote [...]

Not every vote has to be a majority vote. Being a democracy doesn't mean that at every instant you do what The Majority wants at that instant, no matter how slimly it prefers that. Not because there's anything particularly wrong with The Majority, but because like an individual it may change how it feels too often for that to be a good idea.

(Likewise, having my own interests at heart doesn't mean that at every instant I do what I want to at that instant. That's why we have things like marriages and contracts and deliberately-established habits. My preferences are noisy and benefit from a bit of low-pass filtering, and I think the same is true of almost everyone. So we deliberately get ourselves into commitments it takes some effort to get out of. We can still get out of them -- you can get divorced, quit your job, explicitly break off a friendship, etc. -- but it's to our advantage that those things aren't so easy to do and we will only do them when we are really quite sure that they're a good idea. I think research suggests that most people are a bit too reluctant to make such changes, but the amount of friction we want getting in their way isn't zero.)

> What was the well-defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? [...]

I am bemused by the question because I never so much as vaguely hinted that there was any such thing. I said that in 2016 the option of staying in the EU was a well-defined one with known advantages and disadvantages, unlike the "leave the EU somehow but no one's specifying any details at this time" option it was opposed to on the ballot papers.

I completely agree that joining the EEC in 1973 was not like that. That too was a major change, though a smaller one because the EEC was a smaller deal than the EU became over time, and holding a referendum on that (with something more than a mere plurality being required to proceed) would probably have been a good idea. As I said above, the result of the referendum held not long after suggests that joining would probably have won by a comfortable margin, in which case holding a referendum wouldn't have made much difference -- but as a matter of principle I'm in favour of explicitly running such things past The People unless it's already very clear what they want.