Speeches by Lopez.

“I was born in Harlow, would you believe it, Mr Speaker? Can the Secretary of State guarantee that under Labour’s EU reset, Britain will not align with any EU tech rules, including the AI Act?”

“There was no clear answer from the Secretary of State. It sounds like Labour is about to trade away our Brexit freedoms on tech regulation, yet tech Ministers have been briefing behind the scenes that we must not lose Britain’s Brexit freedoms on tech when it comes to AI, data and agritech. Will she now publicly admit …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) on securing this incredibly important debate. He brings a unique blend of glamour and tech nerdery to the House. Frankly, it is something Parliament could do with much more o…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Dame Chi Onwurah) on securing such an important debate. It is so well attended, and it is a shame that it is not longer; I commend everyone for their two-minute raps. In the context…”

“I can agree with that. My point is that this Government are trying to suggest that a consensus can be found in the absence of their having a policy position. They are talking about a consultation, but what on earth are they consulting on? Nobody has a clue. They have not been able to say anything about what they actual…”

“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention—I went off on a nostalgia trip in my brain, thinking about MSN chatrooms and all the rest of it. That was a time when people were not really aware of the power of the internet, and the predatory behaviours subsequently started to become normalised and industrialised. Althou…”

“Today we are debating something that is very important: the protection of children from online harms is vital. I commend the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on what I thought was a very heartfelt speech, but I fear that her good intent has been rather thrown under the bus by her party leadership. Setting asi…”

“I am sure that the issue of the functionality list can be explored as time goes by. It is important to point out that this is not a moral panic but a structural problem. Today the Leader of the Opposition gathered a panel of grieving parents who had lost their children, and in that context negative online activity was …”

“I am sure the applicability of the legislation in Scotland is something that can be debated when the Bill comes before the House. To give them credit, many Labour MPs understand the fact that there is an absence of any Government position, and they will not be taking their foot off the pedal. I suspect that many may ha…”

“We think that the current priority is ensuring that under-16s are taken off harmful social media platforms, but I am sure that there is room for a market to develop, over time, that will not feature negative algorithms and activity, and that there is a world in which new products could retain the essence of positive so…”

“I am not seeking to occupy a moral high ground. I am seeking to set out a way towards keeping children under 16 off social media platforms, because trying to legislate for specific different activities is very challenging, as I think we saw with the Online Safety Act. There are very good causes and there are very impor…”

“This is a Conservative amendment in the Lords that has gained cross-party support, so it will be coming back to us. The hon. Member raises an important point about why this policy was not brought in under the Online Safety Act. That Act tried to do many, many things. In many ways, it took so long because it risked beco…”

“I set out clearly at the beginning of my speech why we cannot support the motion, which is effectively a blank cheque. Notwithstanding the fact that the hon. Member for Twickenham tried to set it out in her speech, nobody actually knows what the Lib Dems are trying to do here. The proposal before us is that the Liberal…”

“I have set out before what we were trying to achieve with the Online Safety Act and why certain things were in it and others were not. I do not want to go over that again. The consequences of these design features are increasingly visible, including rising anxiety and low mood, poor sleep, shredded attention spans and …”

“I agree with the hon. Member wholeheartedly. Until now, we have implicitly decided that childhood must simply adapt to an environment that we as adults find totally overwhelming, undermining of our own sense of self and completely irresistible. We have been exposing our children to this place of no settled social rules…”

“I would not envisage that parents would be responsible for that. There are mechanisms to make sure that platforms would not be permitted to provide accounts to under 16-year-olds and they would have to have highly effective age-assurance techniques. In fact, I have spoken recently to representatives of a major platform…”

“I appreciate where the hon. Member is coming from. I do not think it is wrong to seek evidence and ask for people’s views, but the Prime Minister should be honest about what he wants to do. The problem is that he has been floating various opinions, and he is being buffeted by Labour MPs and by the Opposition and others…”

“I respect the hon. Member’s intervention for its politeness, but I do not think the answer is suddenly to encourage all children who are finding it hard to find purposeful and meaningful activities in the real world to retreat to their bedrooms. One of the challenges we have seen is that children have felt that the onl…”

“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was pointing out that the Minister has no manners, but wishes to shout from a sedentary position. I sat listening to him and waiting to see if I could decipher, in his very long and self-regarding diatribe, whether he actually has any opinions, but it turns out that he does not. He is…”

“There were very real and important debates during the passage of that Bill about legal but harmful material and whether people should be able to speak freely online. Our approach was to seek to create a space where adults can speak freely while accepting that children should not be in some of these spaces. That was the…”