Starmer defends Online Safety Act as ‘child protection'
Rules introduced under the Act on July 25 require online platforms to take steps to prevent children accessing harmful content such as pornography or material that encourages suicide.
This includes introducing age verification for websites and ensuring algorithms do not work to harm children by, for example, pushing such content towards them when online.
But while some charities have urged the Government to go further, others have criticised the impact of the rules on freedom of speech because of ministers' power to direct regulator Ofcom to modify its rules setting out how companies can comply with requirements to crack down on illegal or harmful content.
Speaking alongside Donald Trump during the US president's visit to Scotland, Sir Keir said: 'We're not censoring anyone. We've got some measures which are there to protect children, in particular, from sites like suicide sites.'
He added: 'I personally feel very strongly that we should protect our young teenagers, and that's what it usually is, from things like suicide sites. I don't see that as a free speech issue, I see that as child protection.'
Mr Trump said he could not imagine the UK censoring his own social media site, Truth Social, joking: 'I only say good things about him and this country.'
On Monday, Reform UK's former chairman Zia Yusuf said the party would scrap the Online Safety Act if it came to power, saying it gave ministers powers that '(Chinese president) Xi Jinping himself would blush at'.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
29 minutes ago
- The Independent
Civil service internships to be restricted to working class
The government will tighten eligibility criteria for Whitehall internships as part of a broader push to make the civil service more representative of the working class. According to the BBC, the main internship scheme will now be limited to students from 'lower socio-economic backgrounds'. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the minister responsible for civil service reform, said that Whitehall needed to reflect the broader community. 'We need to get more working-class young people into the Civil Service so it harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country,' he told the BBC. ' Government makes better decisions when it represents and understands the people we serve.' The changes are expected to take effect from summer 2026 and will give young people experience writing briefings, planning events, conducting policy research and shadowing civil servants, according to the broadcaster. The existing work summer placement programme, which lasts up to eight weeks and is paid, is open to undergraduates in the final two years of their degree. The Duchy of Lancaster has been contacted for comment. The move comes after the Government announced plans to move thousands more civil servants out of London as part of plans to 'radically reform the state'. In May, the Government confirmed it would cut the number of civil servants working in London by 12,000 and shift jobs to a series of new regional 'campuses' across the country. Mr McFadden said at the time that the Government would be relocating a 'substantial number of roles'. 'The aim is to reduce the London count by about 12,000. That will save us £94 million in lease costs because the properties in London are very expensive. 'And we will move thousands – it's difficult to put a precise number – thousands of those jobs to new themed campuses around the country,' he told Times Radio. The changes will also see 11 Government office buildings in London close, including one of its largest Westminster sites, in a move expected to save £94 million a year by 2032. The move will see two new major 'campuses' created, one in Manchester focused on digital innovation and AI and another in Aberdeen on energy. Manchester is already home to major offices of the science and culture departments, while Aberdeen houses the new Great British Energy headquarters. Other roles will be created in Birmingham, Leeds, Cardiff, Glasgow, Darlington, Newcastle and Tyneside, Sheffield, Bristol, Edinburgh, Belfast and York, with the changes expected to bring £729 million to the local economy by 2030.
The National
42 minutes ago
- The National
Force the 1% to cough up for their climate damage
Land ownership in Scotland is incredibly concentrated in a small number of hands. Fewer than 500 people own more than half of our private land. This motley group includes our own aristocrats, whose families have owned huge estates for centuries and whose wealth is often a result of their forebears' brutal actions during the Highland Clearances. But in recent decades they've been joined by a new group, the elite of global capitalism. The biggest landowner in Scotland used to be the Duke of Buccleuch, but now it's Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen. And the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum isn't far behind. READ MORE: More Scots need to benefit from Scotland's screen industry, John Swinney says And he might not be in the same league as Povlsen or the Sheikh in terms of hectares, but Scotland's most infamous landowner is undoubtedly Donald Trump. Thankfully, the US president has now returned home after a brief stint of shaking hands, being drowned out by bagpipes and teeing off at his Scottish golf courses. Last year, I proposed a private jet tax which would see Trump and his cronies charged a 'super rate' of up to £250,000 every time they fly here for non-government business. This is something which should be within the powers of the Scottish Government, but is now a decade overdue. In the aftermath of the independence referendum, all parties agreed to devolve air passenger duty to the Scottish Parliament. An Act was passed by MSPs to replace it with a new Scottish air departure tax. But it can't start until the UK Government resolves an issue with the exemption for lifeline