THINK OF THE CHILDREN (AND HAND OVER YOUR PAPERS ... )

In the grand British tradition of moral panics, where every generation discovers that the latest amusement might corrupt the young and promptly demands that the state do something about it, we have arrived at the social media age limit. The government, ever obliging when it comes to expanding its own prerogatives, has committed to raising the barrier to sixteen. Parents, teachers, health professionals and sundry concerned parties cheer this as a victory for the children. One pictures them linking arms and singing hymns of deliverance, much as the villagers once did when the witch was safely ducked.

It is a touching spectacle. One is reminded of Sheila Broflovski in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, that tireless crusader whose rallying cry—“Think of the children!”—launched wars, censorship campaigns and quite a lot of gratuitous musical numbers. The comparison may be unfair; Sheila was at least cartoonishly direct in her hysteria, whereas our modern parental lobbyists cloak their demands in the soothing pastel tones of safeguarding and evidence-based policy. Still, the family resemblance is hard to deny. The impulse is the same: protect the innocents by restricting everyone else’s access to the dangerous toy. And, as in South Park, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and funded by the taxpayer.

The ostensible problem is real enough. Endless scrolling, algorithmic outrage, and the peculiar social dynamics of platforms designed to maximise engagement have not, on the whole, produced a generation of stoic philosophers. Mental health statistics for adolescents flicker with warning lights; grooming and exploitation lurk in the darker corners. No sane observer denies that unlimited smartphone access at age eleven has its drawbacks. The old solution—family computer in the living room, a sturdy Nokia brick for emergencies, and the gentle art of saying “no”—has been unfashionable for years. It required actual parenting: supervision, boundaries, the occasional row. Far easier, it seems, to outsource the heavy lifting to Whitehall.

Yet herein lies the quiet comedy of our age. In their zeal to shield little Timmy and Emily from TikTok’s siren song, campaigning parents have lobbied for measures that necessitate robust age assurance. “Highly effective” is the regulatory euphemism. In practice, this means identity verification: facial scans, biometric estimation, digital wallets, government-issued credentials, perhaps even linkage to NHS numbers or Open Banking data. What begins as a polite request to keep the under-sixteens off Instagram swiftly mutates into infrastructure capable of checking every internet user’s credentials before granting passage. The state does not build such systems for one narrow purpose and then politely dismantle them once the children are safe. Bureaucracies are not known for their minimalist aesthetic.

One almost admires the sleight of hand. Parents animated by left-leaning ideals—those who instinctively reach for collective solutions, who view private restraint as insufficient and state intervention as enlightened—have helped midwife a mechanism of universal surveillance. They did not set out to erect an Orwellian apparatus, of course. They merely wanted the harms mitigated. But good intentions have a habit of arriving at unintended addresses. The same cohort that once tut-tutted at CCTV creep and data retention now finds itself applauding the digital equivalent of an ID card for the entire online realm. The children were the Trojan horse; the surveillance state slipped in behind them while everyone was busy virtue-signalling concern.

Compare this with the low-tech alternative so unfashionable among the digitally anxious: place the family computer in plain sight, hand the offspring a device incapable of infinite doom-scrolling, and accept that raising humans involves some friction. It worked tolerably well when the greatest online peril was a dodgy Geocities page. It requires no national database, no facial recognition middleware, and—no small mercy—no new quango to oversee compliance. Yet such measures lack the grandeur of legislation. They cannot be announced with fanfare in the Commons or celebrated as a “huge win.” They demand responsibility from actual parents rather than the comforting abstraction of society.

Instead, we march toward the logical terminus: every citizen presenting digital papers at the gates of the internet. Refuse, and access is denied or throttled. The infrastructure, once built for the protection of minors, will prove irresistibly useful for other purposes—content moderation, behavioural scoring, the quiet expansion of what constitutes “harmful” material. Today it is social media for sixteen-year-olds; tomorrow the definition of acceptable discourse may tighten further, always in the name of safety, always with the most compassionate rhetoric. The censors of yesteryear at least had the decency to be obvious about it. Our modern variant prefers to arrive wearing the concerned frown of a safeguarding officer.

The irony is particularly rich for those parents steeped in progressive instincts. Many who would recoil at old-fashioned authoritarianism have cheered measures that hand the state potent new tools of control. They imagined a gentle nanny state gently patting errant algorithms on the head. What they are helping construct is something closer to a panopticon with better branding. The state, ever hungry for legitimacy, gratefully accepts the mandate: “You asked us to protect the children; we shall require certain assurances from everyone.” Slippery slopes are dismissed as paranoid until one finds oneself halfway down, clutching a biometric token and wondering how it came to this.

