The 2024 U.K. general election surprised a lot of people, not least the Labour Party itself.Sir Keir Starmer did not so much come to power with a mandate from the electorate as benefit from Britain’s absurd first-past-the-post voting system. Labour secured a massive 174-seat majority on just 33.7% of the vote.Apparently, a 16-year-old is wise enough to choose the next government, but a 15-and-a-half-year-old is too fragile to look at a meme on X without state intervention.This “loveless landslide,” as it has been called, happened because everyone was fed up with the Conservatives pretending to be conservative while presiding over record immigration and historically high taxes, while the emerging Reform Party split the vote on the right.Look back in angerBrits tend to vote tactically. Voting in this country is about getting rid of someone you hate or voting for someone you hate a bit less to prevent someone you hate a lot more from gaining power.When he stood on the steps of Downing Street almost two years ago, Starmer declared that the country had voted for “change.” And change the country he did. To paraphrase Churchill, never in the field of politics have so few done so much to make life worse for so many. The prime minister and his Cabinet of credentialed ideological clones immediately set about dismantling the British state. We went from 14 years of chaotic Conservative rule to managed decline overseen by a man so dull he had to beg his shadow to follow him.Admittedly, he did unite the country — against him.Within the space of two years, Starmer’s blend of technocratic managerialism and authoritarian overreach had alienated and enraged just about everyone. He was so unpopular that he was even hated by people who didn’t know he existed; people heard the name or saw his face and seemed ready to spontaneously combust with rage.Ultimately, he did the right thing and resigned on June 22. Ironically, it was only during his resignation speech that he actually showed some genuine human emotion. When his successor, generally considered to be Andy Burnham, takes up the role — the seventh PM in a decade — the revolving door of people fighting for the front seat of a clown car continues.UnsubscribeStarmer’s final, desperate attempt to manufacture a legacy before leaving Number 10 was his sweeping social media ban for under-16s. Not content with alienating a generation of working-class voters, he apparently wanted to ensure that the youngest demographic would grow up hating Labour as well. Just two years ago, Starmer resisted calls to ban children from having smartphones and using social media. So the about-face is nothing new to a man who has changed his mind on dozens of government policies. The former prime minister has made so many U-turns that the clown car is doing donuts at the circus.According to statements he made during his Downing Street press conference, Starmer took a more draconian approach after meeting with bereaved parents and after evaluating evidence from Australia, which became the first Western country to ban children from social media in December 2025. From early next year, the age limit will be raised from 13 to 16 on platforms including Snapchat, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.Naturally, children were positively overwhelmed with joy by the news that the state was going to become their new moral guardian. When the BBC visited a school to gauge the reaction of under-16s to being kicked off “the socials,” they spoke to a few who agreed with the ban, but they also met a teenager named Isabella. After she revealed that her weekend screen time was nine hours, the reporter asked what she would do with all that sudden time.In classic British fashion, she deadpanned straight to camera: “Stare at a wall.”It was a wonderfully sarcastic, meme-ready response that instantly went viral.RELATED: Britain is paying the price for years of woke ideology JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images’Sheer hypocrisy’If Andy Burnham becomes prime minister and proceeds to enforce this ban, he will inherit a generation of young people whose first political memory is of a government that exists largely to take things away.The sheer hypocrisy of the policy is staggering. This is, after all, the exact same Keir Starmer who championed lowering the voting age to 16, solemnly declaring that young people were mature enough to help decide the future of the United Kingdom. Apparently, a 16-year-old is wise enough to choose the next government, but a 15-and-a-half-year-old is too fragile to look at a meme on X without state intervention.No thought has been put into this ban. The legislation excludes WhatsApp and Signal — so the state’s big-brained solution to online safety prevents a teenager from posting a photo of his friends on a public feed, yet happily lets him participate in group chats with hundreds of peers, swapping the exact same content totally off the regulatory radar.Besides, kids are not as stupid as we think; they are light-years ahead of tech regulation. Recently a study commissioned by online safety charity the Molly Rose Foundation exposed the reality of these policies. The study — the first to examine teen social media use under a blanket ban — found that 61% of Australian 12- to 15-year-olds who previously had accounts still maintained access to at least one platform.Don’t get me wrong: Social media is a sewer, overrun with self-righteous liberals and narcissistic attention-seekers posting slop, but it’s an easy target for policymakers. Not everything is the fault of social media. This is a moral panic, a headline-grabbing stunt parading as child protection. Social media platforms, like video games before them and horror movies before that, have simply become the latest scapegoat for wider social problems.I sympathize deeply with the frustration and anguish felt both by teachers and grieving parents, but child-rearing should not be outsourced to the state any more than the government should declare a national bedtime. It’s a parent’s responsibility to bring up children, not the state’s. If Labour thinks Parliament can legislate a tech-savvy generation into staring at a wall, lawmakers are about to find out exactly how tactical the next electorate can be.
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Two people climbed on top of the Empire State
