Why I am suspicious about Sir Keir Starmer’s social media ban - Sarah Todd

It was like they were in a club, she used to say, using each other’s Instagram and Snapchat to keep conversations going long into the night.

Things were posted - maybe some cool cat in a bikini or a daft lad doing some silly dare or other - and she would be immediately on the back foot; not in on the banter.

Every so often, 15 or whatever years on it is, her horrible mother is reminded about the poor hand she dealt her daughter.

While it was hard at the time, her not having a number to add into the group chat and suchlike, she would hopefully concede that it didn’t do her any harm in the long run.

It’s interesting to watch that, even now with a hectic life of work and socialising, she will often throw a book into her bag. So many other little girls who loved reading at primary school had it sucked out of them as soon as they moved up to the next stage and got that blessed badge of honour, their very own mobile phone.

Sticking to the literature theme, she’s also quite an open book. There isn’t much goes on, even now, that she wouldn’t tell you about. Over a meal, with no phone on the table.

Her younger brother, who did get a phone earlier, is a darker horse. Compared to a lot of lads we probably know a lot about his life, but big sister would take the prize for being the most open.

In conversation, he would say that some of his happiest times have been driving a combine or ploughing a field, with his phone thrown in his bait box and all the pings ignored.

He’s moving away next week, down to Wiltshire to get back behind the wheel of the combine for harvest, then on to start a career down south that’s all about talking to farmers, and he thinks it was clinched when he drove off on a six-hour round trip (even his non-technical mother had said ‘Isn’t that a bit daft, couldn’t you do it on Zoom?’) and met one of the chaps he’ll be working with for a cup of tea.

Human contact is everything and our nation has forgotten this at its peril.

While it would be churlish not to praise the Government for taking the bold step of banning children from social media, there are sneaking suspicions that they are playing party politics.

What evidence? Well for starters, Starmer is always whining about technology and how marvellous artificial intelligence is. Without that wider scepticism about all the other elements worth worrying about in our increasingly digital society is he not just paying lip service? Papering over the cracks.

Looking back, Starmer’s government defeated legislative attempts to implement a blanket social media ban for under-16s not just once, but three times, in the House of Commons; arguing at the time they were unenforceable and risked driving children to unregulated corners of the internet.

Now our Prime Minister appears as a hand-wringing man on a mission, full of this ban having to happen. Excuse me, is that the screeching sound of yet another U-turn?

Nobody can articulate this haunting hunch better than Ian Russell, whose teenage daughter Molly took her own life after viewing harmful content online. While wanting change, he has repeatedly warned against ‘sledgehammer techniques like bans’, fearing they could cause more problems.

Russell spoke so eloquently in a recent interview with the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg, deploring the risk of legislation being rushed for political gain.

We all know those children who were never allowed so much as a sip of cider at home and then went completely off the rails with booze as soon as they left got a taste of the apron strings being untied.

Gradual introduction to the grown-up world - somewhere between here is a phone, get on with it, and this technophobe - surely makes more sense.

Also, is there not something deeply worrying about a country inhabited by such a pathetic population that needs its government to tell them how to parent.

Suppose people can’t say no to dogs, so why on earth would we expect them to be able to give their children the hard word?