John Oxley: ‘Hear that internet curfew bell toll? It tolls for thee, kid, even if we think you can vote’

John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.

Imagine it is the spring of 2029, polling day. You are 17.

You have completed a day of training, education or work (still compulsory at your age). You are excited to cast your first vote, exercising a new right. Before, or perhaps after, you have some time to kill. You can’t fill it by going for a pint, as you’re too young. Or having a cigarette, which will never, ever be legal for you. So instead, you pull out your phone. Perhaps go on YouTube to check the parties’ policies. Or on social media, to see if your friends are voting. But, alas, you’ve left it too late. The time says 8.31. The curfew has descended.

It sounds absurd, but this remains the course the current government are plotting. The voting age is coming down, whilst the ages for everything else rise. The plans announced this week extend this to vast sections of the internet, where the state will effectively enforce a national bedtime for the scrolling-minded. While you could have scrolled for hours in the daytime, the internet of the evening apparently poses some special, unique harm. Either that, or this is a government which really struggles to think properly.

I am not convinced that children should have wholly unfettered access to the internet. There are real dangers that lurk online, from the content and the people on it to the deleterious effects of excessive use. While much of that should be left to parents to protect you from, I can see why some want the law to back them up, and why the state has a role when parents can’t or won’t act. More broadly, just as we regulate the content of TV and radio, there are good reasons to regulate online content. Some things need to be illegal and that no one should be exposed to. We also need to be wary of how Britain’s enemies can exploit online channels to harm us.

Regulation, however, should be workable and proportionate. Too much of the government’s approach is predicated on drafting rules now and inventing the technology for it afterwards. Some of it is also likely to expose all of us, not just young people, to creeping surveillance and require us to provide our IDs and faces to use services online. The idea of an internet curfew is even stranger. It barely limits how much time young people can spend online, nor does it limit what they are exposed to. It imposes an arbitrary time cut-off for reasons that remain unclear. It is a bad rule, but it is also part of our muddled thinking of where childhood, adulthood and adolescence now sit.

The general trend in recent decades has been to raise the age at which certain things are allowed. Compulsory education and training have risen to 18. Marriage was abolished for under-18s, even with parental approval, as a step against familial abuse and forced marriage. Elsewhere, the pseudoscientific meme that brains don’t mature until 25 has taken hold and is used to argue for things like lower sentences for those in early adulthood. Campaigners want graduated driving licences, denying younger people the full freedom of the roads. The social media ban, and particularly the curfew, seem to fit this trend, pushing off the point at which people are set to make decisions for themselves.

At the same time, however, lowering the voting age to 16 has extended perhaps one of the most valuable privileges of adulthood. Given that young people are more coddled by the state than before, it’s easy to presume this is about mere electoral advantage. But we also expect young people to make their own lifelong decisions about training and education and to make major financial decisions regarding student loans. It is contradictory and incoherent.

This approach points to a problem we have in conceptualising adulthood. Our political approach is piecemeal, in a series of unconnected policy decisions rather than a philosophy. Often this tends towards safetyism and an obsession with reducing harm to zero. The online curfew is part of this, not trusting young people to make their own decisions or chart their own course. Others, like the marriage ban, are driven by real concerns and societal shifts, while reducing the voting age seems the product of smart campaigning and political advantage. It is a haphazard approach with haphazard results.

Emerging into adulthood shouldn’t be about harm elimination.

It is about encountering the world with gradually loosening supervision, making mistakes while you still have time to remedy them and developing judgment through them. Too much freedom too young will be dangerous, but so is deferring it. After all, we probably all know someone who was coddled until they left home and struggled to adjust to doing their own washing and cooking. People who have been protected from every bad decision they could make are not a success story but a denial of the sort of education that helps us become broadly functioning adults. Where the state intervenes, it should be conscious of this.

If 16 and 17-year-olds are deserving of the franchise and capable of choosing their representatives and the Prime Minister, the state should start from that assumption. In that world, internet curfews for almost adults make little sense. But if being online in the evening imperils them, if their brains are still forming, then say so openly and keep harmonising things around age 18.

Either way, we’d be better with an approach to young people framed by an understanding of adolescence and development that helps coach them towards adulthood than a series of arbitrary, headline-chasing decisions.