There is, naturally, an antidote more elegant than regulation. It is called parental responsibility, exercised in the analogue world before the digital one consumes it entirely. It is the willingness to endure the mild social awkwardness of saying your child does not have the latest device. It is the dull, unglamorous business of conversation, example, and occasional confiscation. Supplement this with a cultural commitment to free expression—something like the ASI Freedom of Speech Bill, which seeks to push back against the creeping censorship apparatus—rather than layering ever more rules atop the existing ones.

In the end, Britain risks sleepwalking into a peculiarly polite dystopia: not the jackboot of classic totalitarianism, but the soft, data-driven embrace of perpetual verification “for the children.” Sheila Broflovski would recognise the script, even if the accents have improved and the musical numbers are now delivered via algorithmic recommendation. The tragedy is not that parents care; it is that they have been persuaded to care in the manner most likely to empower the very forces least suited to genuine guardianship. The state makes a poor surrogate parent. It is, however, an excellent custodian of power once granted.

One can only hope that enough citizens retain the wit to notice the swap: the promised shield for the young quietly reforged into chains for all. Otherwise, we shall find ourselves, in a few short years, logging on with our digital papers in order, murmuring the updated mantra: “Think of the children”—while the state smiles indulgently and tightens the net.

ALEX ZANARDI (1966 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Alessandro “Alex” Zanardi, the Italian racing driver who treated speed as a philosophical argument and then spent the rest of his life proving that even physics could be negotiated with sufficient charm, has finally been overtaken. He died in Bologna on 1 May 2026 at the age of 59, having spent the better part of six years in a state best described as “persistently inconvenient to the Reaper.”

Born in the motor-mad city that also produced Ferrari’s headaches, Zanardi charged into Formula One in the early 1990s with the sort of optimism usually reserved for lottery tickets. He was quick, flamboyant, and Italian enough to make the paddock feel under-dressed. Yet F1, that merciless sorting office of talent, decided he was better suited to America, where CART rewarded his bravado with two championships in 1997 and 1998. There he perfected the art of winning while looking as if he had just remembered a better joke elsewhere. 

Then came Lausitzring, 15 September 2001. In one of those baroque horrors that open-wheel racing occasionally stages for the gods’ amusement, Zanardi’s car spun into the path of that of Alex Tagliani, who had no chance to avoid him, and was bisected at speed. He lost both legs and most of his blood, yet contrived not only to survive but to return to the same circuit two years later and complete the remaining laps on hand controls. The stunt was pure Zanardi: part defiance, part PR, and wholly theatrical. Critics called it inspirational. He probably called it Tuesday. 

Thereafter he discovered that wheels need not be attached to a racing car. As a handcyclist he collected Paralympic gold medals with the casual air of a man picking up dry-cleaning. The prosthetics he helped design were so efficient that rival athletes began to suspect witchcraft. Fate, never one to let a good story rest, delivered a final satirical flourish in 2020: a handbike collision with a lorry that left him with catastrophic brain injuries. For nearly six years he hovered in that grey zone where medicine meets metaphysics, a living punchline to the joke that nothing could stop him—except, eventually, everything. 

Zanardi’s career was a masterclass in refusal. Refusal to stay average in F1. Refusal to stay broken after amputation. Refusal to stay ordinary even when ordinary would have been forgivable. He treated disability less as tragedy than as a design flaw to be engineered around, preferably at 200 mph. In an age of professionally sensitive athletes, he remained cheerfully unapologetic about risk, speed, and the Italian compulsion to turn every endeavour into opera.

He is survived by his wife Daniela and son Niccolò, who must now endure the world’s well-meaning condolences. One suspects Alex would have greeted his own obituary with a raised eyebrow and the observation that, having already been cut in half once, dying in one piece was something of a promotion. The chequered flag has fallen. The crowd, as ever, is on its feet applauding.

STARMER'S REARGUARD ACTION ...

In the great British tradition of maintaining a stiff upper lip while the rest of the anatomy quietly combusts, the Old Bailey has been staging one of those dramas that the newspapers have elected to treat as though it were a minor outbreak of dry rot in a provincial vicarage. Here we are, in the spring of 2026, with a Prime Minister whose very name once promised a certain forensic tidiness—Keir Starmer, the man who was going to sweep the Augean stables of British politics with the calm efficiency of a senior barrister—and yet the public prints have fallen strangely mute on the subject of three gentlemen currently on trial for attempting to turn several of his former residences, and an associated motor vehicle, into something resembling a Guy Fawkes bonfire out of season.

