James Gillray (1756-1815) was the pre-eminent caricaturist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is considered by many to be the father of the political cartoon. His colorful political and social satires were wildly popular in his own time for their cruel and scurrilous content, which was often directed at George III, his family, and other leading political figures. Just as popular were his military caricatures of Napoleon and both French and British forces during the Napoleonic Wars.

James Gillray, sometimes spelled Gilray (13 August 1757 – 1 June 1815), was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810.

He was born in Chelsea. His father, a native of Lanark, had served as a soldier, losing an arm at the Battle of Fontenoy, and was admitted, first as an inmate, and afterwards as an outdoor pensioner, at Chelsea Hospital. Gillray commenced life by learning letter-engraving, at which he soon became an adept. This employment, however, proving irksome, he wandered about for a time with a company of strolling players. After a very checkered experience he returned to London and was admitted a student in the Royal Academy, supporting himself by engraving, and probably issuing a considerable number of caricatures under fictitious names. His caricatures are almost all in etching, some also with aquatint, and a few using stipple technique. None can correctly be described as engravings, although this term is often loosely or ignorantly used of them. Hogarth’s works were the delight and study of his early years. Paddy on Horseback, which appeared in 1779, is the first caricature which is certainly his. Two caricatures on Rodney’s naval victory, issued in 1782, were among the first of the memorable series of his political sketches.

Gillray is still revered as one of the most influential political caricaturists of all time, and among the leading cartoonists on the political stage in the United Kingdom today, both Steve Bell and Martin Rowson acknowledge him as probably the most influential of all their predecessors in that particular arena.

The look of the Vogon race in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film were in part inspired by Gillray’s work.
There is a good account of Gillray in Wright’s History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865).

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gillray

The prints of James Gillray come from a time when Britain was a very different place. It was a nation of tough, independent minded people, freedom loving and enjoying, with a love of free speech to the extent that the caricatures of James Gillray, that ‘attacked’ anyone he liked (or rather disliked), from the King down, were widely circulated and much admired. It was a time of reason, of true scientists exploring and improving life; when the true spirit of Britain was out in the open, working in the world for the good (mostly).

What is Britain like now?

It is a country where not only are the citizens disarmed, and where they cannot even send a shooting team to compete anywhere, but they cannot even use their own language for fear of reprisals from a group of unaccountable aparatchicks, leeches and social engineers. The new ‘hate speech’ laws have turned Britain into a place where even in private, you cannot say what you think without fear of losing your job.

Schoolboy ‘bullies’ are now hauled into court for speaking words. Whatever you might think about the way children should behave in a school, it is totally insane that the headmaster of a school should not be able to discipline and expel a bad pupil who breaks school rules, and that an actual court case was brought against the pupil in that last link.

Which brings us on to the Badman report saga, which is becoming more absurd by the day.

DCSF have refused to release the Submissions to the Elective Home Education Review, citing that its author is being ‘harassed and vilified” on the internets.

All of the Home Educators commenting on this independently and quite naturally come to the same conclusion; they have been hurt by this report, which equates their parenting to a form of abuse. It is THEY who have been vilified:

M Stafford left an annotation (19 July 2009)

So telling the general public in purposely twisted press releases that home education is a cover for abuse and servitude is not vilifying and harassing.

Graham Badman has produced a poor and dishonest report, misused statistics and compared apples and pears in order to produce a predecided result.

The DCSF needs to be open and transparent about this information, that is what would be in the public interest instead of trying to hide the duplicity involved in this report.

and

Emma Hornby left an annotation (20 July 2009)

I think Mr Badman should be looking long and hard at his conscience.

He is being heavily criticized for a piece of work which, it gradually emerges, is substandard in many respects. It went beyond the explicit terms of the brief, and the terms on which he consulted the public, and the recommendations follow neither from the brief nor from the data, so far as that can be verified. The use of stats is embarrassing. He has misrepresented the submission of the CofE and at least one selectively-quoted HEer, as well as, it emerges, working from notes of meetings with people who are not prepared to sign off those notes as an accurate record of the conversation.

There are two possible courses of action for Mr Badman here. One is to reject the criticisms, instead seeing himself as vilified and harassed (and this course becomes harder to sustain with every fresh revelation, to be honest), and the second is to say “mea culpa”, withdraw his report and either rewrite it more honestly and competently, or return the fee and let the DCSF commission someone else to complete the task.

