In the grand tradition of British political theatre, where the appearance of doing something must always substitute for the substance of achieving anything, Sir Keir Starmer has alighted upon his masterstroke. With the quiet desperation of a man who has watched his poll numbers sink faster than a lead balloon at a children’s party, the Prime Minister has announced that the nation’s under-16s shall be banned from social media. Age verification, he assures us, will be rigorous. Facial scans, presumably. One pictures the scene: some spotty adolescent, hormones raging, forced to present his acne-ridden visage to the benevolent gaze of the state before being permitted to post a meme. The nanny state has rarely looked so literal, or so creepily intimate.
This is not governance; this is the reflex of the control freak who, having failed at every tangible responsibility of office, decides instead to police the daydreams of the young. While Britain’s housing stock moulders, while NHS waiting lists stretch into the next geological epoch, while schools limp along on goodwill and sellotape, and while the streets exhibit all the civic order of a particularly unambitious riot, Starmer has fixed his beady eye on the real enemy: TikTok. It is the sort of bold, decisive leadership that makes one wonder whether the man ever met a problem he couldn’t solve by inventing a new form of paperwork and a fresh layer of bureaucracy.
The timing, of course, is pure coincidence. The Makerfield by-election looms like an awkward family obligation, and what better way to distract the punters than by wrapping oneself in the flag of concerned parenthood? Starmer, that great moralist, has discovered that social media can be addictive and occasionally ghastly. One gasps at the originality. Next he will reveal, with furrowed brow and trembling voice, that chips contain calories and that rain is, on balance, somewhat wet. The consultation—over 100,000 responses, 90% of parents in favour—sounds impressive until one remembers that frightened parents will endorse almost any measure that promises to keep their offspring from becoming the next cautionary tale on the evening news. Politicians have always been adept at harvesting parental anxiety; Starmer merely does it with the added frisson of biometric data collection.
Let us be clear about the man. Keir Starmer is not a bumbling incompetent who means well. That would be forgivable, even endearing in a peculiarly British way. No, he is something rather nastier: a spiteful authoritarian with the soul of a middle-management enforcer who has finally reached the top floor. Having spent years presenting himself as the reasonable, suit-wearing antidote to the excesses of his predecessors, he now reveals the iron fist inside the Islington gauntlet. Ban this. Regulate that. Scan the faces of children because the state knows best. One half expects him to announce that teenagers will henceforth require a licence, countersigned by two responsible adults and a representative of the local constabulary, before being allowed to experience unmediated boredom.
The policy itself is a masterpiece of performative futility. Australia tried something similar; the results, like most Australian exports, have proven noisy but of mixed nutritional value. Social media does indeed harbour predators, pedlars of nonsense, and algorithms engineered by people who understand dopamine the way a medieval torturer understood joints. Yet the notion that the British state—currently incapable of deporting failed asylum seekers or keeping the trains roughly on time—will elegantly thread the needle between protection and surveillance is the sort of touching faith one usually associates with children or cult members. The same government that cannot house its citizens or heal its sick now proposes to become the final arbiter of what the young may see and say. The mind boggles at the sheer cheek of it.
There is, naturally, a deeper comedy here. Starmer’s Labour Party, once the tribune of the working class, has become the party of the lecturer, the diversity officer, and the anxious metropolitan parent who wants the state to perform the parenting they find too exhausting. The working-class child in a post-industrial town, already failed by schools that teach everything except how to read, will now be shielded from the algorithmic wasteland by facial recognition software administered by the same people who turned those schools into therapeutic playgrounds. It would be satire if it were not already policy.
One admires the sheer brass neck required to stand before a nation groaning under the weight of Labour’s failures and declare that the urgent priority is banning Jimmy from scrolling. It is as though a doctor, having botched the surgery, lost the patient’s notes, and set fire to the waiting room, should then gravely inform the relatives that the real problem was the patient’s choice of reading material. The sheer spite of it: when your record on housing, health, education, and public order lies in ruins, attack the one area where private enterprise has undeniably created problems—and do so in a manner that expands state power. Authoritarianism dressed as compassion is the oldest trick in the progressive wardrobe, but Starmer wears it with the self-satisfaction of a man who believes his own press releases.
Future historians, thumbing through the records of this unhappy period, will pause at Starmer’s digital crusade and recognise it for what it was: not leadership, but displacement activity by a man who discovered that actually running the country was rather harder than criticising those who tried. In the meantime, the rest of us are left to contemplate the exquisite irony of an administration that cannot secure the borders or the balance sheets now proposing to secure the smartphones of the young. One almost pities the man. Almost. But then one remembers the facial scans, the by-election timing, and the unctuous certainty, and pity evaporates like dew under the withering gaze of reality.
Keir Starmer: saviour of the nation’s timelines, scourge of the nation’s problems. A dictator for our times, not with jackboots but with login screens and a pious expression. God save us from men who know what is best for other people’s children.