Call me an old-fashioned sentimentalist if you will, but when passing laws, shouldn’t the politicians responsible at least have the first clue what they’re talking about? (That is, of course, assuming they turn up to talk about it at all: 236 MPs voted on the bill, yet only a small fraction of that number actually bothered attending the risibly curtailed debates.)

I listened intently to much of the debates. I could do little else given my eyes were gummed together. And while I didn’t expect the vast majority of MPs to be particularly tech savvy, the levels of ignorance on display – even from the Minister for Digital Britain himself – was nothing short of scandalous. They literally didn’t know what they were talking about.

Here are just a few examples of the technical howlers I heard:

The Minister for Digital Britain

Of all the politicians in the House, Stephen Timms should be the most tech literate. Not only is he the Minister responsible for driving the Digital Economy Bill through, he spent 15 years working in the telecoms industry prior to becoming a politician. Alas, he soon proved to be way out of his depth.

Take the following exchange with fellow Labour MP Austin Mitchell:

Mitchell: Somebody might park outside my house with a laptop, access my signal and abuse it without my knowledge. What would happen if such an abuse occurred and it could be traced back to me?

Timms: In such a case, my hon. Friend might receive a letter in due course informing him that an infringement had occurred on his internet access. He would then have the opportunity to protect that access.

Mitchell: How?

Timms: My hon. Friend could introduce a password so that somebody driving up outside his house would not be able to use his access. The letters that are sent out will have to give such advice and explain what people can do.

Right… So the Minister for Digital Britain is patently unaware that the WEP security still used by many people with older routers is easier to crack than The Sun crossword, even if “protected” by a password. He would have found this out if he’d bothered to watch the (flawed) Panorama investigation into file-sharing, in which he appeared himself.

Lest you think this was an isolated incident, it wasn’t the only time Mr Timms erred. Witness the following dialogue with Tory MP John Redwood, in which he completely fails to grasp the entirely valid point Mr Redwood was making:

Redwood: Will the Minister explain what would happen if someone had paid for an article or some content from a paid-for site? What would they be allowed to do? Could they invite people in their home to read it for free online at their convenience? Could they print it out and circulate the print-out to friends or family, and could they make multiple copies? Is it just sending it around electronically that is illegal? I would be grateful to know what the crime is.

Timms: I think that the right hon. Gentleman is barking up the wrong tree. The owner of the copyright-the person who is responsible for the content, such as the right hon. Gentleman himself in the case of his blog, which he told us about, can do what he likes with that content. The amended clause 18, which is to provide a power to make regulations rather than change the law directly, will allow a copyright holder to apply for a court order to block access to a website.

Redwood: The Minister cannot say that I do not understand the matter. I am asking him how far someone could go in using something that they had paid for before falling foul of his proposal. It is a very reasonable question.

Timms: But the author of the content will not fall foul of the proposal. I do not imagine that the right hon. Gentleman will apply for a court order to block access to a website that holds his content. A music maker such as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) might wish to do that, but the right hon. Gentleman clearly would not.

[At this point John Redwood rises to his feet, presumably to see if he can get the Minister to understand his perfectly straightforward inquiry for the third time, but it shouted at to sit down by several Labour MPs, including Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw.]

Timms: I need to make some progress.

You might suspect that Timms was being deliberately mendacious; ignoring Redwood’s legitimate concerns about usage rights in order to take a cheap swipe at his blog. But then you read this letter – sent out in Timms’ name, although conceivably written on his behalf – in which he defines an IP address as an “intellectual property address” and wonder if the man in charge of Digital Britain is really up to the job?

The people’s hero?

One of the few politicians who came out of the Digital Economy Bill debate with any credibility was Labour’s Tom Watson, who not only voted against his own Government for the first time, but tabled several strong amendments to the bill (many of which he was forced to withdraw).

Yet, even the clued-up Watson was found woefully wanting when it came to debating the merits of sending out warning letters to people accused of illegal file sharing:

Watson: If someone has an ISP connection, the bill is likely to be sent to a postal address, which will allow more certainty. People receiving notifications by e-mail may not see them.

Mark Todd: Is my hon. Friend sure that a postal delivery will suffice? Many people may have chosen to form a contract with an ISP at some stage before moving, and may not have seen any particular reason to notify the ISP of a change of address.

Watson: My hon. Friend has identified a further flaw in the clause that I had not.