I do not intend either to harass or vilify Mr Badman here. But his report and his conduct are both vulnerable to justified criticism, and the sooner he appreciates that, the sooner he will be able to begin restoring his reputation.

Those are just two of the many comments swirling around the internets. The fact of the matter is that this report, if it had been done with any kind of academic rigor, would be able to withstand any scrutiny. And another FOIA requester, Harold Davis, puts it very plainly, that there is no justification whatsoever for these submissions to be withheld:

[…]

You refer to vilification and harassment. Vilification means presenting as vile, and while it may often be uncondonable, it is not a criminal offence, and politicians and other public servants are vilified in numerous publications every day. As you are doubtless aware, many have been vilified in respect of expenses claims they have made. Indeed, when such information has been released, many in the population have very quickly formed or agreed with the view that the makers of such claims are “vile”. That is all part and parcel of the holding of public officials to account. Such a course of events does not in itself constitute the breaking of any law or the commission of any civil wrong. When vilification goes too far, surely the correct course of action is a civil suit for defamation or an application for a court order against the individuals responsible, not the use, without the prior launch of any such suit or the application for any such order (I presume you would have referred to these if they had happened), of s38 of the Freedom of Information Act.

If you would maintain that the risk of vilification is so great as to endanger Mr Badman’s health, this of course raises the question of what information you might hold that, if released, would give grist to the mill of the unidentified vilifiers. Section 38 is not meant to be invoked to protect individuals against the effects of the disclosure, for example, of actions by them which, if disclosed, would JUSTIFIABLY affect their reputations in a negative direction. This is so even if other individuals are already speculating in public that such information may exist, to the “distress” of the individual concerned. Of course there is a risk test, but the test, in my submission, is much stronger than the Department appears to believe. The assumption should be in favour of disclosure.

[…]

Home Ed Forums

Now this is an interesting situation. They do not want to release these documents, clearly because their release will fatally compromise this report, and destroy the reputations of everyone involved in its manufacture. It would not take a great leap of imagination to speculate that all the submissions have said the same thing that the CofE said; that there is no need for a change in the law, and that the status quo is more than adequate.

If they do go to court over this ‘vilification and harassment’, then during the discovery process the opposition will certainly demand everything submitted to this report to be released and entered into the public record, since they are material in determining whether or not what everyone is saying about the report is true or not, and whether the ‘vilification’ was justified or unjustified.

That is what is called being between a rock and a hard place.

This report, as we said before, should never have been written. Had it never been written and the conclusions of the 2007 consultations taken on board as the final word, Britain would still be the best place to Home Educate, and no one would have had to waste their time knocking down this utter rubbish. Now we have the very real prospect of families being disrupted as they either fight this insanity or flee the country to more rational freedom loving countries.

What sort of country can produce a report like this, where the submissions that fed it are made secret on the most weak and irrational of pretexts, the report being clearly biased, ill informed and wrong, which subsequently be accepted unchallenged and unquestioned to make new law? I would guess that reasonable people who know what Britain used to be like would not say that Britain is that sort of country. Secret contributions to false reports used to make bad law are the sort of thing you used to expect and get in the Soviet Union, not a ‘free society’ or ‘free country’ like Britain.

The Home Educating parents that are mounting a vigorous defence of themselves are demonstrating that they are head and shoulders above the crowd. These are the parents who are going to unleash a generation of Britons who are of the same quality and strength of character that we know the British used to have in the days of James Gillray. Even now, some of these Home Educated children are writing letters to complain that they do not want to be disturbed in any way, taking the authorities up on the claptrap that the voices of children are to be heard, only to be patted on the head and patronized.

Those tactics might work with a child, but they are clearly not working with the parents of these children.

Apart from the nauseating patting on the head, the people who are refusing to release the submissions are allowing themselves to be sucked into the black hole that this report has become. Clearly they are not being advised correctly, or are being given orders to suppress this information. If they have been advised to withhold this information, they need to say who it is that gave them this advice or these orders in order to separate and insulate themselves from these incorrect decisions; clearly the people who are the public interface for answering these requests are not applying the law correctly, and this could come back to damage them as this report is destroyed and discredited, as they will have acted improperly by invoking rules that should not have been invoked to try and stop the report being exposed. The first people that will be sacrificed as scape goats are these low level aparatchicks who are, in every instance, expendable. All the people who were responsible for this debacle have already secured new jobs for themselves or will never be discarded from their high level positions; they might get shuffled around, but they will not be brought down. It is the underlings, the messengers who are being ordered to act improperly who will get the chop.

