Online Safety Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Russell and to thank him for his good wishes. I assure the Committee that there is nowhere I would rather spend my birthday, in spite of some competitive offers. I remind noble Lords of my interests in the register, particularly as the chair of 5Rights Foundation.

As my noble friend has set out, these amendments fall in three places: the risk assessments, the safety duties and the codes of practice. However, together they work on the overarching theme of safety by design. I will restrict my detailed remarks to a number of amendments in the first two categories. This is perhaps a good moment to recall the initial work of Carnegie, which provided the conceptual approach of the Bill several years ago in arguing for a duty of care. The Bill has gone many rounds since then, but I think the principle remains that a regulated service should consider its impact on users before it causes them harm. Safety by design, to which all the amendments in this group refer, is an embodiment of a duty of care. In thinking about these amendments as a group, I remind the Committee that both the proportionality provisions and the fact that this is a systems and processes Bill means that no company can, should or will be penalised for a single piece of content, a single piece of design or, indeed, low-level infringements.

Amendments 24, 31, 77 and 84 would delete “content” from the Government’s description of what is harmful to children, meaning that the duty is to consider harm in the round rather than just harmful content. The definition of “content” is drawn broadly in Clause 207 as

“anything communicated by means of an internet service”,

but the examples in the Bill, including

“written material … music and data of any description”,

once again fail to include design features that are so often the key drivers of harm to children.

On day three of Committee, the Minister said:

“The Bill will address cumulative risk where it is the result of a combination of high-risk functionality, such as live streaming, or rewards in service … This will initially be identified through Ofcom’s sector risk assessments, and Ofcom’s risk profiles and risk assessment guidance will reflect where a combination of risk in functionalities such as these can drive up the risk of harm to children. Service providers will have to take Ofcom’s risk profiles into account in their own risk assessments for content which is illegal or harmful to children”.—[Official Report, 27/4/23; col. 1385.]


However, in looking at the child safety duties, Clause 11(5) says:

“The duties … in subsections (2) and (3) apply across all areas of a service, including the way it is designed, operated and used”,


but subsection (14) says:

“The duties set out in subsections (3) and (6)”—


which are the duties to operate proportionate systems and processes to prevent and protect children from encountering harmful content and to include them in terms of service—

“are to be taken to extend only to content that is harmful to children where the risk of harm is presented by the nature of the content (rather than the fact of its dissemination)”.

I hesitate to say whether that is contradictory. I am not actually sure, but it is confusing. I am concerned that while we are reassured that “content” means content and activity and that the risk assessment considers functionality, “harm” is then repeatedly expressed only in the form of content.

Over the weekend, I had an email exchange with the renowned psychoanalyst and author, Norman Doidge, whose work on the plasticity of the brain profoundly changed how we think about addiction and compulsion. In the exchange, he said that

“children’s exposures to super doses, of supernormal images and scenes, leaves an imprint that can hijack development”.

Then, he said that

“the direction seems to be that AI would be working out the irresistible image or scenario, and target people with these images, as they target advertising”.

His argument is that it is not just the image but the dissemination and tailoring of that image that maximises the impact. The volume and frequency of those images create habits in children that take a lifetime to change—if they change at all. Amendments 32 and 85 would remove this language to ensure that content that is harmful by virtue of its dissemination is accounted for.

I turn now to Amendments 28 and 82, which cut the reference to the

“size and capacity of the provider of the service”

in deeming what measures are proportionate. We have already discussed that small is not safe. Such platforms such as Yubo, Clapper and Discord have all been found to harm children and, as both the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, told us, small can become big very quickly. It is far easier to build to a set of rules than it is to retrofit them after the event. Again, I point out that Ofcom already has duties of proportionality; adding size and capacity is unnecessary and may tip the scale to creating loopholes for smaller services.

Amendment 138 seeks to reverse the exemption in Clause 54 of financial harms. More than half of the 100 top-grossing mobile phone apps contain loot boxes, which are well established as unfair and unhealthy, priming young children to gamble and leading to immediate hardship for parents landed with extraordinary bills.

