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Starmer says crackdown affecting teenagers using social media to come ‘very quickly’ after consultation ends tonight
Keir Starmer has said that the government will impose a crackdown affecting teenagers using social media “very quickly” after the government’s consultation on the topic ends tonight.
Speaking during a visit to a nursery in East Sussex today, Starmer said:
The consultation on children and social media is closing this evening. We’ve had very, very many people being part of the process, either responding or in discussions with me and with others.
I’m meeting some of the parents this afternoon.
I’ll be really clear, the question now is not whether we do something, we are going to act, I’m absolutely clear that this needs to be something where there’s a game changer.
So, we will be acting. The question is only what we do, and that will be coming very quickly, because we took powers earlier this year to make sure we can act very, very quickly.
Starmer did not say which of the various crackdown options being considered the government would choose.
Photograph: Gareth Fuller/Reuters
Key events
Labour says Farage needs to explain why he’s happy to have sexist as his candidate in Makerfield
Anna Turley, the Labour party chair, has also commented on the latest past social media revelations about Robert Kenyon, the Reform UK candidate in Makerfield. (See 12.09pm.) She says Nigel Farage needs to explain why he is happy to have a sexist as a candidate. She says:
Nigel Farage needs to urgently explain why he’s happy for a man who proudly admits he’s sexist to represent the people of Makerfield. Robert Kenyon’s comments on women are degrading and an insult to the women and girls who live and work in Makerfield.
Nigel Farage needs to stop selecting people with such retrograde views from standing for public office for Reform.
Reform UK has been approached for a comment.
Reform UK’s ‘locker room banter’ defence of candidate’s comments ‘pathetic excuse for misogyny’, says Labour MP
Robert Kenyon, the Reform UK candidate in Makerfield, has been a profilic user of social media. His online history has now become a serious problem for him in the byelection.
As he was unveiled as the party’s byelection candidate, it was revealed that he had previously deleted an account on X and a Facebook page linked to embarrassing content from the past.
Then Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist campaign group, discovered a second X account that belonged to Kenyon that had been deleted. It featured “creepy comments about women” and conspirarcy theories about Covid, Hope Not Hate said. One of these comments has led to Carol Vorderman saying Kenyon owes her an apology.
Asked about these comments, Reform UK has not endorsed everything Kenyon said, but it has stressed that Kenyon was not a public figure when he made these remarks, and it has described him as someone who is not a professional politician, but an ordinary working man.
Kenyon also posted on an online rugby forum. In an article for the Independent, Athena Stavrou says that an account linked to Kenyon posted various sexist messages including one saying that women can’t “ref, drive or give directions” and another saying: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am.”
Asked by the Independent about the comments, a Reform UK spokesperson did not dispute that Kenyon had made them but described them as “locker room banter”.
In a separate report for the i, Arj Singh and Sanya Burgess say that in the same forum Kenyon expressed very strong anti-abortion views, claiming women had abortions for “vanity purposes” and used them as a “secondary form of contraception”.
Reform UK told the i that Kenyon was entitled to his views on abortion and that abortion policy has always been a conscience matter for MPs in Britain.
This morning the Labour MP Luke Charters said that to describe Kenyon’s comments as ‘locker room banter” was a pathetic excuse for misogyny. He said:
“Locker-room banter” is a pathetic excuse for blatant misogyny from a grown man.
Reform could have called out the overt sexism and condemned it. Instead, they framed it as an “establishment hit job”.
Tells you everything you need to know about them.
Starmer says crackdown affecting teenagers using social media to come ‘very quickly’ after consultation ends tonight
Keir Starmer has said that the government will impose a crackdown affecting teenagers using social media “very quickly” after the government’s consultation on the topic ends tonight.
Speaking during a visit to a nursery in East Sussex today, Starmer said:
The consultation on children and social media is closing this evening. We’ve had very, very many people being part of the process, either responding or in discussions with me and with others.
I’m meeting some of the parents this afternoon.
I’ll be really clear, the question now is not whether we do something, we are going to act, I’m absolutely clear that this needs to be something where there’s a game changer.
So, we will be acting. The question is only what we do, and that will be coming very quickly, because we took powers earlier this year to make sure we can act very, very quickly.
Starmer did not say which of the various crackdown options being considered the government would choose.
