Why is Labour so unpopular? Just look at the dithering over kids’ screen time | Zoe Williams

Keir Starmer is running out of patience with the social media platforms, after Meta and Google’s landmark legal defeat in Los Angeles. But this ‘strongest intervention yet’ comes years too late

I’m past the stage in my parenting journey where I could have any influence over my kids’ screen time. They would be much more likely to invade my privacy, grab my phone, perform some search in settings that I don’t understand, wonder out loud how it’s possible for WhatsApp to take up that many hours in a person’s day, and I would say, “What goes on between a person and their phone is a sacred and never-to-be-breached thing.”

But, I still keep up with government pronouncements on the matter of phones and young people, in my quest to unlock a deeper mystery: how did Labour get so unpopular? I know why they’re unpopular with me; I could make a stab at why they’re unpopular with Reform voters and with Conservatives. What I don’t understand is how they fell foul of the squashy middle: the people who, given the choice, would always rather agree with the guys in charge; the people who’d identify as the centre; the people who determinedly don’t follow politics, don’t have strong views, and just wish it could go about its business more quietly. That army of compatriots whose impartiality makes them, let’s be honest, extremely easy to hang out with must have also turned against the government, otherwise it wouldn’t be getting such awful polling numbers. Last week marked new heights for a governing party in attracting negative attention. Explanations such as “Everyone hates politicians now”, and “They can’t seem to make their minds up, and people don’t like that” seem plausible but insufficient.