Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has said the Conservative government is discussing legislation to outlaw offensive comedy.
Appearing on Times Radio to talk about the Online Safety Bill, Dorries was asked about Jimmy Carr’s “disgusting” joke about the holocaust, where he refers to the death of thousands of travellers killed by the Nazis as a “positive”.
Dorries explained that changes to the Online Safety Bill, which will make online harassment and abuse a criminal offence carrying jail sentences of up to five years, wouldn’t cover Carr’s comments because it doesn’t cover On-Demand services like Netflix because they are “separately carved out of this bill.”
She went on to add that “we are looking at a future bill coming forward soon, looking at measures to bring into scope organisations like Netflix because what Jimmy Carr said was both shocking and abhorrent and unacceptable.”
Nadine Dorries says a bill to regulate video on demand platforms will follow the online safety bill "very shortly".
The culture secretary gave her reaction to comments made about the Holocaust by Jimmy Carr on his Netflix special.@jennykleeman | @lukejones03 | @NadineDorries pic.twitter.com/TF1qzPCw3O
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) February 5, 2022
She then added: ‘We don’t have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that but very shortly we will.”
In a separate interview with Sky News, Dorries said that the proposed Media Bill would look to “make the kind of comments that Jimmy Carr made, subject to a new law which would impose sanctions on those organisations.”
In 2017, Dorries tweeted that “left-wing snowflakes are killing comedy”. Speaking on BBC Breakfast, she responded that “What Jimmy Carr did last night is not comedy. And you know, I’m no angel on Twitter, nobody is, but I just would like to say that nothing I’ve ever put on Twitter has been harmful or abusive.”
Since His Dark Materials aired on December 25, Nadia Whittome, Labour MP for Nottingham East, urged Netflix to remove Carr’s “vile anti-GRT and antisemitic material” while Zarah Sultana, Labour MP for Coventry South, called Carr’s comments “disgusting beyond words”.
Speaking about the comments in the show, Carr said “It’s a joke about the worst thing that’s ever happened in human history, and people say ‘never forget’, well this is how I remember. I keep bringing it up.”
“There is an educational quality. Like everyone in the room knows 6 million Jewish people lost their lives to the Nazis during the second world war. But a lot of people don’t know, because it’s not really taught in our schools, that the Nazis also killed, in their thousands, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
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