It's not often that two of my predictions (which are less derived from any mystic or psychic prowess, alas, and more from simple pattern recognition) come true, not just in the same week, but on the same day, but that's the dubious distinction I've achieved this week.

As I anticipated last year, the UK is now seeking to abolish trial by jury, for all but the most serious crimes (and the journalist Peter Hitchens predicts that, within 20 years, these exceptions will have been scrapped too).

The establishment has been making it explicitly clear for some time that abolishing juries is a key agenda item, with a 2021 Guardian article petitioning its readers, "Our justice system is in crisis, so why not abolish jury trials?"

As I wrote in July 2024:

"Of course the establishment doesn't like trials by jury, as these are the exact antithesis of the authoritarian technocracy the overlords are working so hard to implement, and that we got a clear preview of throughout "Covid".

Trial by jury supposes that ordinary people matter, and that their ability to think, to assess evidence and come to an informed view, is as important and as valid as the views of so-called "experts".

This is a concept that the ruling classes wish to entirely annihilate...

The desired social model for the future is something far more authoritarian and less egalitarian than we currently have, and something far more resembling the medieval feudal system, where a small class of powerful rich people tell the rest of us what to do. 

Therefore, any existing social structures that support the idea of equality, and ordinary people being as worthwhile and important as "experts", has to go."...

Trial by jury will be replaced with trial by "expert" - and, who knows, maybe eventually "trial by AI" (remember the ominous line in Back To The Future II that "the justice system works swiftly in the future now that they've abolished all lawyers")...

We have to ask ourselves, if we are ever falsely accused of a serious crime, who would we want to assess whether we are guilty? A jury of ordinary people much like ourselves... or the same "experts" who gave us Covid, lockdowns, mandates, and ultimately every psychopathic psy-op the world has ever seen?

Ordinary people are not perfect, of course, and they can get things wrong. Yet in any serious situation, I would always invest far more trust and faith in their ability and integrity than any shady cabal of state-appointed "experts".

The good news is that no final decision on abolishing juries has yet been reached, and, given that prominent political figures - including Nigel Farage - are speaking out against it, we can suspect it is quite likely that this is just another propagandist paper tiger - a bit of political pantomime, never meant to become reality - in order to boost Mr Farage's chances at the next general election.

As I observed in a previous article, it seems like "everything is a publicity stunt for Reform" at the moment, with many high-profile news items appearing to exist primarily so that Farage and Reform can be seen to strongly push back against them, echoing public outrage, and therefore further bolstering their future popularity at the polls.

I would put the supposed "imprisonment of Lucy Connolly", various "arrested for Tweet" celebrities, and the dreaded digital ID into this bracket.

I don't think we're going to see digital ID in the form we're being fear-mongered about by the press and certain "leaders" in the freedom movement.

I think what we're going to see is already here.

An end to anonymous internet by enforcing age verifications on "sensitive" content.

As I wrote in October:

"It was announced a few days ago that Twitter ('X') is now going to display the country of origin on all user profiles. Not the location you yourself claim to be in, but the location their servers will be able to detect you're actually in, i.e., if you're a man from India, you will no longer be able to LARP online as a "tradwife from Idaho". If you're in India, the Twitter servers will automatically label your profile as being located in India.

On the surface, this may seem fairly trivial and inconsequential, maybe even a good thing - that it will stop unnecessary deception online. 

Yet if Twitter is prepared to release location data about users without their permission, what else might they decide to reveal?

In short, just how much longer is the age of internet anonymity really going to last?

We can already see an increase in demands to prove our identity online, supposedly to verify age to access "restricted content", but really, it's all just slippery-slope, frog-in-the-pot stuff for accustoming us to eventually being unable to use the internet at all without first verifying who we are."

I really did not expect when I wrote that article that, just the next month, my own Substack would be targeted with age-restriction blocks.

Tony from Twitter was the first to tell me that my recent article had been restricted, informing me, "Substack won't let me view [your article] because of "Your country's Online Safety Act restrictions". Must be a blanket policy."

