The former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has warned the big tech firms are winning in the battle over regulation (Alamy)
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Major tech companies are “winning in a big way” against efforts to make the internet safer for women and children, according to former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips.
Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, said that during her time in government, parts of Whitehall, including No 10, were reluctant to take action for fear of retaliation by tech giants and the Donald Trump administration.
Speaking on the latest episode of PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown, which will be published on Friday (7 August), Phillips said: “We are too beholden currently in the world to basically five unelected people.”
The Labour MP resigned as a Home Office minister in May, accusing the Keir Starmer administration of not working hard enough to protect women and girls online. Phillips said Starmer was a “decent man” but his reluctance to “have an argument” meant that steps to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) were “stalled and delayed”.
In her resignation letter to the then-prime minister, Phillips said that “91 per cent of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited into abuse”, and that Google and Apple, the two companies that control the operating systems on almost all smartphones, could quickly and easily install software that would stop them being used by children to take and receive naked pictures.
In June, Starmer gave tech firms a September deadline to make this change, warning that the government would give itself the powers to fine or take criminal action against those that did not comply.
Phillips wants new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to hold them to this, telling the podcast that, as things stand, “tech companies are winning in a big, big way”.
The former minister said there was a divide within Whitehall about how to tackle online safety when she was in government. She described the Home Office as being “hawkish as hell about tech companies”, while No 10 and the now-abolished Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) were nervous about being too aggressive.
Phillips recalled “the sense that tech companies and the US would hold us to ransom on all sorts of different things”, adding: “I’ve had it directly said to my face, ‘well, look, they’ll just put trade levies on us if you try and do anything with tech companies’.”
She said Starmer “was always on my side in conversations”, but that she “just started to feel like I was going slowly mad” waiting for the machinery of government to make it happen.
“If you could hear some of the conversations I had to have with people. There are some people who genuinely just think that people taking dick pics is a human right,” Phillips said.
“I had to say to somebody once: ‘You know, you won’t die. It’s not water or shelter’.”
Phillips expressed concern that the government’s Online Safety Act is “woeful for women” in its current form and “20 years behind” where it needs to be to tackle evolving online harms.
“As somebody who was seeking to put down lots of amendments to the Online Safety Act while it was passing through, I’ve never known aggressive lobbying like it,” said the Labour MP. “Every single law firm in the whole of London was basically on retainer to one of the big tech companies so that they couldn’t work for anyone else. That is just anti-democratic.”
The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, and is produced and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot
- Click here to listen to the latest episode of The Rundown, or search for ‘PoliticsHome’ wherever you get your podcasts.
