In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posed a proposition that scandalised even many of their radical contemporaries: “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” Leave it to their intellectual descendants in 2020s Britain – among them “conservatives” – to realise this vision.
Marx and Engels argued that the “bourgeois” family rested on capital and private gain and would therefore disappear along with the capitalist order that ostensibly produced it. Engels particularly developed the idea in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, seeking to show how family forms are bound to property relations and how, once private property in the means of production is abolished, the functions historically performed within the family – including the socialisation and education of children – would become collective responsibilities rather than private, familial ones.
What Marx and Engels presented as a revolutionary programme is now being realised, in slow (but ever-faster) motion and by instalments, under the banner of “child protection”.
The United Kingdom, and much of the West with it, is precariously close to abolishing parenthood as a meaningful institution of authority and responsibility. The striking feature of the present moment is that self-described “conservatives” are among the most enthusiastic midwives of this process.
Social media ban
On 15 June 2026, Herr Keir Stürmer announced that the United Kingdom would ban children under 16 from accessing major social media platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, X, and the main YouTube service.
The measure, expected to take effect in 2027, will be enforced through “highly effective age assurance” – in practice, mandatory digital age verification. While many long-standing adult accounts may escape fresh checks, the underlying architecture of verification will apply across the user base.
In order to keep children off these platforms, every user will obviously have to prove their age to the satisfaction of the state and its licenced technology providers. This marks the beginning of the end for digital anonymity for most users.
The government points to its public consultation, “Growing up in the online world”, which closed in May 2026. Among parents who chose to respond – a self-selecting group whose views cannot be treated as necessarily representative of all British parents – some 90% (!) supported the proposal.
This is a striking figure, even if not entirely precise, in that it suggests an extremely deep crisis of parental confidence and authority. These parents might enjoy the idea of parenthood – and the retirement investment that it implicitly represents – but they are quickly seeking to offload the responsibilities and costs that come with it.
Politically, the measure also enjoys broad multipartisan support.
The Labour Party government is implementing it, but the so-called “opposition”, the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch, has been pushing in the same direction for longer and with at least equal vigour.
Badenoch has described restricting children’s social media access as “a very Conservative policy” and has eagerly embraced the government’s move.
The Liberal Democrats – supposedly my tribe – have favoured a more tailored approach rather than a blanket prohibition, but have not opposed the underlying premise of greater state control and surveillance.
Only Restore Britain, under Rupert Lowe, has come out unequivocally against the ban, promising that a Restore Britain government would repeal it and “let parents parent”. It is a lonely position, and one unlikely to command significant electoral weight in the near term.
Parents respond
The most common defence I have seen among (conservative) parents online for their support of the ban confirms how deeply socialistic premises have been entrenched in British political culture.
They claim that it is easy to say, “let parents parent”, but in reality, if they alone prohibit their children from social media, those children will arrive at school at a disadvantage: their peers will remain connected, conversations will pass them by, and they risk bullying, isolation, or social irrelevance.
The only solution, on this view, is for the state to impose the restriction on all kids, thereby eliminating the relative disadvantage.
What presents itself as an ostensibly pragmatic concern for children’s social standing is pregnant with ideological baggage.
It adopts the position of enforced equality of outcome among minors: Some families’ choice to grant access becomes an illegitimate “privilege” that must be levelled by political authority with those who have decided to withhold access, lest inequality persist.
The same socialist logic that demands the rounding down of material wealth – we must all be equally poor rather than allow a wealthy caste to exist – now demands the rounding down of digital access, with the state acting as the agent that deprives the “haves” so that all may be equally restricted.
This posture concedes that the peer group and the schoolyard set the operative standard, and that the political order must adjust reality to spare parents the discomfort of upholding a different one. In doing so, it quietly imports the Marxist premise that inequality itself is the primary evil and that only collective coercion, rather than the dispersed decisions of families, can remedy it.
Rape Gangs Inquiry
This rush to place children under state tutelage occurs against the backdrop of one of the most harrowing official reckonings in modern British history.
The recent Rape Gangs Inquiry (associated with Lowe and Restore Britain) and associated reporting have documented the organised sexual exploitation of an estimated 250,000 British girls by networks operating across dozens of towns and cities, predominantly involving men of Pakistani heritage. While this number is very likely exaggerated, even a quarter of that would still be monstrously unacceptable.
The abuse spanned decades, with local authorities, police forces, and social services repeatedly failing to act, in many cases because they feared being labelled “racist”. I regard this as complicity, not mere negligence.