By rights, Amendments 291 and 292 could fit in the future-proof set of amendments. The way that the Bill in Clause 204 separates out functionalities in terms of search and user-to-user is in direct opposition to the direction of travel in the tech sector. TikTok does shopping, Instagram does video, Amazon does search; autocomplete is an issue across the full gamut of services, and so on and so forth. This amendment simply combines the list of functionalities that must be risk-assessed and makes them apply on any regulated service. I cannot see a single argument against this amendment: it cannot be the Government’s intention that a child can be protected, on search services such as Google, from predictive search or autocomplete, but not on TikTok.

Finally, Amendment 295 will embed the understanding that most harm is cumulative. If the Bereaved Parents for Online Safety were in the Chamber, or any child caught up in self-harm, depression sites, gambling, gaming, bullying, fear of exposure, or the inexorable feeling of losing their childhood to an endless scroll, they would say at the top of their voices that it is not any individual piece of content, or any one moment or incident, but the way in which they are nudged, pushed, enticed and goaded into a toxic, harmful or dangerous place. Adding the simple words

“the volume of the content and the frequency with which the content is accessed”

to the interpretation of what can constitute harm in Clause 205 is one of the most important things that we can do in this Chamber. This Bill comes too late for a whole generation of parents and children but, if these safety by design amendments can protect the next generation of children, I will certainly be very glad.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour, once again, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, in this Committee. I am going to speak in detail to the amendments that seek to change the way the codes of practice are implemented. Before I do, however, I will very briefly add my voice to the general comments that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, have just taken us through. Every parent in the country knows that both the benefit and the harm that online platforms can bring our children is not just about the content. It is about the functionality: the way these platforms work; the way they suck us in. They do give us joy but they also drive addiction. It is hugely important that this Bill reflects the functionality that online platforms bring, and not just content in the normal sense of the word “content”.

I will now speak in a bit more detail about the following amendments: Amendments 65, 65ZA, 65AA, 89, 90, 90B, 96A, 106A, 106B, 107A, 114A—I will finish soon, I promise—112, 122ZA, 122ZB and 122ZC.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My noble friend may have left one out.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

I am afraid I may well have done.

That list shows your Lordships some of the challenges we all have with the Bill. All these amendments seek to ensure that the codes of practice relating to child safety are binding. Such codes should be principles-based and flexible to allow companies to take the most appropriate route of compliance, but implementing these codes should be mandatory, rather than, as the Bill currently sets out, platforms being allowed to use “alternative measures”. That is what all these amendments do—they do exactly the same thing. That was a clear and firm recommendation from the joint scrutiny committee. The government’s response to that joint scrutiny committee report was really quite weak. Rather than rehearse the joint scrutiny committee’s views, I will rehearse the Government’s response and why it is not good enough to keep the Bill as it stands.

The first argument the Government make in their response to the joint scrutiny report is that there is no precedent for mandatory codes of conduct. But actually there are. There is clear precedent in child protection. In the physical world, the SEND code for how we protect some of our most vulnerable children is mandatory. Likewise, in the digital world, the age-appropriate design code, which we have mentioned many a time, is also mandatory. So there is plenty of precedent.

The second concern—this is quite funny—was that stakeholders were concerned about having multiple codes of conduct because it could be quite burdensome on them. Well, forgive me for not crying too much for these enormous tech companies relative to protecting our children. The burden I am worried about is the one on Ofcom. This is an enormous Bill, which places huge amounts of work on a regulator that already has a very wide scope. If you make codes of conduct non-mandatory, you are in fact making the work of the regulator even harder. The Government themselves in their response say that Ofcom has to determine what the minimum standards should be in these non-binding codes of practice. Surely it is much simpler and more straightforward to make these codes mandatory and, yes, to add potentially a small additional burden to these enormous tech companies to ensure that we protect our children.

The third challenge is that non-statutory guidance already looks as if it is causing problems in this space. On the video-sharing platform regime, which is non-mandatory, Ofcom has already said that in its first year of operation it has

“seen a large variation in platforms’ readiness to engage with Ofcom”.

