I am first and foremost a father to three young children: a five-year-old, a four-year-old and a six-month-old. At their age, social media is not yet a huge part of their lives, which is still made up of toys, drawings, dressing up and the daily chaos familiar to any young family. Like many parents of my generation, I can already see the questions approaching. ‘Dad, when can I have a phone?’ ‘Everyone else in the class has a phone, why can’t I have one?’ ‘Dad, I need this app to keep in touch with my friends. Why are you making it difficult for me?’

These questions are not dissimilar to the ones we were asking our parents twenty years ago, but the issue of protecting childhood when the online world continuously sets the terms of friendship is one where politicians have been far behind the curve at Westminster and Holyrood.

The Government’s proposed ban on social media for under-16s cannot simply be dismissed as a moral panic. The problem it seeks to address is very real. Indeed, many others are following suit — New Zealand is introducing its own ban, and similar legislation is being prepared in France, Greece, Sweden and Poland, among others.

Yet if the instinct behind the ban is understandable, the method is questionable. Children need to be children for as long as possible — that is unquestionable — but they also need to grow up in the modern world, where social and workplace interactions take place online. The question is therefore not whether children should be wrapped in cotton wool or left to fend for themselves, but how we allow children to be children without pretending the last twenty years had simply not happened.

Conservatives should not be led to an easy but false choice here. As a Councillor, my instinct has always been that childhood is a matter for parents alone, and I have based my arguments in local government on the fundamental principle that the state should stay out of it altogether unless there are serious concerns for a child’s wellbeing. On the other hand, I hear regularly from members of my local association the temptation to believe that a blanket ban can solve much deeper cultural problems and that we can all go back to how it was twenty years ago.

In truth, neither approach is sufficient.

Yes, parents do have primary responsibility for their children, but they are not dealing with a level playing field. We are dealing with the most powerful companies in the world, employing behavioural scientists and designers to keep users returning time and time again. They are ultimately commercial systems designed to hold attention for as long as possible.

A serious conservatism has never been indifferent to the conditions in which children are raised, and this was recognised as far back as Disraeli. We also fundamentally believe in the importance of family, community and country, and should therefore be willing to challenge any consolidation of power that undermines these principles. That should be the case whether that power is at Westminster, Holyrood or Silicon Valley.

For many years, elements of the right have spoken about online interactions by children in terms of individual and parental choice. After all, if a child spends hours scrolling through TikTok, that is their choice, just as it is the parents’ choice to take the phone away or set stricter rules. But that argument is unnecessarily reductive and treats childhood as just another free market, even though we know these platforms are not neutral products in the first instance.

This is where a serious conservatism should have something useful to say. Conservatism is not simply a defence of the free market, still less a defence of whatever the largest companies happen to find profitable. At its best, it is concerned with the conditions that allow families, communities and individuals to flourish. It values responsibility, but it also recognises that responsibility is harder to exercise when the surrounding culture is pushing in the opposite direction.

That is not to say that all Big Tech is bad in itself, because it is not.

The online world can educate, connect and entertain. That is essentially why we are in this situation in the first place. It makes our lives easier and has given us access to a wealth of information.

The question is not whether children should be allowed to use technology but whether we are content for commercial platforms to set the terms. If we are not content with that, then the instinct behind the proposed ban is understandable. It is an attempt, however imperfect, to draw a line and say that childhood deserves some protection from systems that were never designed with children’s wellbeing as their primary concern.

The chief problem is how the attempt is enforced. If the answer is age verification, like in Australia, then we need to be clear about what that means. Are children expected to prove their age before accessing platforms? Are adults expected to do the same in order to prove that they are not children? Who holds that information? How secure is it? What happens when, inevitably, some of that data is lost, leaked or misused?

These questions go to the heart of whether a policy designed to protect childhood could end up normalising something much more troubling: the idea that ordinary citizens should have to verify their identity as a condition of everyday life online.

There is also the question of effectiveness. Any parent knows that children are very quick at finding a way around the rules. We already have a live example in the restrictions on access to pornography, where the use of VPNs and less regulated platforms is widespread. The result could be a system that is burdensome for responsible families while easily evaded by those most determined to do so.

That would be the worst of both worlds: intrusive enough to trouble those who care about liberty, but not strong enough to deal with the actual harm.

This is precisely why the proposed ban is not a done solution. A useful line in the sand, but not a substitute for an online safety strategy.

As I have said, the real issue is not that children are accessing social media. It is that the platforms they are accessing have been deliberately built around rewarding attention and addiction. These are more challenging aspects for Ministers to deal with and require tough conversations with these companies themselves. For instance, the question of whether children should be exposed to systems that shape behaviour in ways they do not understand is one for an altogether another article.

The proposed ban should therefore be put under real scrutiny when it is put before Parliament. Liberal conservatives should be asking whether the policy strengthens parents or replaces them. Does it protect privacy and not weaken it? Does it hold platforms responsible for systems they have designed? Is it enforceable without intrusion? Will it be easily and effectively implemented?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, the ban may well prove a defensible intervention. If the answer is no, then it risks becoming little more than a populist headline: popular in theory but flawed in execution.

The aim should not be to pretend that the internet can be uninvented, or that children can be kept away from technology indefinitely, but rather to restore some balance. Above all, platforms need to be made responsible for the environments they have created.

Children need protection from Big Tech, but they should not have to grow up in a country where proving your identity online becomes the price of ordinary digital life.

Original photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy.