Keir Starmer wants to ban children from social media, and he's promising it as a gift ; more childhood, more safety, more freedom to grow up. What he isn't saying is that the only way to enforce a ban on some users is to identify all of them, which means the actual product on offer isn't child protection but a national identity checkpoint wearing a parenting costume, built one biometric scan and one device-level filter at a time. This is the oldest move in the state's playbook: when confronted with a technology it can't yet control, slap a permission slip on it, and call the leash a seatbelt
Kudzai Kutukwa · Jun 18, 2026