The defendants are a study in demographic poetry. Roman Lavrynovych, twenty-one years of age and possessed of the sort of cheekbones that might once have graced the cover of a Milanese fashion catalogue, is described in the scant initial reports as an “aspiring male model.” One pictures him arriving in these isles with the sort of portfolio that opens doors—or at least the sort of doors that influential gentlemen keep ajar for private viewings. Beside him sits Petro Pochynok, thirty-five, a man of more settled years whose face suggests he has already learned that life’s catwalks are not always lit by flattering gels. Completing the trio is Stanislav Carpiuc, twenty-seven, Ukrainian by birth but carrying a Romanian passport in the way a man might carry a spare umbrella: useful when the weather turns political. All three have been enjoying the spartan hospitality of Belmarsh since their arrest, a facility whose reputation for quiet contemplation is exceeded only by its indifference to interior design. They have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, a charge whose gravity is somewhat undermined by the fact that the intended victims appear to have been absent at the time. One is left with the impression of a plot whose theatrical timing was, shall we say, imperfect.

It is the silence surrounding the proceedings that tickles the satirical palate. Sub judice, the lawyers intone, as though the phrase were a sacred incantation capable of gagging every editor in the land. Fair enough; we must protect the jury from prejudice, even if the jury in question is composed of citizens who have spent the past decade marinating in 24-hour news cycles and conspiracy podcasts. Yet one cannot help noticing how selectively that principle is applied. When a minor celebrity stubs a toe in public, the airwaves fill with the sort of forensic detail normally reserved for a Royal Commission. Here, however, where the properties in question once sheltered the very apex of the Labour government, the coverage has been as sparse as a vegan buffet at a fox-hunting supper. The BBC and Sky News offered the obligatory paragraphs at the first hearing, the sort of dutiful stenography that reads like an obituary written by someone who has already moved on to the next corpse. Since then: nothing. A hush so complete one almost expects to see the trial conducted in mime. 

One is driven, in the spirit of pure intellectual mischief, to wonder what sort of prior acquaintance might exist between the accused and the gentleman whose doorsteps they allegedly doused with petrol. After all, young Mr Lavrynovych’s chosen profession is not one that flourishes in a vacuum. Aspiring models, particularly those of a certain striking aspect, have been known to secure private engagements in the better quarters of London—engagements that require discretion, a certain flexibility of schedule, and an understanding that the client’s appreciation may extend beyond the purely photographic. It is not beyond the bounds of speculation that such a young man, together with his slightly older companions, might once have found themselves invited to discuss matters of mutual interest in the very properties now under forensic examination. The sort of discussion that takes place after the official minutes have been filed, the security detail has been dismissed, and the lights have been dimmed to that flattering half-glow favoured by gentlemen who prefer their diplomacy conducted at close quarters. One imagines the conversation flowing easily, perhaps even warmly; the exchange of certain personal courtesies that, in the right hands, can feel almost like an act of statesmanship. And then, for reasons known only to the participants, the relationship appears to have cooled rather more dramatically than any of them anticipated. Hence the matches.

It is a delicious irony, is it not? The Prime Minister, whose public persona has always been that of the meticulous prosecutor, the man who dots every i and crosses every t with the precision of a man defusing a bomb, now finds himself the unintended subject of a case that hinges on the possibility that someone once close enough to warm his hearth decided instead to set it alight. One does not, of course, suggest anything so vulgar as motive. Motives are for juries and novelists. We are merely observing the curious geometry of events: three gentlemen from the East, one of them a model whose professional assets include a face that could launch a thousand private commissions, and a set of addresses that, until recently, were part of the Prime Ministerial real-estate portfolio. The flames that were lit were literal; the ones that preceded them, one suspects, were of an altogether more discreet temperature.

The broader comedy lies in the political choreography. Here is a government elected on a platform of competence and moral clarity, now presiding over a trial so discreetly handled that it might as well be taking place in a witness-protection safe house. The Ukrainian connection adds a further layer of farce. We have spent years being told that the brave defenders of Kyiv are the moral equivalent of the RAF in 1940; now three of their countrymen stand accused of treating a former Prime Ministerial residence like a barbecue pit. One almost feels sorry for the spin doctors. How does one square the circle of “our gallant allies” with “alleged arsonists who may once have enjoyed rather more intimate forms of alliance”? Best, evidently, to say nothing at all and hope the story expires quietly in a Belmarsh cell. Christopher Hichens, were he still with us, might have observed that British public life has always run on a mixture of embarrassment and understatement, and that the greater the embarrassment, the deeper the understatement. This case is a masterclass. The Old Bailey will grind on, the jury will deliberate, and the verdict—whatever it may be—will be reported in the sort of six-paragraph brief usually reserved for planning disputes in the Home Counties. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to contemplate the small, exquisite pleasure of watching the machinery of power attempt to smother a story that refuses to stay buried. The properties may have survived the fire. The reputations, one fears, are still smouldering. And somewhere in the quiet hours, one can almost hear the faint, sardonic chuckle of history itself, lighting another metaphorical cigarette and wondering what on earth these people thought they were playing at.