THE one and only time Tony Blair ever referenced Karl Marx at a Labour Party conference came in 1999, midway through his first term as prime minister. “A spectre haunts the world,” he announced, paraphrasing the first line of the Communist Manifesto. “Technological revolution!”
The speech, delivered “on the frontier of the new Millennium”, is one of the purest expressions of the Blairite creed you could hope to find. Politics was no longer about class struggle, Blair explained — the exploiters vs the exploited. It was a battle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction — a question of orientation. Are you for the future or the past? As for the substance of this future, Blair is weirdly uninterested. He’s just all for it. And so, like the Communist Manifesto — with its eerie talk of spells and spectres and sorcerers — the speech has its own touch of mysticism. “These forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries,” he continued. “[They] don’t respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal.”
Blair’s delight in our silicon future might be dismissed as ancient history, were it not for his renewed influence on British governance thanks to the Tony Blair Global Institute for Change (TBI), the multinational thinktank fronted by Blair and underwritten by the Oracle billionaire, Larry Ellison to the tune of over £200 million. The TBI’s position on tech is basically that it’s amazing. “Accelerating AI adoption is… not only a matter of boosting economic growth but also of improving social outcomes,” reads one report about how we need to “reboot copyright” and to ensure that the fruits of Britain’s creative sector can be fed into Silicon Valley’s shiny new machines.
Keir Starmer has reportedly outsourced much of his policy detail to the TBI’s gleaming legions of researchers and has delivered numerous iterations of Blair’s old speech: “There is no route to growth without embracing the transformative potential of AI,” he was promising back in January. We’ll doubtless hear more of the same during the Government’s forthcoming “London Tech Week” — perhaps even a little more detail on the £330 million that Peter Thiel has signed in order to gain access to seven year’s worth of NHS data. Remember: according to Blair’s oracular vision, the likes of Thiel and Ellison are emissaries of the future, so we just have to do what these guys say, right?
So when we learn that the TBI-stamped technology minister Peter Kyle has met lobbyists from Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta, on 28 separate occasions; or that the Government is minded not to ban smartphones in schools due to a “lack of evidence”; or that campaigners are “dismayed by the lack of ambition” in the new Online Safety Act; I think we are supposed to put away any cynical thoughts. The Government is on the side of progress after all.
The trouble is, the Blairites only seem to be able to see progress in terms of whatever the tech firms tell them is progress. This might have been a mildly credible position in 1999. It’s nothing short of idiotic in the enshittified techscape of 2025. Replace “universal” with “totalising” in Blair’s little paean and you have a fairly accurate picture of where digital technology under the current oligopoly has actually led us. A handful of firms, none of them British, actively harming children in pursuit of profit.
We can argue whether successive British Governments’ failure to regulate tech in any meaningful way has benefitted the nation in the grand scheme of things — but the evidence of its dire effects on children in particular is hard to ignore. According to ONS data, between 2010 and 2014, suicide rates among British 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167% and 92% respectively. Self-harm rates among girls rose by 78%. Anxiety diagnoses for 18 to 25-year-olds jumped by 92%. Similar patterns have emerged in just about every developed country since around 2010. Rates of adolescent depression and anxiety nearly doubled in the US between 2010 and 2019. Emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-14-year-old girls rose by 188%. This was before Covid struck and added accelerant.
Correlation is not causation, but as Jonathan Haidt demonstrated in his book, The Anxious Generation, there is no other social change as sudden, universal, or as intimately connected to the lives of teenagers as the introduction of smartphones. In 2010 smartphones barely existed; by 2024, 96% of British teenagers had one according to Ofcom. The teenage mental health crisis exploded around 2010.
It wasn’t Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or Reddit that invented self-harm, revenge porn, anorexia, gender dysmorphia, misogyny, extremism, incel culture, or any of the myriad ways that teen misery can mutate online. But teenage life still largely takes place amid a hostile online ecosystem in which social media companies mine their attention for profit. Whatever you’re worried about in the depths of your teenager’s soul, whatever particular sadness they harbour, it’s fairly likely the algorithm has spotted it first and tried to exploit it.