I’m loath to criticise Watson, because his valiant efforts to rescue this bill far outweighed his mistakes, but do these MPs live in the real world? How on earth do they think you can get a connection without informing your ISP of your new telephone number and address? With the exception of mobile broadband (which wasn’t what they were discussing) it’s simply not possible. If they can’t get even the basic detail right, it’s no wonder the bill ended up in such a state.

The lack of opposition

In case anyone thinks this is an outright attack on Labour, the Conservatives were every bit as culpable for the passing of this bill as the Government that sponsored it. The Tory benches were practically bereft of MPs for the entirety of the debates and only nine bothered to vote (four in favour, five against). So much for “the opposition”.

The Tory front bench, led by Adam Afriyie (Shadow Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills), displayed absolutely breath-taking hypocrisy. At various times during the debate, Afriyie referred to the bill as a “cobbled-together mismatch” delivered at the “fag end of a Parliament” before issuing the following diatribe:

“After three Parliaments of digital dithering, they [the Government] have left us at the last minute with some botched legislation. This is a washed-up Bill from a washed-up Government.”

Afriyie was one of the 189 MPs who voted for the bill.

Hence today’s announcement that the Government will now urge Ofcom to suspend people’s broadband connections as a “last resort”. But on what evidence will ISPs be forced to clip your connection?

Rights holders will be required to identify the IP addresses of people they claim to have caught file sharing, and pass those details to the relevant ISP (as they do currently). But here comes the clincher. “The standard of evidence required from rights holders should, as a minimum, establish an infringement on the balance of probabilities,” the Government’s own consultation on legislation for illegal P2P file sharing states. So no innocent until proven guilty – a high likelihood that you’re in the wrong is all that the rights holders need to press the ISPs to cut off your broadband.

Astonishingly, the Government claims that these plans have the full approval of consumers and the six ISPs it bound to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on file sharing earlier this year. “The template used by the BPI in the MOU trial should serve as a model for this as it has proved satisfactory to all the ISPs in the trial and has not provoked any particular concerns by consumers affected,” the consultation states.

That’s not what TalkTalk – one of the six ISPs involved – is saying this morning. “The evidence that is used to identify offenders is unreliable due to the prevalence of multi-users per account and Wi-Fi-hijacking and so will result in innocent customers being cut-off from broadband,” says TalkTalk, which branded the proposed legislation a potential “breach of human rights”.

And Which? has been running a long and admirable campaign against the heavy-handed law firms employed by the rights holders, which the watchdog claims have been “bullying” innocent people into paying hefty settlements for offences they say they didn’t commit.

The Government is inviting interested parties to respond to its proposals by 29 September, by emailing mike.klym@bis.gsi.gov.uk. We’ll be sending the Government our response to this ill thought-out, knee-jerk legislation. We hope you’ll do likewise.

The amount of money on the table is derisory. BT is spending £1.5 billion on bringing fibre-to-the-cabinet to 10 million homes across the country, and BT is (so far) concentrating on urban areas where deployment costs are lower. Does the Government really think it can bring even 2Mbit/sec broadband to the whole of Britain on a sixth of the budget?

Actually, no, it doesn’t. The Chancellor’s woolly Budget report claims that “If necessary, the cost would also be met through additional funding mechanisms, as set out in the Digital Britain Interim Report.” In other words, fixed and mobile broadband providers will be expected to foot the bill. But as Communications Minister Lord Carter told The Telegraph earlier this week, “there will certainly be 25-30% of the country where there will be no economic case for building a next-generation fixed network”.

While the unambitious target of 2Mbits/sec is hardly the “next-generation” network Carter refers to, it’s clear that the Government has already given up on high-speed networks in rural areas, and will settle for connection speeds that aren’t even fast enough to run the HD streams from the BBC iPlayer in vast chunks of the country.

Is that really a massive problem? It most certainly is, because as Carter concedes in that same Telegraph interview “in less than 10 years, we will be in a complete ‘on demand’ television world.” Except for those who haven’t got the broadband speeds to cope, of course.

“Lord Carter talks of a video-centric world,” argues Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, president of the Country Land and Business Association.  “In reality we have a world where social and economic deprivation is growing because of a lack of access to fast internet connections.

“The economy is being divided because many rural businesses simply cannot compete with their urban rivals. School classes are split because of some children’s inability to do set homework online. Communities are being divided because people are seeking to move to a home that has broadband.”

Digital Britain? Only if you live in the right parts of it.