If I were any of the people behind any of this I would now declare that this has been a monumental error in judgement. They failed to understand the true nature of Home Education, and this caused them to ask for a report with a pre-determined outcome that they should not have commissioned. They misjudged the parents who Home Educate who are clearly amongst the most intelligent, creative, capable, resourceful, dogged and passionate people in the UK (actually, they are REAL PEOPLE of the type that made Britain Great). These Home Educators have demonstrated that they are able to act in concert when necessary. This is highly effective in both Home Educating and in refuting and repulsing attacks, as has been amply demonstrated by the spectacular results reflected in the children of Home Educators, and the state’s pathetic response to being put under a high powered microscope controlled by Home Educators.

Many Home Educators are working on this problem from every conceivable angle. They are not going to rest until this report is totally exposed for what it is, and it is thrown out in its entirety. They have been forced to do this in order to protect their families from the outrageous, unjustifiable and absurd recommendations of this report.

It is patently absurd that the staff of a department and the people associated with it can discriminate against and call an entire group of people unfit parents and accuse them of being child abusers, who must allow their children to be separated from them for arbitrary, humiliating and deeply suspicious inspections during a home invasion; only to withdraw into their dirty little shells when those very same offended and injured parents defend themselves vigorously by requesting the facts and using all their skills to expose the villains.

But then again, this is just about what we expect from these people who are The Cancer That Is Killing Britain.

Take a look at this, “Godfrey on Home Education”:

“An attack on home educators is?an attack on all our Liberties. They must be defended from an all powerful state.”

“What is it that they are so afraid of?” asks Godfrey Bloom, UKIP MEP.

If you read BLOGDIAL, you already know what it is they are afraid of:

[…]

What is worse, is that where there are data on how Home Education performs, the pupils that are measured outperform the state fodder in every way. The top universities are bending over backwards to recruit these exceptional students, taking places away from the state educated ‘customers’. Once they see this trend increasing, the immediate reaction of the state is to imagine a worst case scenario, where there are hundreds of thousands of Home Educated children in the country that will eventually emerge as a superclass that will dominate everyone like the old public school boys did (and still do).

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1818

They are terrified that a superclass of people are being created, that will number over 100,000 in a very short number of years. These people will be independent thinkers, who have been properly trained in ways that produce (and that historically have produced) the greatest minds. They will be capable, unflappable, unprogrammable, steadfast, quick witted and very very powerful.

100,000 people is an army. The Home Educated army of the future will be, at the very least, able to totally dominate society. They will ascend to all the highest positions in industry, finance and politics, completely shutting out everyone else. And by the way, everyone else will be so dumbed down and brainwashed that it will be easy for even the weakest Home Educated child to shine like Einstein in comparison.

That is a real and present danger to the people whose aim it is to create a docile, pliable and unthinking population.

As it is today, they have partially succeeded. There are very few people in the western world coming out of the state school system who understand the scientific method. This is why it has been so easy to sell the Global Warming Hoax to the masses; and of course the most dangerous people, legislators, are unable to tell the difference between science and junk science. Had the legislatures of the west been filled with Home Educated people, Cap and Trade (for example) would never have been brought to the legislature for consideration.

Which brings us back to the Badman report. AHEd have released a briefing paper in response to the Elective Home Education Review Report and Recommendations. It is a great piece of work, and it calls a spade a spade:

The freedoms threatened by these proposals are freedoms necessary to every family and not just home educators. To put it simply, the party currently in power does not trust parents to raise their children and wish instead to control all aspects of our lives to ensure they are in line with a centralised agenda.

Anyone who thinks that undermining the homes and families of children in this way will not destabilise children and deprive them of a sense of security is wrong.

Anyone who thinks that forcing children to exhibit to strangers their educational attainment and progress will not disrupt and undermine their education is wrong.

Anyone who thinks that obliging families to undergo forced access to their home and forcing children to allow stranger access to their person separated from parents, will not make children confused and vulnerable to illicit approaches by other adults is wrong. It is child abuse.

The officials who agree to carry out such state sponsored grooming of school age children may do so in a gentle voice and with a big smile on their faces, but that will not change the nature of what they are doing. It is child abuse.

The purpose of forced registration, home visit inspections and compulsory interview of children separated by law from parents is control. For what?

[…]

http://ahed.pbworks.com/BriefingPaperHEReview

AHEd have hit the nail on the head, and their conclusion is completely correct. What the report’s proposals are advocating is child abuse nothing more, and nothing less.