Shocked, I retweeted his comment and asked if anyone else was having the same issue. I quickly received several replies telling me that people were.

Man About Mourne said "Your article titles are just all blacked out/redacted whenever I click on the Substack link in your Twitter profile. You’ll soon be taken off to ‘The Ministry of Love’ for rehabilitation."

Whilst General Ripper added: "No problem seeing them when I'm signed in but it's restricted when I'm not signed in browsing from the UK without VPN." (He could see it fine using a VPN set to Japan)

Shortly after receiving these confirmations that my article (and for some, articles) had been restricted, I received this email from Substack:

So there is explicit confirmation if ever we needed it that "age verification" checks are nothing to do with verifying your age, and everything to do with stripping away your online anonymity, because how does possessing a credit/debit card verify your age?

As a debit card can be legally obtained from the age of 11, it is clear that requiring you to enter your debit card details in order to access certain content online is simply about obliging you to identify yourself, and has nothing whatsoever to do with confirming your age.

That my article - which contained no explicit or profane content of any sort - was slapped with an age restriction block also gives us a good indication of just how censorious we can expect age restrictions to become.

I don't know why my article was restricted (I wouldn't even know that it was unless readers had told me), but I speculate it may be because it contained a word relating to a part of the male anatomy that is an anagram of 'spine'.

This is not a crude, vulgar, or offensive term, it is a normal anatomical word that appears in any school biology textbook, so it seems extraordinary that this would attract an age-block, especially since (as I detailed in a recent article) there are no age restrictions of any sort on books.

Any child of any age can purchase whatever books they want, and ones which contain infinitely more explicit content than my articles do, so how can these restrictions realistically claim to be about "child safety"? For this to be remotely plausible, books would need to be subject to age restrictions too, because there is no logical reason to believe a child is at risk from certain words if they are on the internet, but not if they are in books.

So, we can extrapolate that if my articles - which contain no explicit material at all and rarely even contain swearing - are now to be age-restricted, pretty soon, more or less the whole internet will be - or that is to say, the whole of the independent internet will be. The whole of the internet that isn't operated by "them".

The vast majority of quoted information in my recent article came from mainstream sources, yet these sources are not age-restricted. For instance, the anecdote I included from Scarlett Freud relating to her grandmother's use of - how to put this to avoid another block? - "women's nighttime mechanical devices" came from the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail doesn't have any age verifying requirements on this or any of its other articles, including its notorious "sidebar of shame".

So what we will find is that age verifcation blocks are applied very selectively, and information that is freely printed in the mainstream, with no blocks or bans, will immediately attract an age verification demand if it's repeated by other, "unapproved" sources.

Therefore, what I anticipate is that nobody will be "forced" to have a digital ID (Farage will make a big ostentatious show of scrapping them when he comes to power) - but they will be dramatically restricted from using the internet, and confined only to mainstream sources, unless they are prepared to identify themselves.

For now, one can get around this with VPNs, and hopefully that continues, but how long before these "safety measures" extend to other countries too?

My own website, miriaf.co.uk, where I also publish all my articles, is owned by me, and hence is not subject to the 'Online Safety Act', so please do visit that site if ever you're having issues accessing my content on Substack.

Very ominously, however, I have learned that my site could be subject to this Act if it allowed comments, because effectively, the site owner is held responsible for all content on the site, even from other people, the implications of which are very grave... Essentially, the pressure this Act puts on site owners to moderate comments is so great that many owners of discussion forums are simply closing down rather than attempting to comply. This fits with my prediction that - especially following the high-profile fallout from gossip forum, Tattle Life - the days of being able to freely discuss any topic under a pseudonym online are rapidly coming to an end.

The only positive to take from all this is that, as I seem to be one of the first Substack authors to be hit with an age-verification block (at least, I can't see many other Substackers talking about this yet), I must be really annoying all the right people...

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