Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall am 10:38 am ar 14 Mai 2024.
I will not, if the right hon. Lady does not mind, because I have several points to make— I am terribly sorry.
Physical and personal interaction with others is vital to humanity. I apologise for the casual sexism of the early 17th century, but John Donne said:
“No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
…
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”
We are fundamentally social beings, and sometimes social media can enable that. Grandparents FaceTime with their grandchildren, and they would of course never have dreamed of being able to do so 30 years ago. That is wonderful, but where social media replaces social interaction, we have long-term problems.
Of course, social media and the internet can be enormously valuable. As the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge said, she gets lost if she does not have Google Maps working—sometimes I cannot get it to work properly. I do not know how anybody ever managed to meet up back in the 1960s and 1970s. These are all wonderful innovations, and they are great for kids, too. They have a place in education: I want lots of kids to learn how to create apps and be part of the vibrant UK economy by creating video games and all the rest of it. That is part of the issue, but we cannot just bow down before that altar and surrender everything.
My other fundamental principle is that no executive is above the law, which is why I believe that swift and full implementation of the Online Safety Act is so important. I echo the points that have already been made. The Minister probably agrees that it has taken us too long to get to this point with the Online Safety Act. I will not make partisan points about all the ups and downs and ins and outs, but it has taken too long, and I worry about whether the next processes will happen anywhere near fast enough.
There are some things that Labour is keen to do. First, we need better mental health support for young people. It is shocking that one in four 17 to 19-year-olds in England now have a mental health problem. That is up from one in 10 in 2017, which is a dramatic increase. That may be partly to do with covid, but it is a significant problem. We want to put many more specialist mental health professionals into schools. I have family members who work in this field, and they desperately need more support. Early support is really important in preventing escalation. The problem of brain injuries in schools has hardly been recognised, and the Government will not even be able to give us proper numbers on how many kids in schools have had a brain injury and needed support. Also, creative education can be an important part of fostering better self-confidence, self-understanding, socialisation, and team working, and one of the problems over recent years is that that has fallen away.
Age guidelines must be truly effective, and it is worrying that Ofcom’s early research on stopping children using social media finds that it is almost impossible to do so even for children as young as five. That is highly problematic, and much more work needs to be done. For all sorts of economic reasons of their own, social media companies have failed to regulate themselves. They have sometimes not told the full truth about what their algorithms do, or about their economic model. The divide between those who argue, “No nanny state,” and those who argue, “Protect our children,” is a false dichotomy. The question is not “What legislation?” but, “How do we make sure that we have the right legislation?”