Photograph: Gareth Fuller/Reuters
Starmer says court of appeal to review rape sentences of teenage boys
Keir Starmer has now confirmed that Lord Hermer, the attorney general, has referred the sentences given to three teenage boys who avoided custody for the rape of two girls to the court of appeal on the grounds that the sentences were too lenient. Haroon Siddique has the story.
Carol Vorderman demands apology from Reform candidate in Makerfield over his support for sexually explicit post about her
Carol Vorderman has demanded an apology from a “cowardly” Reform UK candidate in the Makerfield by-election who supported an sexually explicit post about her, the Press Association is reporting. PA says:
Robert Kenyon, who is standing against Labour’s Andy Burnham in the 18 June contest, used a now-deleted X account to support an offensive post about the Welsh broadcaster.
Messages published by campaign group Hope Not Hate showed that Kenyon responded on Christmas Eve 2021 to another person’s post including graphic sexual language about the presenter, who made her name as the maths expert on Channel 4’s Countdown.
Alongside a thumbs up and a laughing emoji, the plumber wrote: “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.”
Vorderman told the Mirror: “I want an apology from Rob Kenyon, to me, and to all the other people he’s abused online.”
Yesterday Reform UK MP Danny Kruger described Kenyon’s social media posts as “inappropriate”, but sought to defend the “private” comments of “an ordinary man”.
Asked about the message, Kruger told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The great challenge for social media for private people is that they use it as if they are chatting to their friends in the park.
“Clearly an inappropriate thing to say publicly.
“I’m not going to judge people for their what are essentially regarded at the time and intended as private conversations.”
Asked about Kruger’s defence of his party’s candidate, Vorderman told the Mirror: “I’m sorry, Kenyon isn’t an ordinary man. He’s a cowardly man which is why he deleted one of his social media accounts.
“They are public comments on a public platform and if Danny Kruger thinks online abuse is OK then Reform are therefore stating online abuse against women is OK, then all women in Makerfield need to know that.”
Greens announce new Makerfield candidate, after ex-leader says party should not run ‘full campaign’ against Burnham
At the weekend the former Green party co-leader Jonathan Bartley was among a group of prominent Green activists and progressives who signed an open statement saying that, if Andy Burnham commits to putting proportional representation in Labour’s next manifesto, the Green party should not run a “full campaign” against him in Makerfield.
Burnham has said recently that he would like to commit to PR at the next election (he has been a supporter of PR for years) – but he did not present that as a specific offer to the Green party.
Anyone hoping that the Green party would decide not to put up a candidate in Makerfield will be disappointed. As Jessica Elgot reports, this morning the party has announced that Sarah Wakefield will be the Green candidate. She replaces Chris Kennedy, who withdrew from the contest last week after the Times discovered that he had posted conspiracy theories on social media about the attack on Jewish community ambulances.
In a statement, Wakefield, who is a Manchester city councillor and who is on maternity leave from her job as a charity director, said:
It is vital in a democracy that voters are given a choice of who they want to vote for. Together we can bring back the hope that politics can create a better life for ourselves and our children. This is what the Green party represents.
We showed in Gorton and Denton we can take on and beat Reform, whose backward-looking and divisive politics needs to be challenged head-on with a message that the future can be better and fairer than the failed status quo. Don’t vote in anger, vote in hope.
What is not yet clear is how much effort the party will put in to contesting the seat. The Greens only got 4% of the vote there at the 2024 general election. But some in the part fear that, in a close contest between Labour’s Andy Burnham and Reform UK, a strong Green performance could cost Labour the seat.
Mother of boy who may have died in TikTok challenge urges No 10 to ban social media
Wes Streeting is not the only person saying this morning that the government has been too slow to implement a ban on social media for under-16s. As Jessica Elgot reports, Ellen Roome, who believes her teenage son died in a TikTok challenge that went wrong, has been making the same argument.
Roome will be one of the parents meeting Keir Starmer to discuss this issue at a roundtable in Downing Street this afternoon.
Streeting accuses social media companies of ignoring their ‘moral duty’ to protect children
In his Today interview, Wes Streeting stressed that he was not just blaming governments for their failure to regulate social media companies more effectively. The firms themselves were also at fault, he said.
Markets are great things. They drive innovation, creativity, new products, and many of the aspects of social media and technology more broadly have have been life changing in a positive way.
But markets do not have a set of morals and values at their heart. That is where the public sphere comes in. That’s where government, and the state, has a role to play to make sure that markets are working to a set of rules that are in the interests of society as a whole.
