Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2013/02/27/baroness_martha_lane_fox/

It's the Peer 2.0: Martha Lane Fox now a crossbench baroness

Arise, Baroness Dotcom. Fancy some peer-to-peer networking?

By Kelly Fiveash

Posted in Legal, 27th February 2013 12:45 GMT

"Dotcom dinosaur" and Whitehall's digerati darling Martha Lane Fox CBE has been made a crossbench peer in the House of Lords.

The freshly entitled Baroness of Soho*, who is the face of the Cabinet Office's "digital by default" agenda, naturally took to Twitter to announce the news.

Her non-party political peerage followed recommendations by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, which is an advisory body set up by the Prime Minister.

MLF co-founded lastminute.com in 1998, just before the Web 2.0 boom, and has been the government's digi champion since 2009.

She chairs the charity Go On UK, which supports the Tory-led coalition's agenda to get more of the population online so as it can deliver many more public services over the internet rather than deal with people face-to-face.

However, as we reported last week, government figures issued by the Office for National Statistics showed that more than seven-million Brits haven't used the internet; the vast majority of them are disabled, elderly or poor.

It's argued that the government's pursuit to change those web usage stats is a vanity exercise for poshos bent on helping those who live on what MLF once described as "horrible council estates".

She once also patronisingly claimed: "I don't think you can be a proper citizen in our society in the future if you're not online."

Let's pity those seven-million Brits, then. ®

* After this article was published, Baroness Lane-Fox admitted she probably shouldn't have mentioned the Soho bit just yet.