All that will simply make it harder and harder, so the burden will lie on this regulator—which I think all of us in this House are already worried is being asked to do an awful lot—if we do not make it very clear what is mandatory and what is not. The Secretary of State said of the Bill that she is

“determined to put these vital protections for … children … into law as quickly as possible”.

A law that puts in place a non-mandatory code of conduct is not what parents across the country would expect from that statement from the Secretary of State. People out there—parents and grandparents across the land—would expect Ofcom to be setting some rules and companies to be required to follow them. That is exactly what we do in the physical world, and I do not understand why we would not want to do it in the digital world.

Finally—I apologise for having gone on for quite a long time—I will very briefly talk specifically to Amendment 32A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, which is also in this group. It is a probing amendment which looks at how the Bill will address and require Ofcom and participants to take due regard of VPNs: the ability for our savvy children—I am the mother of two teenage girls—to get round all this by using a VPN to access the content they want. This is an important amendment and I am keen to hear what my noble friend Minister will say in response. Last week, I spoke about my attempts to find out how easy it would be for my 17 year-old daughter to access pornography on her iPhone. I spoke about how I searched in the App Store on her phone and found that immediately a whole series of 17-plus-rated apps came up that were pornography sites. What I did not mention then is that with that—in fact, at the top of the list—came a whole series of VPN apps. Just in case my daughter was naive enough to think that she could just click through and watch it, and Apple was right that 17 year-olds were allowed to watch pornography, which obviously they are not, the App Store was also offering her an easy route to access it through a VPN. That is not about content but functionality, and we need to properly understand why this bundle of amendments is so important.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Well, I must regard myself as doubly rebuked, and unfairly, because my reflections are very relevant to the amendments, and I have developed them in that direction. In respect of the parents, they have suffered very cruelly and wrongly, but although it may sound harsh, as I have said in this House before on other matters, hard cases make bad law. We are in the business of trying to make good law that applies to the whole population, so I do not think that these are wholly—

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

If my noble friend could, would he roll back the health and safety regulations for selling toys, in the same way that he seems so happy to have no health and safety regulations for children’s access to digital toys?

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, if the internet were a toy, aimed at children and used only by children, those remarks would of course be very relevant, but we are dealing with something of huge value and importance to adults as well. It is the lack of consideration of the role of adults, the access for adults and the effects on freedom of expression and freedom of speech, implicit in these amendments, that cause me so much concern.

I seem to have upset everybody. I will now take issue with and upset the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, with whom I have not engaged on this topic so far. At Second Reading and earlier in Committee, she used the phrase, “childhood lasts a lifetime”. There are many people for whom this is a very chilling phrase. We have an amendment in this group—a probing amendment, granted—tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, which seeks to block access to VPNs as well. We are in danger of putting ourselves in the same position as China, with a hermetically sealed national internet, attempting to put borders around it so that nobody can breach it. I am assured that even in China this does not work and that clever and savvy people simply get around the barriers that the state has erected for them.

Before I sit down, I will redeem myself a little, if I can, by giving some encouragement to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on Amendments 28 and 32 —although I think the amendments are in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool. These amendments, if we are to assess the danger posed by the internet to children, seek to substitute an assessment of the riskiness of the provider for the Government’s emphasis on the size of the provider. As I said earlier in Committee, I do not regard size as being a source of danger. When it comes to many other services— I mentioned that I buy my sandwich from Marks & Spencer as opposed to a corner shop—it is very often the bigger provider I feel is going to be safer, because I feel I can rely on its processes more. So I would certainly like to hear how my noble friend the Minister responds on that point in relation to Amendments 28 and 32, and why the Government continue to put such emphasis on size.

More broadly, in these understandable attempts to protect children, we are in danger of using language that is far too loose and of having an effect on adult access to the internet which is not being considered in the debate—or at least has not been until I have, however unwelcomely, raised it.

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[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

This is the trouble with looking at legislation that is technologically neutral and future-proofed and has to envisage risks and solutions changing in years to come. We want to impose duties that can technically be met, of course, but this is primarily a point for companies in the sector. We are happy to engage and provide further information, but it is inherently part of the challenge of identifying evolving risks.

