This week’s motion – ‘This house regrets the commercialisation of childhood.’ – was the last chance for our teams to practice before the last big competition of the year – Cambridge University Schools Debating Competition – with the Northern Round in York all day tomorrow: a long, gruelling day of four competitive debates against the best debaters in the north. What was always going to be most interesting about this debate was how the Opposition presented the commercialisation of childhood as a positive thing, and they did very well. This turned out to be a hugely interesting debating, but it was mostly confined to the harms (or not) of social media, and how children’s likes and views are being harvested by the social media giants. However, the opposition did make an interesting case for how the commercialisation of childhood is empowering for children, giving them the freedom to choose, over their parents’ deciding for them. However, who is the more potentially malign actor: parents of these children, or the Facebooks, TikToks and Xs of this world?

Mr Ahern & Mr Murphy