There is nothing like being right. Being so certain. Feeling the kind of self assurance that makes you walk taller and command a room with your thinking. That was where I was on Monday morning.
Keir Starmer had delivered one of his most assured, most prime ministerial statements of his premiership – the long awaited, and indeed longed-for, ban on social media for the under-16s.
It was time to give children back their childhoods, argued the PM. And to give parents a break from hammering them. In truth, there wasn’t much arguing needed. The public was already onside – if not ahead.
Across the political spectrum there was near universal consensus. There aren’t many things that unite the Greens and Reform but this, curiously, is one. For Reform it might have been the nostalgia of a bygone age. For the Greens, the chance to kick Big Tech. But here they were aligned.
I nodded along. YES, YES, YES. Get outside. Live Real Life. My questions to the Government AI minister that day were about how, not why. He fudged some of the finer details of what was banned and what was not, but talked more broadly about culture. Values. Children needed to be saved from the algorithmic smack trammelling their veins. My words not his, but you get the drift.