The provision in Clause 11(16) addresses the noble Lord’s concerns about the use of VPNs in circumventing age-assurance or age-verification measures. For it to apply, providers would need to ensure that the measures they put in place are effective and that children cannot normally access their services. They would need to consider things such as how the use of VPNs affects the efficacy of age-assurance and age-verification measures. If children were routinely using VPNs to access their service, they would not be able to conclude that Clause 11(16) applies. I hope that sets out how this is covered in the Bill.

Amendments 65, 65ZA, 65AA, 89, 90, 90B, 96A, 106A, 106B, 107A, 114A, 122, 122ZA, 122ZB and 122ZC from the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, seek to make the measures Ofcom sets out in codes of practice mandatory for all services. I should make it clear at the outset that companies must comply with the duties in the Bill. They are not optional and it is not a non-statutory regime; the duties are robust and binding. It is important that the binding legal duties on companies are decided by Parliament and set out in legislation, rather than delegated to a regulator.

Codes of practice provide clarity on how to comply with statutory duties, but should not supersede or replace them. This is true of codes in other areas, including the age-appropriate design code, which is not directly enforceable. Following up on the point from my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe, neither the age-appropriate design code nor the SEND code is directly enforceable. The Information Commissioner’s Office or bodies listed in the Children and Families Act must take the respective codes into account when considering whether a service has complied with its obligations as set out in law.

As with these codes, what will be directly enforceable in this Bill are the statutory duties by which all sites in scope of the legislation will need to abide. We have made it clear in the Bill that compliance with the codes will be taken as compliance with the duties. This will help small companies in particular. We must also recognise the diversity and innovative nature of this sector. Requiring compliance with prescriptive steps rather than outcomes may mean that companies do not use the most effective or efficient methods to protect children.

I reassure noble Lords that, if companies decide to take a different route to compliance, they will be required to document what their own measures are and how they amount to compliance. This will ensure that Ofcom has oversight of how companies comply with their duties. If the alternative steps that providers have taken are insufficient, they could face enforcement action. We expect Ofcom to take a particularly robust approach to companies which fail to protect their child users.

My noble friend Lord Vaizey touched on the age-appropriate design code in his remarks—

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My noble friend the Minister did not address the concern I set out that the Bill’s approach will overburden Ofcom. If Ofcom has to review the suitability of each set of alternative measures, we will create an even bigger monster than we first thought.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I do not think that it will. We have provided further resource for Ofcom to take on the work that this Bill will give it; it has been very happy to engage with noble Lords to talk through how it intends to go about that work and, I am sure, would be happy to follow up on that point with my noble friend to offer her some reassurance.

Responding to the point from my noble friend Lord Vaizey, the Bill is part of the UK’s overall digital regulatory landscape, which will deliver protections for children alongside the data protection requirements for children set out in the Information Commissioner’s age-appropriate design code. Ofcom has strong existing relationships with other bodies in the regulatory sphere, including through the Digital Regulation Co-operation Forum. The Information Commissioner has been added to this Bill as a statutory consultee for Ofcom’s draft codes of practice and relevant pieces of guidance formally to provide for the ICO’s input into its areas of expertise, especially relating to privacy.

Amendment 138 from the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, would amend the criteria for non-designated content which is harmful to children to bring into scope content whose risk of harm derives from its potential financial impact. The Bill already requires platforms to take measures to protect all users, including children, from financial crime online. All companies in scope of the Bill will need to design and operate their services to reduce the risk of users encountering content amounting to a fraud offence, as set out in the list of priority offences in Schedule 7. This amendment would expand the scope of the Bill to include broader commercial harms. These are dealt with by a separate legal framework, including the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. This amendment therefore risks creating regulatory overlap, which would cause confusion for business while not providing additional protections to consumers and internet users.

Amendment 261 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford seeks to modify the existing requirements for the Secretary of State’s review into the effectiveness of the regulatory framework. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that all aspects of a regulated service are taken into account when considering the risk of harm to users and not just content.

