Solidarity with all teenagers
And an apology to Gen Alpha
The thing that disgusts me most about the social media ban for under 16s is that it could hurt me commercially, because some our UK readers will understandably balk at handing over their ID to the Home Office before reading some of our more controversial views on policy issues like Defence expenditure (4% of GDP by 2030 is the bare minimum for any credible rearmament plan).
I am also appalled when I see millennials who got to enjoy growing up with unrestricted access to the internet try and claim that the internet back in their day was different (nothing like the Skunk you lot are smoking nowadays). The internet was indeed different in the mid to late 2000s; it was substantially more dangerous. Many British people who went to a secondary school around this time would have purchased drugs from the Silk Road. ISIS beheading videos were circulated on Facebook and children were bullied to the point of suicide on AskFM.
If you had said, in 2011, that the right solution to these problems would to make everyone upload pictures of their passports to random websites you would have been rightly ignored, as the political culture pre-lockdown was far more sensible and less hysterical. This was a time when young people in Scandinavia were organising into ‘Pirate parties’ which argued that the internet had made the concept of intellectual property irrelevant. The internet was in the ascendance, ‘IRL’ looked staid and irrelevant; online freedoms were unlimited. And uncontroversial. It was the responsibility of those ‘surfing the web’ to take care of themselves.
In the TV show the Inbetweeners, released around this time, one episode opens with the boys watching Two Girls One Cup on a laptop. The Iconic music plays and the boys are shown to look disgusted. The show then moves swiftly on. This, moreso than the boldly offensive language, dates the show. If it were filmed today the ‘online harms’ faced by teenage boys because they once saw a bit of dragon sideboob on the world wide web would the main point of the show.
What has changed? I suspect the problem is confused middle aged people using the internet en masse. When the internet was still the wild west it was also treated as a preoccupation for nerdy boys and later for ‘young people’ with their blinkin Blackberries and their MySpaces. Though middle aged and even elderly people were present they were the exception to the norm, and being generally technology enthusiasts had reasonably liberal views. Peter Oakley, to give an example, became famous on YouTube simply for being an old man who vlogged, going by the username geriatric1927.
As soon as platforms like Facebook and X began to draw in millions of frightened, technologically illiterate middle-aged people online, without any respect for online anonymity or other digital freedoms, it was only a matter of time before they would start demanding that the internet be changed by government fiat to accommodate them. Particularly as many such newcomers were legacy politicians and journalists who came of age when derogatory comments made towards them had to be printed by Editors who could be threatened with legal action.
It was believed, in the 2000s, that the British people were living through a deeply illiberal time – Blair was tearing up our civil liberties because of political correctness you could no longer proudly display your golliwogs in the pub. It is depressing to think that the nightmarish years of New Labour could now be looked back upon as the Halcyon days of old English liberty by children born at the time.
Starmer’s Britain is one where all of the worst aspects of liberalism are inflicted on you. Mentally ill people must be treated ‘in the community’ where they have ready access to knives and the soft part of your neck. At the same time every freedom which makes life worth living; pornography, driving and vaping is slowly crushed by legislation and punitive taxation out of vindictiveness and spite.
I am sorry - genuinely sorry – that the last escape from modern hell, from the world of Famalam and Manchester United (you beauty!) has been shut off for teenagers who do not fit in with the people around them. Intelligent mildly sensitive 15-year-olds are denied the right to a selective education and then shoved into schools where they are bullied by other children who have no interest in learning. They will be locked up in their rooms by their helicopter parents and left to rot in front of the television, emerging less informed and more miserable from their adolescence.
The one place where these teenagers might have connected with other like-minded peers is now being closed to them because an unholy alliance of anxious mothers with post-natal depression and far-left activists who want to ban political discussions they disagree with have managed to force through this legislation with very little pushback from normal people, most of whom cannot bring themselves to care about what happens to the young.
I am sorry. And I hope the wait until your sixteenth birthday passes quickly.
When you yourselves are old, do better than we did.
The most outrageous part is the social media curfew for 16-17 year olds… such a petty attempt at displaying power over the young.
If my parents even hinted at an ‘appropriate bedtime’ by that age, I’d have rightly laughed in their faces - never mind Sir Keir Starmer KC. What business do they think they have meddling in this stuff?
“Mentally ill people must be treated ‘in the community’ where they have ready access to knives and the soft part of your neck”
Hilarious as always