Politics Home Article | Baroness Bertin: We need to talk about porn

If the British have a reputation for being a little squeamish when it comes to talking about sex, it seems that Baroness Gabby Bertin didn’t get the memo.

“It’s quite amusing at dinner parties,” she told Women in Westminster during our sit-down interview. “My husband says to me, ‘For God’s sake, try not to talk about porn literally within five minutes of getting into any sort of social situation.’ I try, but people do ask. So, I always do end up there.”

As a slightly squeamish Brit myself, there is certainly something a little disconcerting about the openness with which Bertin breezily lists the sorts of material readily available on some of the major pornography sites. But the former aide to David Cameron is adamant that porn has become so prevalent in our society that such frankness is essential if we are to regulate it properly and guard against harms.

“Porn’s fine,” she says. “People are watching it. Loads of people are watching it. But what is bad is harmful porn that is totally different from what would be legal offline.”

Bertin is clear throughout our conversation that her objective in taking on the review of online pornography was never to judge or moralise. Rather, it was to ensure that online spaces were regulated in much the same way as offline ones are.

“I was trying to avoid becoming ‘Mary Whitehouse Mark II’,” she tells us. “It wasn’t remotely prudish. It’s just you’ve got to get the guardrails back in place. It’s as simple as that.”

Bertin was commissioned by the then Conservative government to lead her independent review into the regulation of online pornography in 2023. The concluding report was published early in 2025 and led to significant changes to legislation, including the banning of pornography depicting strangulation.

“These companies were making so much money by making it very extreme in the online world with no legislation stopping them from doing it,” she tells us.

She recounts that at the start of her work, the reluctance of some parts of government to engage with the problem came as something of a shock.

“What surprised me most was the total lack of interest at government level,” she recalls. “I remember the first few meetings when we started going around each department that may have had a thumb in the pie. It was pretty clear that they just hadn’t thought about this.”

Bertin sees that reluctance as symptomatic of a culture that essentially regarded porn use as an entirely private matter. However, she believes that a reluctance to discuss pornography openly has left policymakers operating with a significant blind spot.

This is something she herself experienced. Bertin was already campaigning on topics such as domestic abuse, but increasingly recognised that many of the issues she cared passionately about were being exacerbated by an environment where online pornography was often violently misogynistic. Yet that element was often missing from the policy conversation.

“You’re making lots of legislative progress, you’re changing the law, providing more funding, raising awareness,” she says, referencing the Domestic Abuse Act. “And yet there’s this parallel universe where pornography sites were not being regulated, were not being held to task. And they are showing such violent porn in such a normalised way.”

She also claims that a tendency to ignore pornography and its potential harms, often stemming from squeamishness or embarrassment, was creating gaps in policy and regulation that were leading to real-world impacts.

“There was no proper interrogation of what is on these sites,” she tells us. “Nobody wanted to raise it. Who’s going to go into their meeting and say, ‘God, I was on Pornhub last night, some pretty, pretty dreadful stuff on there.’ You know, that just wasn’t happening.”

Bertin tells us that much of the material on those sites is normalising new behaviours and harms. “They are not being driven by our sexual taste. They are driving our sexual taste,” she explains.

The review recommended action to ban degrading, violent and misogynistic pornography, and proposed that porn videos considered too harmful for any certificate in the offline world should also be banned online. The report has already led to action from the government.

“Banning the depictions of strangulation, I think, is really important, but also the depictions of incest, the depictions of step incest,” she says. “You don’t have freedom to see people being hurt or harmful content. I think you’ve got to be really black and white about that.”

The Conservative peer believes that the UK is now one of the most pioneering in the world when it comes to online safety. Alongside her own review, she cites the Online Safety Act and recent announcements to restrict social media use. Given the borderless nature of the pornography industry, she argues that there is now a need to work with other countries to deliver change.

“There’s a responsibility on us as a country to show leadership,” she says. “With terrorism, everyone just works together and no one says it’s a bad thing. I don’t really understand why very serious online harms, particularly against women, shouldn’t be viewed in the same way.”

By the end of our conversation, I am pretty certain that Baroness Bertin is not “Mary Whitehouse Mark II”. However, she does possess a very British no-nonsense approach that recognises the world as it is rather than as some might want it to be. Bertin is essentially a realist who has focused her talents and energies on delivering a report that was actionable rather than full of what she describes as “pie in the sky ideas”.

“If there’s a job to be done, you’ve just got to do it,” she says with a shrug. “That was what I thought with this. There could have been part of me that said, ‘Oh no, that subject is just too controversial’. But I just thought, no, come on, let’s do it.”