As we have discussed already, the Bill defines “content” very broadly and companies must look at every aspect of how their service facilitates harm associated with the spread of content. Furthermore, the review clause makes explicit reference to the systems and processes which regulated services use, so the review can already cover harm associated with, for example, the design of services.

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[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, I rise on this group of amendments, particularly with reference to Amendments 25, 78, 187 and 196, to inject a slight note of caution—I hope in a constructive manner—and to suggest that it would be the wrong step to try to incorporate them into this legislation. I say at the outset that I think the intention behind these amendments is perfectly correct; I do not query the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and others. Indeed, one thing that has struck me as we have discussed the Bill is the commonality of approach across the Chamber. There is a strong common desire to provide a level of protection for children’s rights, but I question whether these amendments are the right vehicle by which to do that.

It is undoubtedly the case that the spirit of the UNCRC is very strongly reflected within the Bill, and I think it moves in a complementary fashion to the Bill. Therefore, again, I do not query the UNCRC in particular. It can act as a very strong guide to government as to the route it needs to take, and I think it has had a level of influence on the Bill. I speak not simply as someone observing the Bill but as someone who, in a previous existence, served as an Education Minister in Northern Ireland and had direct responsibility for children’s rights. The guidance we received from the UNCRC was, at times, very useful to Ministers, so I do not question any of that.

For three reasons, I express a level of concern about these amendments. I mentioned that the purpose of the UNCRC is to act as a guide—a yardstick—for government as to what should be there in terms of domestic protections. That is its intention. The UNCRC itself was never written as a piece of legislation, and I do not think it was the original intention to have it directly incorporated and implemented as part of law. The UNCRC is aspirational in nature, which is very worth while. However, it is not written in a legislative form. At times, it can be a little vague, particularly if we are looking at the roles that companies will play. At times, it sets out very important principles, but ones which, if left for interpretation by the companies themselves, could create a level of tension.

To give an example, there is within the UNCRC a right to information and a right to privacy. That can sometimes create a tension for companies. If we are to take the purpose of the UNCRC, it is to provide that level of guidance to government, to ensure that it gets it right rather than trying to graft UNCRC directly on to domestic law.

Secondly, the effect of these amendments would be to shift the interpretation and implementation of what is required of companies from government to the companies themselves. They would be left to try to determine this, whereas I think that the UNCRC is principally a device that tries to make government accountable for children’s rights. As such, it is appropriate that government has the level of responsibility to draft the regulations, in conjunction with key experts within the field, and to try to ensure that what we have in these regulations is fit for purpose and bespoke to the kind of regulations that we want to see.

To give a very good example, there are different commissioners across the United Kingdom. One of the key groups that the Government should clearly be consulting with to make sure they get it right is the Children’s Commissioners of the different jurisdictions in the United Kingdom. Through that process, but with that level of ownership still lying with government and Ofcom, we can create regulations that provide the level of protection for our children that we all desire to see; whereas, if the onus is effectively shifted on to companies simply to comply with what is a slightly vague, aspirational purpose in these regulations, that is going to lead to difficulties as regards interpretation and application.

Thirdly, there is a reference to having due regard to what is in the UNCRC. From my experience, both within government and even seeing the way in which government departments do that—and I appreciate that “due regard” has case law behind it—even different government departments have tended to interpret that differently and in different pieces of legislation. At one extreme, on some occasions that effectively means that lip service has been paid to that by government departments and, in effect, it has been largely ignored. Others have seen it as a very rigorous duty. If we see that level of disparity between government departments within the same Government, and if this is to be interpreted as a direct instruction to and requirement of companies of varying sizes—and perhaps with various attitudes and feelings of responsibility on this subject—that creates a level of difficulty in and of itself.

My final concern in relation to this has been mentioned in a number of debates on various groups of amendments. Where a lot of Peers would see either a weakness in the legislation or something else that needs to be improved, we need to have as much consistency and clarity as possible in both interpretation and implementation. As such, the more we move away from direct regulations, which could then be put in place, to relying on the companies themselves interpreting and implementing, perhaps in different fashions, with many being challenged by the courts at times, the more we create a level of uncertainty and confusion, both for the companies themselves and for users, particularly the children we are looking to protect.