It certainly spotted Molly Russell. In 2023, Senior Coroner Andrew Walker determined that the 14-year-old British school girl had died from an act of self-harm after Instagram’s algorithms pushed her image after image inducing her to kill herself. It was the first court case that directly named one of the tech firms as a cause of harm. Her father, Ian Russell, has been clear: “It’s time to protect innocent young people, instead of allowing platforms to monetise their misery.”
Meta responded with platitudes (including some from Nick Clegg, no less), meaningless verifications and assurances that the content was indeed “safe” (in fact, Instagram continued to push inducements to self-harm even after her death). But it wasn’t a design flaw; it was the business model. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg came close to admitting as much in the recent Meta antitrust trial in the US. He testified that only about 20% of content consumed on Facebook and 10% on Instagram actually comes from a user’s friends and family. “The vast majority of the experience is more around exploring your interests, entertainment…” Whatever keeps you glued to the screen, in other words, which just happens to be the most inane, harmful, enraging, depressing, divisive content. Content which, as a recent British Standards Institution survey found, resulted in 72% of 16-21 year olds feeling worse after spending time online. Fully 46% of them wish the internet had never been invented.
“It is an exercise in Blairite governance: if you can’t beat them, invite them to write your policy.”
The backlash against smartphones — essentially a backlash against the totalising tech monopolies — is finally strong enough that Labour cannot afford to ignore it. There are Smartphone Free Childhood chapters in just about every community. Parents talk of little else. Even Tony Blair has now been heard saying that tech is “messing with kids minds” — though he’s not sure what to do about it.
The Government’s own position is similarly confused. Starmer would like it to be known that he has watched Adolescence with his teenage son. Gillian Keegan has limply promised to “crack down” on smartphone use in schools. Political will seems absent. As one charity worker, whose work centres on vulnerable boys online, put it to me recently: “I keep telling the Home Office, ‘Why are we not doing more to tackle these big tech companies?’ And they basically said: ‘There’s no political appetite. Big Tech is too powerful to take on’.” As policitians are lobbied here, Zuckerberg has already managed to torpedo protections for young people in America — and we can only speculate what cases his representatives made to Kyle across nine separate meetings. I wonder if Molly Russell’s name came up.
Actual policy is limp. The new Online Safety Bill continues to welcome measures such as age verification (we’ll see how the kids get round that one) and potential fines on social media companies (with no risk of prosecution), but it has clearly been watered down, with no onus to remove “harmful but legal” content. There is nothing remotely as ambitious as Australia’s ban on smartphones for under-16s.
It is an exercise in Blairite governance: if you can’t beat them, invite them to write your policy. Hence the current position regarding a total ban on smartphones in schools comes down to “more research”. Tobacco firms once wanted more research. Betting firms want more research. The fast food lobby hungers for more research. We have the research. The research shows us that smartphones in schools have been a disaster.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Republicans have joined the battle. The broligarchy are openly attacking nations like Canada, Australia and the EU for their attempts to rein in their tech monopolies. JD Vance has reserved particular fury for the UK with the implication that we should fall into line with our Imperial masters on issues such as “free speech” or risk losing favour. The cost of Silicon Valley’s favour is clear: access to data, to infrastructure and to the inner lives of British teenagers.
We have started into this moral vortex before, the strange combination of naivety, cynicism and evangelical uplift that characterised much of the Blair project. Perhaps it is the fate of apparently liberal, progressive governments to be easy on capital and vicious to the vulnerable — an inverted version of the Nixon Paradox. Yet to argue for more leniency for these companies is not to argue for change, but a still more enshittified version of the present. And this is what makes Starmer’s subservience to the exploiters so depressing. As the public begins to get the measure of these companies, the Government and its Blairite allies are opening the door wider.
