4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

Step 1, pass law.

Step 2, demand compliance.

Step 3, upon not hearing of compliance, levy fines.

Step 4, upon non payment of fines, declare in breach of (2).

Step 5, block site from UK using DNS, in the same manner as torrent sites etc.

5 was always the goal, 2 to 4 are largely just performative.

This is the only power they have left.

The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.

While I disapprove of what the gov is doing here, I think it’s incorrect and unhelpful to put all the blame on them. AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.

The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)

Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.

Tell me about this "quirk" and winning by "default" (and how this never applied to other recent elections).

Less than 30% of the electorate voted labour. The problem is that the opposing party consistently ran as opposition but then executed on labour's policies instead so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.

The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies, they effectively weren't given a choice. To call that democracy delegtimizes democratic elections.