And I’m afraid what we’ve seen too often in relation to Big Tech is a model which is driven entirely by making the greatest amount of money as quickly as possible, without thinking through the consequences for society.
And I think they have a moral duty to think more carefully about harm. And governments have a responsibility to act, particularly to protect children and young people from harm.
Streeting is on the right of the Labour party and, in a leadership contest, this would be a problem because many party members identify more with the centre left. Social media is a good issue for him in this context because, by attacking the tech companies in this way, he sounds a bit more leftwing.
(This is worth noting, but it would be a mistake to get too conspiratorial. The main reason why Streeting is saying this is, almost certainly, because it is what he thinks.)
Wes Streeting says Starmer ‘behind the curve’ on under-16s social media ban
Good morning. The government has been consulting on whether to follow Australia and impose a ban on social media for under-16s, or whether to opt for other restrictions, and the consultation ends at 11.59pm tonight. Keir Starmer is expected to announce the government’s response soon afterwards. He has already said that there will be action of some sort. Last year ministers were sceptical about following the Australian example, but this is an issue where opinion – both in government, and in society more broadly – has been shifting very quickly.
This morning Wes Streeting, the former health secretary who is running what is in effect a leadership campaign, has intervened. As the Guardian reports, he has said that a social media ban for under-16s “must be the start, not the end” and he has compared the sector to the tobacco industry.
In an interview this morning on the Today programme, Streeting went further, saying that when he was in cabinet he was arguing unsuccessfully for tougher action and accusing Keir Starmer of being “behind the curve” on this issue.
Here are some of the main lines from his interview.
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Streeting restated his claim that social media is like the tobacco industry and suggested that, just as tobacco bosses did in the mid-20th century, social media executives have been suppressing evidence about the full extent of the harm caused by their products. He said:
What we’ve seen from Big Tech is behaviour akin to Big Tobacco … We know from whistleblowers that in the tech industry, among those who are responsible for designing technology, including social media platforms, that are changing every aspect of our lives, they know that the product they’re designing is addictive, they know that it is harmful, and the business model is orientated towards getting kids while they’re young, addicting them with the design features that are designed for addiction, to grab your attention and keep you on their platform for as long as possible.
And then we see the consequences beginning to emerge through the growing body of evidence about the impact of this technology on childhood, whether that is sleep, concentration, learning, health, wellbeing, including mental health.
The harms are evident.
And the precautionary principle should apply here. So yes, it is true to say that the evidence is still emerging, but I think people have got eyes and ears and they can see the consequences of this unchecked harm.
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He claimed governmments around the world had been “asleep at the wheel” on this issue. “Frankly, legislators, regulators, have been asleep at the wheel on this,” he said.
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He suggested that Keir Starmer had been “behind the curve” on this issue. While he was not overly criticial of the PM on this issue, suggesting that governments around the world have been slow to confront social media companies on this issue, he made it clear that he thought the Starmer government could have acted more quickly. He said that he was speaking out now because he was “liberated from the obligations of collective responsibility”. He said the arguments he was making in public today were the ones he was making privately in government, “in a number of cabinet committees and meetings”, and that he “pushed as hard as I could”. He said the government was now moving to a “better position”, but he suggested Starmer could have acted more quickly.
To be fair to Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, she came into office [in September last year], she’s gripped this, she’s chosen to run a rapid consultation with the principle of how to implement restrictions, rather than whether. That’s all positive. And I trust Liz Kendall to act quickly following the closure of the consultation today.
And we must, because, as I say, we’re behind the curve.
Of course, there is no actual leadership election taking part in the Labour party yet. Streeting is not officially a candidate. But, in his Today interview, he said that he definitely had the 81 Labour MPs names he needed to launch a leadership challenge and he said he was only holding back to allow Andy Burnham the chance to return to parliament, in the Makerfield byelection on 18 June.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in East Sussex, to promote a government announcement about a competition review of the childcare sector, where he is due to speak to the media.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 2pm: MSPs debate a Scottish government motion saying the UK government should give Holyrood the power to hold a referendum on Scottish independence. The vote is due at 5pm.
Afternoon: Starmer is meeting bereaved parents who blame social media for the death of their children at a roundtable event in Downing Street. A government consultation on a potential ban on social media for under-16s ends tonight, and Starmer is expected to government action shortly.
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