island flights – and neither they nor the [[Scottish Government]] seem to be in any rush to do that. If this was resolved, the Scottish Government could immediately bring in a super-tax on private jets, reflecting the fact that they are about twenty times more polluting than regular flights. Personally, I'd rather ban most private air travel. It is the perfect example of how the world's richest 1% are disproportionately responsible for the climate crisis. Unfortunately, full powers over air travel are still reserved to Westminster for now. Trump doesn't care about the climate, but he would care about the £250,000 tax bill every time his huge private plane arrives here. Some super-rich elites would undoubtedly take the financial hit and still fly here anyway, but the money raised could at least then be used to fund climate-friendly policies like cheaper buses and trains. And private air travel is just one example of how the super-rich play by different rules to the rest of us, all whilst avoiding paying their fair share. For too long, they have been allowed to avoid not just paying their fair share in tax, but also having their often deeply damaging activities scrutinised. All while ordinary people suffer the consequences of budgets for schools, hospitals and social care being squeezed. Tax is the price we pay for living in a civilised society, one with public services capable of meeting all of our needs throughout our lives. But the richest among us do not pay nearly enough towards maintaining the services needed for that kind of society. The Scottish Greens have long called for a wealth tax, one which would see the richest 10% of people who hold almost half the total wealth of the country taxed fairly. Introducing just a 1% annual tax on all wealth and assets above £1 million would massively boost the efforts to create a fairer, better Scotland for everyone. For context, the other 90% of Scots households hold nowhere near enough wealth to be considered for such a tax, with the average having about £214,000 in assets. This would be an extremely well-targeted tax, raising billions from those who can more than afford to pay. We are not the only people calling for a wealth tax. Just this week, leading economists from across the world have called on Labour to introduce a UK-wide wealth tax to tackle extreme levels of inequality and poverty. They have warned the Government what the Greens have argued for years: that far too much wealth is concentrated in the hands of far too few people in the UK, and it is damaging society at large. Sadly, Labour seem determined to rule this out. It is time for Keir Starmer to seriously rethink his approach and what he wants his legacy to be: a society where everyone has what they need to get by, or one where far too many children are left in desperate poverty whilst a tiny number of people hoard more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. The Scottish Greens are clear on what we need to do: tax the super-rich now, for the good of people and planet.
The National
43 minutes ago
- The National
People are using slurs we thought we left in the 70s
Celebrating its 10th birthday a few weeks ago, it looked back on real achievements reflecting this country's embrace of a more progressive future. Thanks to its efforts, LGBTQ school pupils are able to feel more recognised in our education system. TIE has expanded from an organisation campaigning against the prejudice and bullying faced by [[LGBT]]Q pupils to one with its own staff creating resources and training for teachers on behalf of the Scottish Government. At the heart of its success is a deep friendship between a young gay man and an older, straight trade unionist, which sparked the energy needed to power real change. READ MORE: Labour's governing fiasco shows Scots the urgency of independence, says John Swinney That friendship was rightly celebrated at TIE's 10th birthday party, but the smiles were tinged with an unease over a rise in right-wing rhetoric, which has more recently threatened to undermine some of the advances TIE has made. The National talked to TIE founders Jordan Daly and Liam Stevenson about their work, their friendship, their achievements, and the difficult challenges which lie ahead. THE BIRTH OF A FRIENDSHIP Jordan: I was 19 when I first met Liam, and an undergraduate student at the University of Glasgow. I was about a year out of school, and it was just after the independence referendum. So like most people of my age, that was the first seismic political event [we had experienced]. I think the thing that struck Liam and I was the Radical Independence Campaign's slogan 'Another Scotland is Possible'. A lot of the discussions around the referendum for me were very much about another Scotland that looks after vulnerable communities, that prioritises and enhances equality and addresses inequality. I was really engaged by the referendum but none of my close friends were very politically engaged. One of my mum's friends told me about this guy who was involved in politics and was organising a food bank fundraiser. When I contacted him, Liam and I clicked very quickly. We were both passionate about issues related to poverty. It was the start of a very fast friendship. Liam: My activism at that time was trying to promote the message of what an independent socialist Scotland could look like, and what people should be striving for. After the agonising defeat in 2014 I remember thinking that this isn't done; there's going to be another go at this in the future. For me, this was about a better Scotland. It was about an opportunity to try and wipe the slate clean and ask what would a new country look like, and how do we start going about building that? After the referendum I accepted a random friend request from Jordan on Facebook. Back then I was really self-conscious, even more so than I am now. I was 36 years old, a petrol tanker driver and a trade unionist. But I wasn't university educated. I