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4 hours ago
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I’m past the stage in my parenting journey where I could have any influence over my kids’ screen time. They would be much more likely to invade my privacy, grab my phone, perform some search in settings that I don’t understand, wonder out loud how it’s possible for WhatsApp to take up that many hours in a person’s day, and I would say, “What goes on between a person and their phone is a sacred and never-to-be-breached thing.”
But, I still keep up with government pronouncements on the matter of phones and young people, in my quest to unlock a deeper mystery: how did Labour get so unpopular? I know why they’re unpopular with me; I could make a stab at why they’re unpopular with Reform voters and with Conservatives. What I don’t understand is how they fell foul of the squashy middle: the people who, given the choice, would always rather agree with the guys in charge; the people who’d identify as the centre; the people who determinedly don’t follow politics, don’t have strong views, and just wish it could go about its business more quietly. That army of compatriots whose impartiality makes them, let’s be honest, extremely easy to hang out with must have also turned against the government, otherwise it wouldn’t be getting such awful polling numbers. Last week marked new heights for a governing party in attracting negative attention. Explanations such as “Everyone hates politicians now”, and “They can’t seem to make their minds up, and people don’t like that” seem plausible but insufficient.
You could probably trace the progress of any issue to get somewhere near the answer, so let’s take children and phones as a for-instance. When Labour came in, the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, was already situating social media use as a tech-giant problem more than an individual one; surely there was some way to re-engineer an under-16’s phone so they could use it to call their parents but not to access social media sites? Starmer at that point was against an outright ban on phones for under-16s. At the weekend, in what people are calling his “strongest intervention yet”, he declared war on the algorithm, identifying that platforms deliberately try to suck kids into addictive behaviours, concluding: “I can’t see that there’s a case for that, and therefore I can see we’re going to have to act.”
That followed the landmark ruling in Los Angeles last week holding Meta and Google liable for creating an addiction to their products Instagram and YouTube. A 20-year-old user was compensated $3m, with a further $3m payable in punitive damages. But the dark side of the algorithm, driving kids towards harmful content with the sole aim of keeping their attention and no care for their health, has been well known since the tragic case of Molly Russell in 2022. Strong statements now look like an intolerable lag, a government dragged with utmost reluctance to a conclusion that everyone else on earth has already reached.
At the start of this month, a consultation was launched, which closes in May, and, just as a taster, new recommendations for tiny kids came out last week: no screen time at all for the under-twos, except video-calling relatives and whatnot; a maximum of one hour a day for the two-to-fives. It’s by far the least important of the education secretary’s plans, which involve trying to revitalise Sure Start, the destruction of which was one of the single most vandalising acts of the early austerity years, and overhaul Send, and yet it will inevitably get the most attention because it sounds so obvious as to be clueless, like saying, “Limit two-year-olds to four packets of crisps a day.” Nobody thinks a smartphone makes a good babysitter for a toddler; if that’s how the day went, it was a matter of dire necessity. Against a backdrop of known corporate harm, which can only be dealt with at source, it’s time-warp advice, throwing the problem back to families, a solution from an era before smartphones were invented.
This pattern of caution, dithering, timidity in the face of tech power, unhelpfully lame suggestions to the rest of us, seem to define the government. Could that be why the middle’s turned against them? Or is it rather that, when you’ve fallen out of love with a government, everything it does is insufferable?
