There is a kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a white paper and dies the moment it meets voters who have actually raised, or been, a teenager — and this curfew is one of them, buried under a landslide that left barely one in six backing it. The "voluntary" framing, designed to make this the gentle sibling of the under-16s ban, bought it almost no goodwill here.
The age pattern is the real story. Every bracket from 25 upward rejected it in near-lockstep, with the 35-44s — the parents actually living with this dilemma nightly — the most hostile of all, while the tiny cluster of 16-24-year-olds, the very cohort the policy targets, leaned the other way. That inversion suggests the adults doing the imagining of enforcement (nagging, phone confiscation, family rows at 10pm) recoiled from it faster than the teenagers who'd theoretically be curfewed.
It echoes the wider unease that has trailed Starmer's online-harms agenda since the under-16s ban was first floated: broad appetite for protecting children in principle, but deep scepticism the moment "voluntary" state-backed rules meet the reality of enforcing bedtime via legislation rather than parenting.
If the government hoped a softer, opt-in measure would land better than an outright ban, this chamber's verdict says otherwise.
1 Opinion
Government should keep their fingers out of peoples' private lives. Controlling social media is one step on the path to total control and propaganda. No thank you.