firmly believed that was a huge barrier for me. (Image: Danny Lawson) I had never read all these books. My political outlook and worldview have been shaped by my life, not by books. So when I met this impressive, bright, young guy, I'm thinking, this is going to be interesting. Jordan and I just clicked. Although there was a massive age gap, we had a lot in common: how we viewed the world, and what we thought a better world would look like. I'm not a religious guy. I'm not a spiritual guy. But when I look back, I am absolutely convinced that we've been put together for a purpose. Jordan: I was the first out gay person that Liam had as a friend. I often describe Liam, in a joking way, as the kind of GI Joe stereotype of masculinity. He's got the shaved head, he's quite buff … if you were to draw a masculine man from Scotland, you would draw Liam. I used to say to him, 'you're the kind of person that I would cross the street to avoid, because I would have expected that someone that looked like you might be homophobic towards me.' But I was making stereotypical assumptions. What I found in Liam as a friend was someone who was deeply empathetic and understanding and prepared to stand up for me. I remember going down to Liam's house one night for a drink and having conversations which in hindsight led to TIE. THE ORIGINS OF TIE Liam: I always admired most those people that were confident enough to be authentic and live their lives with their true identity. There were no out gay people in my school. When I initiated some conversations with Jordan about what school was like for him, I was completely dumbfounded. Jordan: If my objective was to do well in my exams and go to university, then I had a successful education. The challenging aspect for me was the extent of how normalised homophobia was from early on. I heard the word gay all the time. I heard words like lesbian all the time. But I heard them in the playground, and I heard them as insults and jokes and slurs. There was never any sensible education about what gay or lesbian meant. That was my primary school experience. Everyone in my generation who grew up with that, hearing this really casual, normalised homophobic language and having it addressed, we all went into secondary school thinking that casual homophobia was acceptable. Like any form of prejudice, it often starts with everyday language and escalates into more serious behaviours. It was probably about six months or so into my first year of high school that the bullying started. A group of boys that just assumed that I was gay decided to bully me for it. Bullying is hard to speak to a staff member about, because you're worried about consequences and that it will make things worse. You're not quite sure how the school will react. Liam: All this was absolutely surprising to me. I was shocked and disappointed. I started looking online and pulling up data from surveys of young people in schools across the United Kingdom. I realised this was still a real problem. A homophobic culture was emanating in schools, which were failing to protect young people who were potentially lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Jordan: I think the friendship with Liam helped me process some of what I had experienced at school. He was the first person that I really opened up to and spoke to. Even some of my family members didn't know about how serious things had become for me at school. What I learned from Liam was that solidarity, support and friendship can come from quite unlikely sources. I think that was a really important lesson for me. At school I learned about racism and how dangerous it could be, I learned about sexism and the unequal treatment of women and misogyny, the Suffragettes and Emmeline Pankhurst. And I learned about religious discrimination. And I remember saying to Liam, why couldn't I have also learned about the introduction and repeal of Section 28 [legislation which banned discussion of homosexuality in schools], or the Stonewall uprising, or LGBT history that I ultimately had to learn for myself when I left school? Why couldn't we have learned about that at school? Liam: I think it was me who first suggested creating an organisation to tackle this. I had no idea about the enormity of the task that was ahead of us. Had I known then what I know now, I wouldn't have put my shoes on. Jordan showed me a documentary, How To Survive A Plague, about the Aids epidemic. One of the things that struck me was that we've structured our society in a way that made these people feel shame instead of being immensely proud of the community to which they belong. That gave me the absolute urgency to say we need to be teaching young people this, because we need to give young people that confidence to know that just because you're gay or bi or lesbian or trans, you shouldn't be ashamed. You should be proud of that because you come from a really rich tapestry of resistance, people fighting literally for their lives. TIE: THE FIRST STEP Liam: The first-ever donation to the TIE campaign came from my branch of petrol tanker drivers at Unite. I didn't ask for it. Another member asked for it. Jordan was crying when they gave us 500 quid to produce a booklet to send to every MSP in the country containing stories of people who had a really difficult time at school. That donation was very important to me. Jordan: We were talking about things we could do and I said I learned at school about petitions. We found out that the Scottish Parliament would accept petitions from the public. So the very first thing we did was to draft up a petition calling for LGBT education to be included on the school curriculum. Liam: We walked Buchanan Street asking people to sign the petition. Our first press coverage was an interview with The National. Jordan: I wasn't quite sure what people's responses would be, but it was really positive. A lot of people were surprised LGBTQ education wasn't already happening. People