While I have a lot of sympathy for the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and while we need to find a way to incorporate into the Bill in some form how we can drive children’s rights more centrally within this, the formulation of the direct grafting of the UNCRC on to this legislation, even through due regard, is the wrong vehicle for doing it. It is inappropriate. As such, it is important that we take time to try to find a better vehicle for the sort of intention that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and others are putting forward. Therefore, I urge the noble Lord not to press his amendments. If he does, I believe that the Committee should oppose the amendments as drafted. Let us see if, collectively, we can find a better and more appropriate way to achieve what we all desire: to try to provide the maximum protection in a very changing world for our children as regards online safety.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. We are in the process of having a very important debate, both in the previous group and in this one. I came to this really important subject of online safety 13 years ago, because I was the chief executive of a telecoms company. Just to remind noble Lords, 13 years ago neither Snap, TikTok nor Instagram—the three biggest platforms that children use today—existed, and telecoms companies were viewed as the bad guys in this space. I arrived, new to the telecoms sector, facing huge pressure—along with all of us running telecoms companies—from Governments to block content.

I often felt that the debate 13 years ago too quickly turned into what was bad about the internet. I was spending the vast majority of my working day trying to encourage families to buy broadband and to access this thing that you could see was creating huge value in people’s lives, both personal and professional. Sitting on these Benches, I fundamentally want to see a society with the minimum amount of regulation, so I was concerned that regulating internet safety would constrain innovation; I wanted to believe that self-regulation would work. In fact, I spent many hours in workshops with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and many others in this Chamber, as we tried to persuade and encourage the tech giants—as everyone started to see that it was not the telecoms companies that were the issue; it was the emerging platforms—to self-regulate. It is absolutely clear that that has failed. I say that with quite a heavy heart; it has genuinely failed, and that is why the Bill is so important: to enshrine in law some hard regulatory requirements to protect children.

That does not change the underlying concern that I and many others—and everyone in this Chamber—have, that the internet is also potentially a force for good. All technology is morally neutral: it is the human beings who make it good or bad. We want our children to genuinely have access to the digital world, so in a Bill that is enshrining hard gates for children, it is really important that it is also really clear about the rights that children have to access that technology. When you are put under enormous pressure, it is too easy—I say this as someone who faced it 13 years ago, and I was not even facing legislation—to try to do what you think your Government want to do, and then end up causing harm to the individuals you are actually trying to protect. We need this counterbalance in this Bill. It is a shame that my noble friend Lord Moylan is not in his place, because, for the first time in this Committee, I find myself agreeing with him. It is hugely important that we remember that this is also about freedom and giving children the freedom to access this amazing technology.

Some parts of the Bill are genuinely ground-breaking, where we in this country are trying to work out how to put the legal scaffolding in place to regulate the internet. Documenting children’s rights is not something where we need to start from scratch. That is why I put my name to this amendment: I think we should take a leaf from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I recognise that the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, made some very thought-provoking comments about how we have to be careful about the ambiguity that we might be creating for companies, but I am afraid that ambiguity is there whether we like it or not. These are not just decisions for government: the tension between offering services that will brighten the lives of children but risking them as well are exactly behind the decisions that technology companies take every day. As the Bill enshrines some obligations on them to protect children from the harms, I firmly believe it should also enshrine obligations on them to offer the beauty and the wonder of the internet, and in doing that enshrine their right to this technology.

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[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

I want to challenge the noble Baroness’s assertion that the Bill is not about children’s rights. Anyone who has a teenage child knows that their right to access the internet is keenly held and fought out in every household in the country.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

The quip works, but political rights are not quips. Political rights have responsibilities, and so on. If we gave children rights, they would not be dependent on adults and adult society. Therefore, it is a debate; it is a row about what our rights are. Guess what. It is a philosophical row that has been going on all around the world. I am just suggesting that this is not the place—