Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I shall attempt to be brief but, based on previous experience with other speakers, that may be difficult. At least it gives the Whip on the Front Bench the chance to do some agile body moves.

I welcome this overdue Bill. I think the Minister got it slightly wrong when he congratulated us on waiting patiently for it. Judging by every single contribution around the entire House today, patience has been rather wanting. We want to get on with it. Like many government Bills, this has grown like Topsy. It has grown sideways, downwards and upwards. We need to beware of going around in circles. Above all, we need to expedite this and get it on the statute book.

I will focus on three key areas. Unsurprisingly, the first will be children. Here I declare that I am a governor of Coram, the oldest children’s charity in the United Kingdom. I will certainly support amendments such as those that the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, was talking about to try to bring in proper age verification.

Like many other noble Lords, on Monday I had the privilege of sitting in on the briefing that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, arranged. Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, was present, together with one of her sisters. What we saw was truly shocking. In some ways it was particularly shocking to me because, as Ian shared some of his daughter’s diary—what she had actually written in the days and weeks before she died—I had a sudden jolt of recognition. What 14 year-old Molly was saying was almost identical to the transcript of the suicide note that my father wrote to my mother, which I have in my desk at home. It has the same self-loathing, the feeling of worthlessness and the belief—completely wrong—that you would better serve those you love and live with by departing from this life. My father was a Second World War veteran who had won the Military Cross. He was suffering from manic depression and was clearly in a depressed state, but I cannot even begin to imagine the effect it must have had on Molly to have the deluge of filthy, negative, awful, harmful content that she was deluged in 24 hours a day. Perversely, the more she looked at it, the more excited the algorithm got and the more she received.

Particularly disgraceful is that it took no less than five years for the family and their lawyer finally to get some of the platforms Molly had been watching to disgorge and show some of the content she had been viewing. Five years is wholly and utterly unacceptable.

I take the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, made about young people being involved. It would be a good idea for Ofcom in some way, shape or form to have access to young people advising it. I support in principle the idea of a Joint Committee of Parliament. Again, I think it would be very helpful to have young people advising that.

The second area is supporting the wonderful noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I declare quite openly that I am a Beebanite. I think there are quite a few of us in the House, and we will do everything we can to support the wonderful noble Baroness in everything she does.

Lastly, I come to the companies. I speak as somebody who was a head-hunter for 30 years. A large part of our business was in North America and—surprise, surprise—a lot of our most wonderful clients were some of these new tech giants. I know a lot because of that about what I would call the psychology of attraction and repulsion. I can tell the House that for many years, on going to a candidate and saying, “Would you like to join Facebook? Would you like to join one of these other companies?”, they would get pretty excited, because it is new technology, there is a lot of money, it is sexy, it is probably in California—what could be better?

We have to change the paradigm in which people look at potentially being employed by those companies. We have to create a frisson of fear and forethought that, if they do join forces with those companies, not only might their personal reputation suffer but the reputation of the company will suffer, shareholders will suffer, and those who provide services to that company, be they banks or lawyers, will also suffer. That is what we need to change. I will do everything I can, working with others who probably know rather more about this than I do, to concentrate on getting into the minds of those companies, which have huge resources, legal and financial, to resist whatever we do. We have to get inside their minds, find their weak points and go for the jugular.