The scale and duration of the scandal dwarf the claims that fuelled the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1990s that spanned the West, including Britain. Yet the response from British parents and communities to the Rape Gangs Inquiry has been almost entirely passive.
While the report was only just published, the work of the Inquiry has been well-publicised over many months, with harrowing details of abuse already unearthed. And yet there have been no mass demonstrations, no sustained pitchfork-pickets outside Parliament or police headquarters, no popular insistence that the political class that presided over this catastrophe be held to account.
In fact, the latest polling for the next British election has Restore Britain (the only party seeming to make a fuss) polling at a paltry 4%, whereas the complicit Labour and “Conservative” parties both command 19%. Reform UK edges ahead by 5 points, at 24%. These numbers do not indicate that the British political world has been shattered.
The contrast with the parental mobilisation of the 1990s is instructive. Then, even exaggerated or unfounded fears produced visible outrage. Today, documented industrial-scale abuse of children elicits little more than weary commentary.
Risks in South Africa
South Africans have reason to watch these developments closely.
In February 2026, Democratic Alliance communications minister Solly Malatsi indicated that the South African government was monitoring international moves to restrict minors’ access to social media and was itself “exploring stronger guardrails, including possible age-verification requirements for platforms”.
He acknowledged the temptation, whenever harms appear, to reach for bans and restrictions, while cautioning that such measures risk becoming “cosmetic” without enforcement capacity. But the fact that he is entertaining the notion at all should be regarded as disqualifying.
This is a familiar and frustrating pattern for South African advocates of civil liberty to observe. Horrible ideas first tested in Australia, Britain, or Europe are soon presented to South African voters as unavoidable modernisations, often by people who otherwise position themselves as “liberal” or “reformist”.
We know none of this is ultimately about the mental health or safety of children.
The abolition of intermediary social institutions – the church, the community, the family, the parents – has long been on the agenda of governments both progressive and conservative to ensure no meaningful resistance to future tyranny. The political elite, after all, always knows best, and having to constantly deal with pushback is inefficient, costly, and cramps their style.
Towards the (re)privatisation of children
Readers might agree that social media is not good for developing minds – it might not even be good for fully-developed minds! – but to engage on the harms or benefits of social media is to accept the unacceptable premise laid before us. Whether social media is harmful or not is a red herring. The only question is: Who decides?
The deeper issue is not any specific policy change, but the steady transfer of parental responsibility to the parasitical political and administrative class.
How is it that the average voter can privately moan about how politicians are incompetent, corrupt, but above all self-serving and just care about winning elections but publicly declare with confidence that it is precisely to these politicians that families must hand their children over. It is bewildering in the extreme!
There are, ultimately, only two coherent positions: Either the formation of the next generation is a private concern – properly the domain of families and secondarily of the smallest and most immediate communities – or it is a social concern to be managed by faraway strangers in the form of bureaucrats and politicians.
The first is the historic position of both liberalism and conservatism. The second is the position of every variety of totalitarian collectivism.
We need to re-privatise children. If such provocative language is necessary to get people to pay attention, then so be it!
Privatisation here does not mean treating children as commodities. It means refusing to treat them as the collective property of politicians. It means insisting that parents, not parasites in suits, are the primary guardians of their own offspring.
For generations this was simply and rightly assumed. Today, unfortunately, it must be argued for.
Where to?
It is a telling sign of the times that classical liberals and libertarians now find themselves among the few remaining defenders of family authority and parental responsibility, while large sections of the conservative movement have made their peace with the political molestation of their children.
Something fundamental in Western political culture appears to have broken in the mid-to-late 2010s.
The old presumptions of social hierarchy have been perverted, and now bureaucrats and politicians must apparently be given whatever tools they claim are necessary to “protect the children” – even when the same political class has demonstrated, repeatedly and catastrophically, that it cannot or will not perform that role.
It would rather see girls abused than be labelled “racist”.
Britain is not yet fully at the point Marx and Engels imagined. But it is moving, with conservative applause and assistance, in the direction they prescribed: the progressive substitution of social mechanisms for the private responsibilities of parents. Many – unacceptably many – parents themselves are cheering with approval.
The question for the rest of the West, including South Africa, is whether we will follow, or whether we will recover the older, and wiser, understanding that children belong first to their families, not to the clowns who call themselves our “leaders”.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-family-together-11369179/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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