Like the title of this post says, this is deeply, deeply sinister.

Alex Jones has been investigating this for over fourteen years.

A broad spectrum of opinion on this matter has been delivered in many places, from people in all walks of life. These proposals are most definitely WRONG, and they should be DROPPED IMMEDIATELY. It is abundantly clear that there are enough safeguards and checks in place and that the law is already adequate.

If these proposals are not dropped, then harm will come to families and children in this country. Harm is the only thing that can come out of this unless the report fails and no changes are made and the status quo is solidified by virtue of the report being utterly condemned.

Chairman
Home School Legal Defense Association

Introduction

His name is Badman. Graham Badman. His June 2009 “Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England,” which proposes draconian changes in English home education law, lives up to his name.

His core premise is that the current education law does not properly balance the rights of parents and the rights of children.

However, he reaches this conclusion on a faulty basis. Most significantly, he fails to fully and accurately describe the current legal framework that governs home education. He avoids any discussion of the power of local education officials to intervene with the force of law in a situation where they have found a home education program to be unsuitable.

Despite his failure to accurately describe the current situation, he makes a series of recommendations to remedy the problems he has “discovered.” Central to his scheme is the requirement that a government official be empowered to compel entry into the homes of families engaged in home education. Then he wishes the official to have the power to interrogate each child in order to “hear” the child’s wishes and make an independent determination of the suitability of the home education program.

A cryptic quotation appears as a preface to the entire report:

The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament.

This statement was by Isaiah Berlin in a 1969 work published by Oxford University.

Badman’s apparent meaning is that one cherished value needs to be sacrificed to achieve a different cherished value. From the body of the Badman Report there is little doubt as to his intended application of this principle.

The Badman Report opines that traditional English concepts of parental rights and liberty must be sacrificed to achieve the value of adherence to children’s rights theory—specifically, the theory contained in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

But as so often is the case with meddlesome interlopers, it is easy to demonstrate that Badman’s conclusions are premised on numerous fallacies.

How the English Legal System Works

Section 7 of the Education Act of 1996 provides the legal framework for home education in England.

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—
(a) to his age, ability, aptitude, and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

Badman asserts that the terms “efficient” and “suitable” are not defined. This is true enough insofar as the statutory language is concerned. However, this does not mean that English courts are incapable of interpreting and applying these terms with common sense. Badman cites and quotes judicial definitions of both “efficiency” and “a suitable education,” but fails to give us the source for the quotation of the suitability determination.¹ Accordingly, it is simply false to say that these terms are undefined in English law.

Section 437 (1) of the Education act imposes a duty on “a local education authority” to give notice to any parent “if it appears that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education.”

After quoting Section 437(1), Badman merely states that local authorities are encouraged to use informal means.

At this point, Badman simply stops reading the statutes and fails to include in his report the balance of the statutory scheme which empowers local authorities to take action to seek remediation if a home education program appears to be unsuitable.

Here is what he left out:

Under Section 437, “[i]f it appears to a local education authority that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education” the officials may issue a notice to parents requiring them, within 15 days, to demonstrate that the education their child is receiving is in fact suitable. If the school officials are not satisfied with the response, they have the ability to issue an attendance order, forcing the child to attend a school designated by the officials. The parents may ask for a lawful alternative school placement. However, there is no lawful option to simply continue a program of home education that had been found to be wanting.

But the law permits parents two paths to seek review of the attendance order.

Administrative review. Under Section 442, a parent may request the local authority to remove the attendance order on the grounds that suitable education is being provided. If the local authority refuses to remove the order, the aggrieved parent may appeal to the Secretary of State who is given wide discretion in fashioning a course of action for the child in question.

Judicial option. A parent may simply refuse to comply with the attendance order. This is an offense which may be prosecuted under Section 443. Parents may raise an affirmative defense in such a prosecution. A parent will be exonerated if “he proves that he is causing the child to receive suitable education otherwise than at school.” Upon such a judicial determination, the attendance order would be vacated.

The Badman Report leaves the distinct impression that there are no effective means available for local education officials to pursue home educating parents who are failing to provide a proper education for their children.

Both the objectivity and the professionalism of the Badman Report are called into serious question by its failure to fully describe the complete operation of current law.

There is nothing ineffective about the current English law when all of the elements are considered:

• Homeschooling parents are under the same educational duty as all other parents.
• This standard has been subject to further definition by English courts.
• Local school officials have both the duty and authority to take action if they have reasonable grounds to believe that suitable education is not being given to any child.
• Parents are given notice and an opportunity to cure any deficiency.
• If the school officials are not satisfied, they may order a cessation to home education.
• If the parents disagree with this decision, they may elect to appeal to the Secretary or make their defense in court.

