Unboxing?

Poor little Preston Davey. He was born in prison, complete with the mother and baby unit at HMP Styal as his mother’s address on his birth certificate, because she had been recalled for breach of her licence having been sent down at 14 for the murder of a close relative of a friend of mine. What a world. If Britain thinks about small children at all, then it regards them as a nuisance.

But Britain is actively terrified of adolescents. In Australia, 60 per cent of 13 to 15-year-olds admit to bypassing the social media ban, and anyone who had ever met a teenager must assume that another 30 to 35 per cent were liars. Here, though, with Bluesky amusingly forgotten about in the first instance, we are to have Australia Plus, because nothing must stand in the way, either of forcing digital ID and facial scanning on everyone, or of depriving those who were becoming politically conscious of anything other than the presuppositions of the football team pretty boys of both sexes.

Lucky Prince George, who at Eton will have an outside chance, but still a better one than any state school pupil, of ever hearing anything other than the point at which the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media met the right-wing Labour machine in local government. By all accounts, Jeremy Corbyn turned down several invitations to speak at public schools when he was Leader of the Labour Party, although he may well accept them today. George Galloway regularly did accept such invitations before he went into exile. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state school might offer a platform to anyone from the Left. And soon, nobody even one day below what was to become the voting age would be able to encounter it online, either.

Are we really going to tell 15-year-olds that they might not watch YouTube videos on science, or history, or anything else that was not on YouTube Kids, with even 16 and 17-year-olds not allowed to do so after a state-mandated bedtime? YouTube Kids itself says that it goes up only to the age of 12, with some emphasis on “toy unboxing”, whatever that may be. In those formative years, politics would be derived solely from school and the telly, and so would everything else. Between those two and with nowhere else to go, it would be the World Cup all day, every day of all year, every year. I do not say lightly that there would be far more teenage mental health problems and even suicides than there were now, and there are a hell of a lot now. Well, of course there are, in the culture of which Rachel Charlton-Dailey writes:

The number of disabled children who are kicked off benefits when they are reassessed as an adult has doubled in two years. Under the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) rules, children get disability living allowance (DLA) until they are 16. Instead of just automatically moving on to Personal Independence Payment (PIP), they then have to reapply. It should be a straightforward process, but because PIP is a needlessly cruel system, many find it harder to qualify for.

Disabled kids suddenly not disabled at 16

Information service, Benefits and Work, examined the statistics on moving from Child DLA to PIP on DWP StatXplore. Its team found that between 2023 and 2025, the rate of failure doubled. From August to October 2023, 11% of claimants who had received DLA failed the assessment to get PIP. But for the same quarter in 2025, the failure rate had jumped to 23%. Those are the most recent stats available, so the situation could be much worse by now.

Not only that, but success rates where the claimant gets more money with PIP than they did from DLA have also fallen. Between August and October 2023, 69% of claimants saw an increase in their award from moving to PIP. But in the same quarter in 2025, this increase rate was 54%. So, despite there being no changes to the PIP assessment yet, it’s clearly already a ridiculous system to qualify for, if there’s such a discrepancy between children getting DLA and over-16s getting PIP. A young person’s disabilities don’t magically disappear on their 16th birthday.

Higher poverty rates

It’s especially worrying to see that so many disabled young people are left without support once they turn 16, when you consider how many disabled children live in poverty. The children’s charity Variety found that 21,000 disabled children live in temporary accommodation. This equates to one out of every eight children facing homelessness. It’s also important to consider that temporary accommodation often cannot meet the needs of disabled people. Temporary accommodation is supposed to be a short-term fix, but Variety found that, on average, disabled children spend six to 10 months in temporary housing. Some cases exceeded six years. Whilst there have been no policy changes since 2023, there has been a sustained campaign by the Tories and then Labour to demonise benefits claimants. These latest statistics evidence another way that the DWP is trying to make life harder for people with disabilities.