Don’t Sell Out British Kids as Tariff Bargaining Chip

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Will Keir Starmer’s government sell out the safety of UK teens in a deal to mitigate Donald Trump’s tariff apocalypse?

That’s the question parents’ groups are asking as the UK, along with every other country, searches for ways to persuade Washington to dial down its new aggressive tariff regime and avert a full-scale trade war.

Saddled with “only” the 10% baseline charge, Britain got off lighter than many, including its recent partners in the European Union, which must now cough up 20% levies on exports. But it’s still about to take a catastrophic hit — the UK economy is, of course, exposed to a general global downturn, and will feel the pinch of the additional US tariffs on its car and steel sectors.  More concerning, Britain’s finances are in such a dire state that the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned the wafer thin headroom Chancellor Rachel Reeves set aside to avoid breaching her fiscal rules will be blown out of the water by Trump’s tariffs.

In response, Starmer’s government is continuing the keep calm and carry on playbook it adopted on Trump’s return to office. There will be no angry invective or swift retaliation along the lines of that seen in capitals from Ottawa to Canberra, Beijing and Brussels. Instead, officials led by Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds are working on a plan to ameliorate the impact of the tariffs: In language Trump understands, they want to make him a deal.

And that’s what’s worrying parents — specifically those such as members of the Molly Russell Foundation, set up in the name of a 14-year old London girl who took her life after viewing videos of suicide and self-harm on her phone  — who campaign for greater online protection for young people.

Reynolds has dropped hints that the UK could nix a 2% digital services tax worth around £800 million ($1.04 billion) a year, which Americans complain hits the US sector hardest. In recent days, there have been additional reports that the draft transatlantic trade agreement also includes a pledge to review the Online Safety Act, the landmark legislation requiring providers to shield under-18s from harmful content.

That would be a betrayal of parents not just in the UK but those around the world who are relying on Britain to take a lead in this area.

The row exposes a schism in the British government. On the one hand, Starmer himself has vowed to clean up the internet, and is personally invested in tackling the toxicity kids are daily exposed to, having been moved by watching the Netflix show Adolescence with his own teenagers.On the other, Britain is keen to carve out a role post-Brexit that offers a more welcoming environment to tech companies put off by what they see as the over-regulatory approach of the European Union, in order to drive the growth the Labour government needs to patch a hole in its finances.  

But when it comes to online safety, the Act cannot be the price to pay to wriggle out of Trump’s tariffs.

At a screening of a new Bloomberg documentary Can’t Look Away this week, we held a panel discussion on what can be done to tackle the problem of phones and teens. The film tells the starkly emotional story of a group of American parents suing various tech companies after their children fell victim to a panoply of dreadful scenarios: A high school football star who took his life after being tricked into sending nude photos; a young girl who died after watching self-harm videos; a boy left severely disabled having bought a fake pill from a drug dealer he connected with online; a youngster distraught at a breakup encouraged down the path of suicide. All are parents’ worst nightmares.

As a companion piece to Adolescence, it comes with a similar health warning: Watching it is to feel powerless, yet this is terrain that is too important to surrender.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s Michael McGrath told our event the answer doesn’t lie with banning children from having phones — that came as a relief to parents in the room such as me for whom that option is way too late. While McGrath felt youngsters had a right to enjoy the same access to the internet as adults, not least as an escape route out of dangerous situations, my own view is more that the genie is out of the bottle; we can’t realistically keep our teens away from tech.

But we can do so much more to clean up what youngsters view online. In part that means active parenting: Delaying phones until children are approaching secondary school, reserving social media for older teens and monitoring what they view online. Teachers are beginning to play a part too, with most now insisting phones are switched off during school hours.

But in the absence of any sign of proactive measures, the major tech companies must be forced to play their part and introduce basic steps to keep safe the kids who make them billions — with age verification, the swift removal of illegal and dangerous content, adjustments to settings to allow law enforcement to pursue predators, and more.

Let’s hope the brave parents we saw suing to try to force the firms to clean up their acts are successful. With US politicians largely deaf to the issue, it falls to Britain to show some mettle.

Starmer should do what he knows to be right and maintain the pressure on Big Tech to keep kids safe.More from Bloomberg Opinion:

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Rosa Prince is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering UK politics and policy. She was formerly an editor and writer at Politico and the Daily Telegraph, and is the author of ‘Comrade Corbyn’ and ‘Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister.’

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