Belated thoughts follow, ones which I previously said I’d offer, on the events in the UK over the past month, and what they might mean for the digital policy road ahead.

I’d meant to go on more of an elocution safari than this, but I got distracted by people waving money at me. I do tend to prioritise people who wave money at me.

Now obviously, you’re wondering: what on earth is a marzipan dreadnought and what does that have to do with policy?

The title comes from one of my favourite Commodore 64 games as a GenX child: the absolutely delightful adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, in which I fell down the rabbit hole, had my adventure, followed my map, flew back up the rabbit hole, and made it home safe, many, many times. In one of the hundreds of rooms that you, Alice, would have to explore, you would come across a golden ship on a side table. If you chose to examine it, you would learn “it is a marzipan dreadnought that appears to have melted and stuck”. (Meaning you couldn’t take it and add it to your inventory, like a song, or a muffin.) It served no purpose to the plot, and certainly didn’t help Alice to defeat the annoying pests in her way. It was just there.

“Marzipan dreadnought” always stayed in my head as an alternative to “white elephant”. It’s a lovely phrase to describe something large, unnecessarily complicated, and basically useless.

A bit like some regulatory legacies.

This is a padded version of a conversation I had with a paywalled policy industry publication, which is why you didn’t see it. Unless you did. Oooh, look at you and your big budget.

*clears throat*

The Conservatives aggressively promoted the Online Safety Act as the one weird trick to fix everything wrong with social media, often to the point of absurdity. Anyone who has actually read the Act, and Ofcom’s consultations on it, knew all along that all it does is create paper tigers. The Act is and only ever was about compelling companies to write massive bureaucratic assessments for performative compliance, whilst being forced to enter into extortionate service contracts with the the UK’s rapacious age verification industry.

So it was striking to me how Keir Starmer’s response to the Southport riots, from the outset, made a definitive statement about the utter uselessness of the online safety toolkit which the Conservatives left him. It turns out that you can arrest a lot of violent thugs on our streets, immediately, in the time that used to be spent pointing fingers at tech companies to do something about violent thugs online, someday. And it turns out that you can’t stop violent mobs from organising online by writing risk assessments.

Labour then went on to say that they won’t revisit the OSA until after it’s in force, which means more than a year or two down the road, once what will likely total 4,000 pages of consultations x several hundred responses have been processed, studied, and turned into codes of practice. That’s the correct response. The OSA was not the correct policy lever to deal with the riots, either what led up to them or to their aftermath. It never was. The reactions we saw, ranging from exasperation to spluttering indignance, from the people who just expected the OSA to fully unfold like a Transformer on demand and solve the riots online and off, clearly bought into the “one weird trick” sales pitch. More fool them.

So in my view, whoever is advising Keir Starmer on digital policy has played a masterstroke here. By focusing on the social causes of the riots and the people who carried them out, rather than focusing on the digital tools those individuals may or may have not used on the way, Labour managed to demolish the entire pretense of the Conservatives’ seven-year project on online safety, in less than seven weeks.

The marzipan dreadnought appears to have melted and stuck.