Cameron’s plan represents an alarming intrusion into our homes, into our private lives, into the sovereignty of the family itself.

The imposition of filters on domestic internet connections won’t actually stop wily, web-savvy young people from seeing porn. Armed with smart phones and tablets, and aware that there are Wi-Fi connections pretty much everywhere these days, even the offspring of men and women who agree to allow ISPs to determine what bits of the internet their household can access will find a way to watch mucky movies. If those of us who were children in the pre-web 80s could find a way to source, store, and surreptitiously look at porno mags and crappy VHS videos of Italian women giving blowjobs, then today’s permanently connected youth will surely work out how to circumvent blocks and get their fix of filth.

But what these filters do is set a dangerous precedent: they will say it is okay for the government to behave as parent to their nation, as the stern, finger-wagging father to its citizens.

Cameron is in essence assuming the role of in loco parentis in relation to almost every household in Britain. But households are not only made up of children; they consist of—in fact they are run by—adults. And by forcing mandatory web filters on households Cameron is arrogantly overruling these adults, in the process denting both their rights to access online whatever the hell they want and their authority over their offspring.