assumed that education was up to speed with the modern world. THE NEXT STEPS Jordan: I remember the first time we gave evidence at the Scottish Parliament. I had only ever been there on a school trip when I was in primary seven. Liam had never been there. Both of us were terrified. We were only supposed to be there for 15 minutes. They extended the session to an hour, and I remember being quite emotional at the end of it. The petition ended up getting rejected on a technicality. We don't have a statutory curriculum in Scotland, so they couldn't include it. Liam: I think we were supposed to have just gone away after the petition was rejected. When I was asked for a statement on the petition being closed, I said: 'That's a setback, nothing more.' And that was the spirit that we adopted. We went away. We thought about a new strategy and came back with it. THE FIRST BIG SUCCESS Liam: When the door opened for us to speak to government officials, they asked us how to progress. Jordan and I, always the pragmatists, said: 'We need a working group with every stakeholder in education on it, because we need to get it right first time.' It reported in 16 months with 33 recommendations. Jordan: Simultaneously, we were meeting with MSPs and support was really building. The trade union movement was coming out in support; the National Parent Forum of Scotland came out in support. I remember when we walked into the first working group meeting. [[Education]] Scotland were there. So were the National Parent Forum and the Scottish Catholic [[Education]] Service, the Scottish Human Rights Commission and Cosla. We both had real impostor syndrome. Liam was still working nightshift as a petrol tanker driver. I was working part-time in a bar at the time. I would finish there at 1am and work in my car outside my house because my little sister had just been born, so I couldn't go in and wake them up. Liam would be working nightshift and he would have a phone call on his headphones and we'd talk about what we would do, what we could ask for at a working group meeting the next morning. Nowadays we laugh about conspiratorial ideas suggesting that TIE is a quango that's been propelled along the way and been given all this money. The reality genuinely was two people who had to prove themselves time after time. Thirty-three quite detailed policy recommendations were agreed unanimously by every stakeholder on that group, which, in hindsight, was a quite remarkable achievement. And those recommendations were then accepted in full by Scottish ministers. TODAY'S CHALLENGES Liam: There seems to be a culture just now that has shifted back in time, when it's cool to be cruel again. The rise of the so-called 'manosphere' online and normalisation of hate has had an impact on young people for example. I can remember the 1990s as a young guy growing up, when we were often encouraged to display our masculinity in very different ways from the way we did five years ago, when it was encouraged to be better men and softer, kinder men. I feel as if things started to shift in a different direction due to some of the influences on social media targeted at specific groups of people. Some of the political narratives that have been introduced and normalised are really distressing. Jordan: We've had the Me Too movement, which rightly and accurately called out men's violence against women. We had equal marriage. And we had Black Lives Matter. I think that quite a lot of what we're seeing now culturally is the kind of last-gasp backlash to that progress. That's impacted us as an organisation in that we're seeing US culture war rhetoric imported here. In 2018 it would not have been normal or acceptable to target an education organisation – one that is working on a daily basis to address homophobic bullying in schools, that employs teachers to deliver those education services – to call their staff groomers, and yet that is now a normal experience for us. Even doing this interview, we have to prepare not only ourselves but our family and staff for the online harassment that will come from that. I think we're seeing LGBT topics and education initiatives like ours being weaponised and misrepresented to distract from decades of consecutive economic failure that have made people's lives harder. In the United States, we see the impact of that disinformation and false claims such as 'children are being told to transition in schools'. We had that with Section 28. We've had that censorship. It's dangerous and it's damaging, and I think that we have to be very careful not to give credence to that type of rhetoric, to this idea that there's inappropriate or extreme teaching happening in schools. The reality of the situation is children are learning about same-sex families alongside lots of other types of families. They're learning about the impact of homophobia that they already see and experience at school, and they're given factual information about historical events. We have to challenge these false narratives, these lies, with the truth. Liam: Allyship is also very important, where people who are not members of minorities stand up against those who attack them. We're currently living in a period in which truth doesn't matter. Before truth has brushed its teeth, the lies are two times around the world. People are using slurs that we thought we left in the 1970s and 1980s and maybe at the start of the 1990s about LGBT people being predators and being paedophiles and being people who can't be trusted to be positive influences around young people. Some of this stuff leads to people like me and Jordan having rapid response alerts on our properties for the police so that if we dial 999 and give an address, every officer in the vicinity has to drop their stuff and get to a property, because we are viewed by the police as vulnerable to harm simply because we want all children to go to school and to learn in an environment where they're safe, respected and protected.
