Labour’s Age Check Fiasco: When Censorship Wears a Cardigan

The Labour Government, with all the grace of a cantankerous aunt rearranging your closet, has turned its gaze to the internet. The result? The Online Safety Act, and its latest flourish of mandatory age verification. Now, before accessing perfectly lawful content, British adults will be asked to prove that they are, in fact, adults. Our digital nanny has arrived, and she wants your ID.

One might laugh, were the consequences not so serious. In theory, this is about protecting children. In practice, it’s a bureaucratic farce that is not only costly, but intrusive and philosophically incoherent. It is also – and let us not shy away from saying this word – profoundly illiberal.

What’s most galling, however, is not simply the heavy hand of the state rummaging through our digital lives – it’s the fact that this is happening under a government that promised to be “pro-growth.” That word – growth – was supposed to signal seriousness: a break with managerialist tinkering, and a tilt towards ambition, investment, and innovation. But instead of laying the groundwork for a flourishing tech and online sector, we are saddling it with the administrative equivalent of a hi-vis vest and a clipboard.

Digital creators, small businesses, start-ups – these are precisely the very people a modern Britain should be championing. But instead of helping them build and grow, this government seems obsessed with bogging them down in compliance costs and red tape. It’s not just bad economics: it reveals a deeper, more worrying instinct. It shows us that Labour doesn’t see the digital sphere as a frontier of excitement, innovation, and possibility – it instead sees it as inherently unruly, and something that must be monitored, managed, and tamed. This government is not interested in treating the tech sector as a mature partner in growth. Instead, in the mind of Nanny Starmer, the tech sector – along with the entire British public – is akin to a fussy child that requires constant minding. 

And what a strange form of childhood Labour imagines for us all: one in which consenting adults must line up for permission slips before watching, reading, or listening to anything not forbidden by the Ministry for the Protection of Grown-Ups. There is something almost touching about the idea that, in 2025, the British state still believes it can instantly purify the internet by checking everyone’s age at entry.

Of course, the tech world won’t take this lying down. Many sites – especially smaller platforms and independent creators – are now simply blocking British users, or retreating from the market entirely. Others will pass the cost and friction onto consumers – and just like that Britain will become a harder place to build a digital business, and a colder, more frustrating place to be an internet user.

The government calls this “online safety.” But this is not safety – this is sanctimony. It’s state paternalism wrapped in the language of digital responsibility. It’s a strange kind of future we’re being offered: one where innovation is tolerated, but only if it passes the desk of someone who last used a computer sometime in the Blair era.

Britain should be the best place in the world to build, create, and think freely online. We provided the visionaries who made the world wide web, thus ushering in the information age. Instead, our government has once again drifted us towards something smaller, dimmer, and slower: an internet that is clipped at the wings by a state that can’t quite bring itself to trust its own citizens.

If Labour is truly serious about growth, it must realise that a flourishing digital economy cannot be built on a foundation of suspicion and surveillance. And if it wants to lead the future, it must stop trying to chaperone it.

Illustration by Will Allen/Europinion