Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin with a brief refection on my 26 years or thereabouts on the internet, which saw me hand-coding my first website in 1999 and sees me now, I believe, as one of the few Members of your Lordships’ House with a TikTok account. I have had a lot of good times on the internet; I have learned a lot, made a lot of friends and built political communities that stretch around the world in ways that were entirely impossible before it arrived. That tells you, perhaps, that I think we should be careful in this debate about the diagnosis of the source of undoubted issues that the Bill seeks to address. It appears that some would like to wave a magic wand and shut it all down if they could—to return to some imagined golden age of the past, perhaps when your Lordships’ House was harrumphing loudly about the damaging effects of this new-fangled television.

While we are talking about young people, I have serious questions about the capacity of this House to engage with this debate. Yes, we did well in getting online during lockdown, even if we sometimes caught a glimpse of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren pressing the buttons so that their elders could speak in the House. They are the same generation; we are looking to take control over what they are doing right now. I invite noble Lords to keep that in mind as this debate proceeds.

I put it very seriously to your Lordships’ House that before we proceed further, we should invite a youth parliament into this very Chamber. We should listen to that debate on this Bill very carefully. On few subjects is the obvious need for votes at 16, or even younger, more obvious—the need for the experts by experience to be heard. They have the capacity to be the agents and to shape their own world, if their elders get out of the road.

I have no doubt that those young people would tell us that they suffer harm on the internet, with awful violent pornography and dangerous encouragements to self-harm and suicide. There need to be protections, while acknowledging that young people cannot be walled off into a little garden of their own. But I am sure young people would also say we need to address much wider issues, to build resilience and provide an education that encourages critical thinking rather than polished regurgitation of the facts. I would associate myself with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, among others, about the need for media education. But how do we encourage critical thinking about the media when we are also encouraging regurgitation of the right results for the exam—that you have to repeat these 10 points? The two things do not fit together.

In a stairwell discussion with a Member of your Lordships’ House who is not a digital native—and I point out that nobody in this debate is a digital native—but is certainly someone with much experience over decades, they reflected on the early hopes of the internet for democracy, for access to information and for community. They suggested it was inevitably a lost age; I do not agree. Political decisions and choices allowed a handful of multinational companies—mostly tax dodging, unaccountable to shareholders, now immensely rich—to dominate. That is not unique to the internet; that is what the political decisions of neoliberalism over the past decades have done to our food supplies, our retailing systems, our energy, our medicines and, increasingly, our education system. Far right, misogynistic, racist, homophobic and transphobic voices have been allowed to take hold and operate without challenge in our mainstream media, our communities, our politics and on the internet.

Financial fraud is a huge problem on the internet and, hopefully, this Bill might address it; but financial fraud and corruption is a huge problem across our financial sector, as indeed is the all-pervading one of gambling. The internet is a mirror to our society, as well as a theatre of interaction. The idea that we can fix our societies by fixing the internet is a fallacy; for many with commercial and political interests, it is a comfortable one that deflects political challenges they would rather not face.