Lisa Nandy wants to dictate what kids can view online

Imagine a UK government warning independent publishers of children’s books that it didn’t like the quality of their products. Imagine that it claimed they were drawing too many children away from the wholesome reading on offer from government-approved outlets. And imagine that it told publishers that if they didn’t change the books’ content themselves it might compel them to do so by law.

Unthinkable? Don’t be too sure. UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy seems to have ideas along these lines for online platforms. As last year drew to a close, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that she was very worried that children had migrated wholesale from the traditional broadcast media to outfits like YouTube. Rather than lapping up the carefully chosen material on offer from the BBC and other legacy broadcasters, children were now ‘finding their own content’. This material, she fulminated, was ‘not as high-quality as the sort of content public-service broadcasters and commercial broadcasters are producing’.

Nandy also said she had already written to YouTube and TikTok, calling on them to promote higher-quality content for children, and also to Ofcom to ask it to prioritise children’s TV as part of this summer’s public-service broadcasting review. She refused to rule out further statutory intervention against online providers in general.

It’s difficult to know where to start on this veiled threat of establishment censorship (which, however sugar-coated, is what it is). For one thing, its sheer priggishness takes some beating. Like some straight-laced nanny from a previous age, Nandy said there was no reason children should not be satisfied with the TV ‘crown jewels’ (her words) of CBeebies and Peppa Pig. She even made great play of her own son using BBC’s Newsround as his source for current affairs. What was left unsaid was that CBBC, unlike online channels, can be relied on to transmit woke ideas to their young viewers, on everything from race and gender to climate and Brexit. Whatever happened to Nandy’s infamous declaration that the ‘era of culture wars is over’?

The thinking behind Nandy’s intervention is deeply worrying. For one thing, it reveals the authoritarianism of both the government and the new establishment which supports it – neither trusts ordinary people to make their own decisions about what they and their children watch on TV and online. The guest producer of the particular edition of Today on which Nandy appeared – former children’s TV presenter Floella Benjamin – was especially enthusiastic about more regulation. She described today’s expansive range of content for kids as a ‘wild west’ that needed taming. They were both uncomfortable with any speech that the authorities cannot somehow control.

This shows a staggering contempt for the public’s intelligence. It seems our political and cultural elites do not think parents can be relied on to make their own judgements about their kids’ watching habits – despite the fact that parents have their children’s interests at heart and can control the use of the electronics they buy them. No, the only answer is for an enlightened state to ride to the rescue, and decide what amounts to wholesome entertainment on our behalf.

And who, if Nandy has her way, would play the role of the state’s benevolent censor? It would almost certainly be Ofcom, which conveniently answers to the Culture Media and Sport Committee and with a membership appointed from among the ‘progressive’ great and the good. Unsurprisingly, Ofcom has no interest in protecting speech with which it doesn’t agree.

Moreover, it already has form in its obsession with micromanaging media content: witness its heavy-handed interventions on what it saw as misinformation during Covid, and more recently against GB News, often on the most dubious of grounds. It is, moreover, about to take control of social-media content under the Online Safety Act, which is something that should worry everyone.

This is all deeply troubling. It’s not simply that citizens need to be free to run their own lives, and parents should be free to raise their children as they see fit. With every extension of state control over what we are allowed to access online, censorship becomes increasingly normalised. We must call this out, and loudly, before it’s too late.

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.