This is standard practice. MPs receive a lot of letters from their constituents and it isn't practical to send individual responses.<p>As well, Amber Rudd and Damien Green are conservative MPs, so they can be considered supporters of this proposal. I would hardly expect their replies to do anything other than make positive statements about the proposal.<p>There's more to democracy than voting and writing to MPs. For example, in light of the leaks about GCHQ and this proposed internet censorship, I have started supporting Pirate Party UK. They are the only party with a satisfactorily strong anti-surveillance and anti-censorship stance. Put your money where your mouth is.
These cretins will be out of power in less than 2 years (to be replaced by the other cretins).<p>If we can stall, block and generally oppose this for 2 years the next set of cretins will throw it out (they didn't think of it therefore it has to be thrown out..good or bad) then we can start fighting their version.<p>Ain't democracy wonderful.
My MP (Jonathan Reynolds, Lab) is entirely content to play party politics over the issue.<p>I wrote to him some years ago when Labour were proposing something very similar, and he responded defending it.<p>I wrote to him again recently, now the Conservatives are in power, and funnily enough he's moderately opposed to it.
This is a typical example of a policy that is both pointless and ineffective. The government is, for one, not clear on what the goal of the policy is.<p>If it's to thwart child pornography, that won't work because if you wanted to view it, you'd just toddle off to your ISP and opt out of the filters.<p>If it's to stop children looking at pornography in general, that will fail children/young people are smarter than people imagine at circumventing these things.<p>This sort of thing gets proposed because it makes people think the government is doing something to social problems, even if it is technically problematic and won't really achieve the stated aims. I'm actually all for discouraging the use of pornography because it is something of a scourge on society, but this is not the way to do it. Education is.
They won't read them, but they might weigh them. The point of writing to MPs about policies can't really be to engage with them in an individual debate, but to form one tiny part of a mass of opinions which might persuade the MP.
You're rarely going to get a personal reply to a letter to your MP. The sheer volume of correspondence prevents it.<p>Your MP's surgery sessions are a much better place to bring up issues like these. They're usually held every week and some don't require an appointment. When I went to speak to my MP about this issue, I was seen in 20mins and had a good 15-20min discussion.