OPINION

       Keir Starmer is all PR (Image: PA)

       Four weeks ago Britain was manipulated into hysteria over Adolescence, Netflix’s latest drama. That piece of light entertainment was elevated to holy writ, and presented as Exhibit A for the misogyny of men and boys and their vulnerability to the left’s favourite bogeyman, “toxic masculinity”. Sir Keir Starmer saw an opening. With his poll numbers wobbling, he grabbed the chance to cast himself as the great protector, fanning outrage and summoning its creators to Downing Street for a staged, am-dram photo-call.

       This, we were led to believe, would be the silver bullet that would solve societal woes around the toxic influence of smartphones and the internet on our nation’s boys. He even commanded that the drama should be shown in all schools. One wonders what he thinks anyone will gain from that or why he wants school kids to watch material created for those aged 15 and over. And then… silence. A month on, Starmer has not uttered so much as a line about Adolescence.

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       Four weeks is a long time in his politics; once the X feed cools, the props are packed away and yesterday’s cause is forgotten. That certainly seems to be the case here.

       Starmer, short of a policy response to tackle the very real damage that social media and smartphone use is having on the mental health of children and young people, had simply grabbed an opportunity to talk tough.

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       Meanwhile, the real adolescent emergency still glows in every teenager’s palm. Unrestricted smartphone use is shredding our kids’ mental and physical health: soaring anxiety, compulsive porn and gambling habits, record self-harm, lower reading abilities, all tracking perfectly with the rise of 24-hour access to a screen, with disadvantaged kids tending to be worst affected.

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       Add in plummeting activity levels and an obesity epidemic and, for the first time in modern history, today’s children are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents. We cannot sit idly by and let this slide continue.

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       If Starmer truly wanted to “protect the next generation”, he would start with the one policy that works: ban smartphones from school premises. Full stop. Not the half-hearted “keep it in your bag” fudge that still lets pupils text through lessons; a proper, enforced ban from first bell to last.

       Where such bans have been introduced here, teachers report that children truly focus in lessons, academic outcomes improve, behaviour improves and, miracle of miracles, children start talking to each other and playing together again.

       And children support the bans too – when none of them have access to their phones, they know they aren’t missing out, and they enjoy their newfound freedom from the tyranny of their smartphone.

       Not all technology is bad, but in this instance, the ubiquity of smartphone technology is slowly but surely destroying young peoples’ ability to connect with the real world. We should all read Jonathan Haidt’s brilliant The Anxious Generation if we doubt the seriousness of this issue.

       So why the inertia? Because Starmer governs by weather-vane. Principles are postponed until he is certain they poll well. Taking on Big Tech risks bad headlines, whereas emoting about a TV series costs nothing. His fleeting obsession with Adolescence is symptomatic of his mindset. Short-term PR first, hard policy never.

       When Kemi Badenoch said on BBC Breakfast recently that she had not watched Adolescence, she was attacked by the presenters. Didn’t she need to watch it so she could understand what was happening?

       No, she explained, for she had been talking about this issue for years because she had examined the research, had long called for action to be taken to protect our children, and didn’t need to watch a drama (however good) to be educated about it. A sound, sensible, evidence-based position, not knee-jerk, on-the-hoof, populist gimmickry.

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       Starmer promised better politics and many voted for his party on that promise. Yet, we got the same old vacuous pantomime that has punctuated Westminster politics for too long.

       Smartphones, not streaming dramas, are the real adolescent crisis - and until the Prime Minister faces that, our children remain the collateral damage.

       Andy Preston is a former Labour Party member and currrent Conservative Party donor who founded homelessness charity CEO Sleepout