My dear deluded nincompoop
@CMcKinnellMP,
One notes with the weary familiarity that attends such performances the latest effusion from the honourable member. A mother, one is assured, stopped her at the station to express delight that the Government is “legislating to protect children online” so that her younger son might enjoy “more quality time during his childhood.”
How convenient.
How neatly it aligns with the narrative being pushed at this precise moment. One would have thought that any parent genuinely concerned for quality time might have begun by exercising the parental authority that has existed since time immemorial — limiting screen time, supervising usage, and declining to hand a child an unsupervised portal to the world.
That this mother apparently requires an Act of Parliament to achieve what was once a basic function of parenthood speaks volumes about the calibre of parenting now being celebrated.
More to the point, the claim is unverifiable anecdote of the most convenient sort. No name, no corroboration, no independent witness — merely the timeless political device of “a constituent told me.”
One observes that such stories have proliferated among Government members in the hours since the announcement, each miraculously discovering a grateful parent at the precise moment it serves the script.
Meanwhile, the same Government that postures as the defender of childhood has declined to pursue with vigour the organised grooming gangs that systematically destroyed the childhoods of thousands of girls under the very institutions Sir Keir once led.
It continues policies that place unvetted adult males in proximity to schools and communities. And it conspicuously exempts from its ban certain platforms favoured by its own ideological allies — platforms about which serious concerns regarding inappropriate content have already been raised.
If the object were truly the protection of children, one might have expected action on those fronts first. Instead we are offered age-verification infrastructure that will inevitably encompass adults, all justified by a story that cannot be checked and a policy whose evidence base, as the Community Note on the Prime Minister’s own post recorded, shows only modest correlation and no established causation.
Parents who wish to raise their children will continue to do so without the assistance of fabricated station encounters or the state’s tender mercies.
Yours in profound contempt,
A Gentleman from the Old School
#SocialMediaBan #DigitalID