The Online Safety Act stands against Britain’s liberal tradition

Marx was wrong, Burnham was right: capitalism wasn’t replaced by communism, but by managerialism. In ‘The Managerial Revolution’ (1941), James Burnham wrote that the bourgeoisie weren’t sinking into the proletariat – they were being replaced by ‘administrators, technicians, managers’. If, like me, you love Edmund Burke, this might remind you of his mournful line: ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded’. We live in the age of managerialism – and the Online Safety Act is one of its bitter fruits.

The Act, which came into effect on July 25, declares one of its aims to be tackling ‘misinformation and disinformation’. How exactly? It requires Ofcom to establish a Disinformation and Misinformation Advisory Committee ‘to build cross-sector understanding’. Category 1 services must also remove certain types of content if their terms of service prohibit it. But this leads us to a deeper issue: what do they mean by disinformation?

The government defines disinformation as ‘the deliberate creation and spreading of false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead people’. The problem isn’t just the vague and expansive nature of this definition – it’s the mindset behind it.

Managerialism functions smoothly only when the public agrees with the managers. But when there’s disagreement, the managerial class often seeks to ‘correct’ people – not through persuasion, but through control. Their toolbox includes censorship (sorry, ‘making the internet safe’) and a phalanx of experts. In the managerial state, political economists and social scientists are no longer neutral observers – they are enlisted as engineers of consent.

But that’s not the role of a political economist. For Nobel laureate James Buchanan, the political economist is not above the citizen – they are among the citizens. Their role isn’t to steer public opinion toward the goals of planners, but to help individuals understand how rules and institutions affect their lives, so that they can make informed decisions about the social structures they want. The goal is not alignment with top-down goals, but bottom-up understanding.

The illusion of authority over truth

The Online Safety Act’s committee on misinformation exemplifies a growing habit: making citizens align with rules imposed from above, based on ever-shifting definitions of ‘truth’. But this is a dangerous game. New ideas almost always begin as minority opinions. When the Wright brothers were attempting to fly, the scientific consensus said it was impossible. Experts even argued that flight had a weight limit – small birds could fly, but anything over 50kg couldn’t. If ‘misinformation’ had been policed then, perhaps flight itself would’ve been grounded.

The essence of liberty is the freedom to challenge consensus. To break patterns, to question assumptions. The managerial state starts from a false premise: ‘We know the truth’. But we don’t. No one does. What managerialism neglects is our inevitable ignorance.

Beyond the misuse of experts and epistemic arrogance, there’s a third issue: unintended consequences.

VPN surge reveals a classic case of government failure

Recently, the BBC reported that VPNs have become the top downloads on app stores after the Online Safety Act’s age verification rules came into force. In an ironic twist, a law intended to protect children has ended up exposing many of them to a broader, darker internet. With a few taps, they now bypass not just age restrictions, but many forms of national content regulation. What was meant to shield them from harm may have given them front-row seats to it.

This is a classic case of government failure. Good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. But the managerial mindset doesn’t learn from its failures – it doubles down. Now the government is reportedly considering bans on VPNs, starting a chain reaction of interventions.

The problem isn’t that children shouldn’t be protected. Of course they should. The problem is that this law isn’t doing that. It’s a policy whose intentions directly contradict its results.

Managerialism is at odds with our liberal tradition

More broadly, the Online Safety Act stands against our liberal tradition – the one that runs from John Stuart Mill to Frank Knight. For Mill, free speech is a process of discovery; for Knight, democracy is ‘government by discussion’. In both views, progress happens through debate and dissent – not by bureaucrats deciding what we are allowed to say.

This growing obsession with correcting people is not the solution. It’s the problem.

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