MP calls for spam action

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 11 Jun 2003 at 15:47

Paul Flynn has proposed a change in the law to outlaw spam email, as the tidal wave reaches even the far flung shores of MPs' inboxes.

Flynn proposed in the House of Commons yesterday a 10-minute rule bill to alter the Consumer Protection (direct selling) regulations 2000 by making it an offence to send unsolicited commercial emails.

Although the Bill is unlikely to be passed, Flynn took the action to add pressure for sterner and united action to tackle the problem.

Flynn said: 'Unsolicited commercial emails are a pestilential nuisance that threaten to terminally swamp and suffocate the world's email system. Electronic mail is the best improvement in communications since the invention of the telephone, and SPAM is a multiplying giant parasite that now threatens to destroy its host.'

He voiced particular concern over the medicinal scams for drugs that have never been regulated in the UK and pornographic material that spammers send indiscriminately, turning up in front of young children, the elderly and the vulnerable.

'The only person I have ever known who claims to have benefited from spam is a gentleman who says that he bought every offer he received to enhance his maleness and now has a male appendage that is 43m long,' he told the House.

He also voiced concerns that it is clogging up the in-boxes of MPs while they are on holiday - with one member returning to wade through 600 spam messages - as well as getting in the way of 'the legitimate vigorously expressed messages that we occasionally receive from our constituents'.

He laid some of the blame at the door of the US, whose glib reluctance to legislate against the freedom to spam has allowed one individual to build a system that sends a billion spam mails a day.

One member of the House who manages to escape the scourge that is spam, it emerges, is the Prime Minister who doesn't have an email address, despite the numerous photo opportunities never missed to tap out a few lines on a computer.