Web giants must be accountable

need to safeguard our NHS, or the importance of properly caring for our elderly, because we were too busy taking lumps out of each other about Backstop codicils, regulatory alignment, transition periods and Canada Plus Plus Plus.

And yet amidst this unholy chaos we have found something on which we can agree… the abject incompetence of our politicians and the parliamentary process which props them up.

We’ve had almost three years to prepare for quitting the EU.

And yet like a teenager in the run up to GCSEs any attempt to properly prepare and do the ground work has been botched. Instead, Mrs May has sat in her room flicking through YouTube and listening to the new Drake album (or whatever the Prime Ministerial version of that is).

She has proved herself incapable of building alliances or trust. She has alienated her backbenchers, the opposition, the Europeans, the nation. Even paying people to be pals with her, like she did with the DUP, hasn’t worked. Not that any of Sometimes it’s hard to work out just who our legal system is created for. Rarely it seems to help the victims. This week’s scandal is the Legal Aid Agency refusing to fund aid for the family of teenager Molly Russell at the inquest into her death.

Her heartbroken parents are desperate for expert support at the hearing because it is probably the only hope any of us have of holding Facebook – which the folk around her are any better. The Government has become rife with in-fighting where careerism and opportunism has chewed up, swallowed and spat out any vestige of “national interest”, turning it into a concept confined to political soundbites.

Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and those other big beasts who got us into this predicament have long since run for the hills (or more likely the Alpine ski slopes).

And we are left with a sea of mediocrity so locked in tribal politics they are unable to consider for one moment how ludicrous they look to the rest of the nation. Meanwhile, the Labour Party has steadfastly dodged committing itself to one course of action until the very last moment, hoping to avoid upsetting any of its supporters, but managing to irritate us all.

Although, to be fair, the party has been so busy tearing itself apart there’s been little time for policy or strategy.

Many commentators have described the Brexit vote as a national kick in the guts to the political class. Well, in the 22 long months since then, the political class has certainly hit back with an assault on the senses of the nation.

They will never be forgiven for how they failed us in this time of historic importance.

We wanted leadership. We got lemmings. owns Instagram – to account after Molly, 14, took her life having viewed self-harm and suicide sites.

And yet the Legal Aid bosses had the sheer inhumanity to claim that the case “is not a matter of wider public interest”.

Not of wider interest? I can think of few issues of greater interest than interrogating those enormous Silicon Valley companies whose businesses hold in their hands our children’s lives – and deaths... SUICIDE Molly Russell

‘‘