Technology

Absolute bollocks. Doesn’t require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.

If your opposition is just based on vibes than it can be ignored based on nothing more than that.

You should practice it.

Levy is a Tax.

Oh, you are talking about an actual fee in the legislation, not the cost of contracting with a company that verifies ages.

The cost though is £70 million. Since you raise the prospect of child poverty, the one policy the government needs to reverse to improve child poverty is the two-child benefit cap, which would cost £2.1bn, so this policy costs 3% of a substantive policy on child poverty.

A high estimate for how many deaths could be prevented by lifting the cap is about 300 per year, that I have seen (it's not really about the cap itself but is about modelling what would happen if Labour were able to reduce child poverty at the same rate it was in 1997-2010, which would presumably include eliminating the cap). 3% of 300 is 9 deaths. While I don't support the OSA, I think it is completely plausible that a policy which reduces the amount children are looking at extreme violence and advocation of eating disorders and suicide would prevent in the region of 9 deaths per year. About 150 children die each year by suicide (according to statistics, which will undercount the problem because parents as a rule don't want their child's death to be recorded as suicide). And saving 9 lives is to bring this policy in line, cost-wise, with an estimate that relates to a whole programme of government, which will in reality cost far more than £2.1bn.

Cost is not the right lens through which to examine the OSA, no matter what your personal opinion tells you.