As I remarked to the Prime Minister over a rather robust Sancerre at the Athenaeum Club just last week, true political leadership is a matter of triage. A statesman must be able to look at the vast, chaotic landscape of a nation’s problems and identify exactly which minor irritant to inflate into an urgent moral panic. Keir Starmer, to his immense credit, has done precisely that. The government’s forthcoming, fast-tracked crackdown on teenagers using social media is a masterstroke of priority management, perfectly balanced by his appropriately gentle, unhurried response to the Scottish National Party’s missing £400,000.
Tonight, the government's public consultation on teenage social media use finally ends. Tomorrow, we strike. Starmer has promised that his crackdown will come very quickly, a phrase that sends a necessary and righteous shiver down the spine of every fourteen-year-old currently attempting to watch a short-form dance video. This is exactly the sort of iron-fisted, zero-tolerance governance the chattering classes have been begging for. A youth looking at an illuminated rectangle is not merely a nuisance; it is a direct threat to the very fabric of the realm.
We simply cannot have the nation's children exposed to unregulated streams of information. Every second a teenager spends on Instagram is a second they are not engaging in proper, state-approved activities, such as preparing for their exams, staring blankly out of a rainy window, or quietly accepting the declining economic conditions we have so thoughtfully prepared for them. The digital realm gives them ideas. It gives them a voice. It is, frankly, terrifying, and the Prime Minister is right to deploy the full, terrifying weight of the British state to crush it overnight.
Contrast this urgent, existential crisis of the scrolling youth with the minor administrative hiccup currently unfolding up in Edinburgh. As we all know, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell has admitted to embezzling a rather pedestrian £400,000 from party funds to spend on luxury goods. Starmer, showing the precise emotional calibration required of a modern leader, noted that he was baffled that those at the top of the SNP claimed they didn't know what was going on. He sensibly suggested that there are simply questions that need to be answered.
Questions. Not immediate legislative crackdowns. Not overnight bans preventing politicians from accessing bank accounts. Just questions. This is the mature, adult approach to governance that I have been advocating for in my columns for over a decade.
We must be realistic about the pressures placed upon our political class. If we expect our leaders to meticulously track every half-million pounds that wanders out of the party coffers and into a luxury motorhome dealership, we will simply drive all the real talent out of politics. £400,000 is barely a rounding error in today’s economy. Who among us has not, in a moment of absent-mindedness during a stressful campaign season, accidentally diverted a six-figure sum of donor money toward high-end consumer goods? It is the cost of doing business.
The sheer hypocrisy of the modern public is staggering. They expect adult politicians to possess the financial self-restraint of a medieval monk, yet they throw a tantrum when we suggest that children should be legally barred from looking at a screen.
Lord Farnsworth is, as always, entirely correct. The real victims in the SNP embezzlement scandal are not the donors who lost their money, nor the voters who were misled. The real victims are the political elites who are now being rudely asked to explain their bookkeeping. Starmer’s polite bafflement at the SNP leadership is exactly the right tone to strike when dealing with the systemic misallocation of public trust. You do not punish the establishment; you merely ask them to do better next time, perhaps over a light lunch.
But a teenager with a Snapchat account? That is an entirely different magnitude of criminality. A politician stealing funds only damages a political party, but a teenager sending a digital photograph with a dog-ear filter damages the soul of the nation. It is a deliberate act of societal vandalism that cannot go unpunished.
During a panel I recently chaired at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I made the point that a society is judged by who it chooses to protect and who it chooses to prosecute. By promising to act very quickly against the youth while affording the SNP the dignified space to slowly answer questions about massive financial fraud, Starmer is protecting the institutions that matter. He is sending a clear message that the rules apply strictly to the powerless, and operate merely as gentle suggestions for the powerful.
I will not be apologizing for supporting this framework. It is the cornerstone of British civilization. So, to the youth of this country, I say this: put down your phones. Log off your applications. Submit to the immediate, unyielding crackdown on your digital lives. The adults in the room have serious work to do, and we cannot properly concentrate on embezzling our luxury goods if you keep posting about it on the internet.