Sir Keir Starmer wants to ban under-16s from social media, as reported by GB News. What’s right about that? What is the spiritual angle? And what could possibly go wrong?
Watch our video of this article, including Keir Starmer defending his proposal:
Social Media harms children
To be fair, we must acknowledge the serious harm being done to children through social media. It’s in three main forms.
Firstly, children’s natural innocence and naivety allows predators to groom them, arrange to meet them, even blackmail them into sending naked images and all the rest of it. Sir Keir is absolutely right about that.
Secondly, and it’s allied, even if someone chatting up a young girl on Snapchat or wherever really is an adolescent boy, there is huge scope for premature sexualisation, which is bad.
But Relationships and Sex Education, endorsed enthusiastically by successive governments and the educational establishment, in state schools, is already sexualising children. When does Sir Keir plan to put an end to that wickedness? Will he deal with our crass cultural environment with abortion, sodomy, gay marriage and transgenderism informing the arts and the media?
Children not exempt from the judgment
Make no mistake, we are under judgment. And the nation’s children, those allowed to be born, are not exempt. The prophet says:
Hosea 4:6b seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Thirdly, there are the social pressures, online competition for ‘likes’ on Instagram, and putdowns and abuse from those of the same age, or in the same classroom.
You have always had bullying, denigration, name-calling of those whom certain children take against. Social media dials it up. It has driven young people to suicide. You’ve heard of these tragedies.
Parental responsibility
And here is where parental responsibility comes in. Children should be able to confide in their parents. Parents should be supporting their children as they grow up. Scripture says:
Prov 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
When the apostle tells:
Col 3:21 Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.
It is clear parents have a duty to encourage them, build children up and help them to see things in perspective and by the Lord’s criteria.
Or to put it another way:
Eph 6:4b … bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
The over-riding divine principle is that parents have the responsibility for the nation’s young people, not the state. But too many parents have allowed themselves to be excluded from their children’s lives. They give them mobile phones. They allow them to sit scrolling.
Too much scrolling
Parents are even sat scrolling themselves, instead of chatting as the Bible commands, constantly talking of God’s ways, about what has happened during the day, about behaviour and morality:
Deut 6:7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
All the time, in other words. Parents should certainly ban phones from children’s bedrooms. But so many parents, yes, even nominally Christian parents, have given up. They feel powerless. They think the Government should ‘do something’.
Keir, with his godless statist philosophy, feels driven to oblige. He leads a dysfunctional government in a dysfunctional nation. He should be putting the burden of child protection on parents, but instead he will put it on the social media companies.
The government are butting in on what should be a parental space, but too many parents have vacated it.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Guardian reports how the Australian experience shows children will find ways round the age verification.
Secondly, we have, I think, well-founded suspicions that some kind of censorship is going to creep in through the back door.
And an argument is sure to follow that this ban could be folded in to their digital ID. They proposed ‘BritCard’ as a mandatory scheme. Only a public backlash shifted them to ‘opt-in’ and ‘non-compulsory’.
For now. No doubt even now civil servants and quangocrats are pondering what other baubles they can hang on what could become a Christmas Tree of a Bill.
Government ‘here to help’
I am aware of Ronald Reagan’s nine most terrifying words: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
But I don’t for a moment accept the view of Jeffrey Demarco at Save the Children and his risk of ‘pushing children into less regulated spaces, where they are less likely to seek help when something goes wrong’. The spaces are not regulated now. Nor are children seeking help now.
And on the matter of the Establishment’s God-given duty to protect the wider population from foreign aggression, criminal migrants and street-based grooming gangs, those are coming up against the cost of their welfare obsession and their dogma of multiculturalism.
Pray – and watch!
Our Lord told us:
Mark 13:33 Take ye heed, watch and pray:
Even bad rulers can do good stuff, but they are more inclined to default to evil. That is why we must pray for those in authority and pray the Lord will even now raise up humble, God-fearing, honest, truthful, competent men to lead us.
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