An Incomplete Comparison

The Badman Report asserts: “International comparison suggests that of all countries with highly developed education systems, England is the most liberal in its approach to elective home education.”

Seven lines of analysis follow this naked assertion. He mentions Germany, “most European countries” (without elaboration), and New Zealand.

The omission of the United States is a particularly blatant error when it comes to the subject of home education. There is little doubt that more children are being homeschooled in the United States than in the rest of the world combined. By comparison, the Badman Report discloses that there are between 20,000 and 80,000 children being homeschooled in England.² The United States Department of Education estimates that there were between 1,277,000 and 1,739,000 (median 1,508,000) being home educated in 2007.³ Independent researchers place the number even higher. “There were an estimated 1.8 to 2.5 million children (in grades K to 12) home educated during 2007–2008 in the United States.”⁴

North Carolina’s Department of Education reports that in the 2007–2008 school year, there were 38,367 homeschools with an estimated 71,566 children being taught in those homes.⁵ A 2008 decision of the California Court of Appeal estimated 166,000 children were being homeschooled in that state alone.⁶

It is important to note that, just as in England, the United States cannot provide a precise count of the number of children being home educated. If the implication that the inability to enumerate home educated children was an indicium of educational failure, it should have become apparent by now in the United States. The numbers are simply too great for the problem to have been hidden.

Moreover, once the United States is brought into play in the international comparison, it is simply unfair and inaccurate to suggest that England is the most liberal in it is approach to home education regulation.

The Education Act of 1996 is similar to some of the older American home education laws. For example, Massachusetts law requires “instruction in all the studies required by law equals in thoroughness and efficiency, and in the progress made therein, that in the public schools in the same town.” Mass. Gen. Laws Ch. 76, § 1.

Oklahoma law provides:

It is unlawful for a parent of a school aged child “to neglect or refuse to cause or compel such child to attend and comply with the rules of some public, private or other school, unless other means of education [i.e., home schooling] are provided for the full term the schools of the district are in session.” Stat. Ann. tit. 70 § 10-105(A).

The phrase “other means of education” in the Oklahoma statute is virtually identical to the English phrase “at school or otherwise.” Homeschooling flourishes in Oklahoma with no governmental interference in the ordinary case.

Illinois law provides an example of law with broad, undefined standards for home education. In that state parents must ensure that “children are taught the branches of education taught to children of corresponding age and grade in public schools, and where the instruction of the child in the branches of education is in the English language.” 105 ILCS § 5/26-1.

A summary of the home education law in all 50 American states is attached. It is evident upon review that some states are more lenient than the English system, and some have more specific requirements. None differ greatly from the general approach of English law that parents should be trusted and authorities are empowered to intervene in the extraordinary case.

There is simply no basis for widespread alarm concerning the well-being of children. Freedom works. This is especially true when, as in England, the authorities have the clear statutory power to intervene when they believe that there is a problem.

Badman’s Reliance on The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child

Badman begins his review of the regulatory framework of the current English system by citing Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). This Article provides that “in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child [be] given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Badman then says: “Yet under the current legislation and guidance, local authorities have no right of access to the child to determine or ascertain such views.”

Accordingly, Badman suggests that Parliament enact mandatory provisions to require parents to have an official enter their home to interrogate their children concerning their “views” and to make an independent assessment of the suitability of the home education being provided.

However, under the express terms of the UNCRC, Article 12 states a universal principle applicable to all children. If Parliament intends to implement the provisions of Article 12 to determine the “wishes” of the child with regard to his education, then this requirement must be imposed vis-à-vis all children in all forms of education. The Preamble of the UNCRC mentions the principle of “equality” in two separate statements. Article 28 states that education decisions for children must be made “on the basis of equal opportunity.”

Moreover, if home education parents are not to be allowed to be present when their children are interrogated concerning their “wishes,” both logic and the principle of equality require that local school officials must be excluded from the interviews when children from such schools are likewise enabled to express their “wishes.”

Reading Article 12 and 28 together, favoritism or selective enforcement is not permitted. If the child’s wishes are to be received by independent reviewers, then it must be for all children and the reviewers must truly be independent.

Obviously, the Article 12 system would vest the independent reviewer with extraordinary power of subjective judgment. Such a methodology is antithetical in any society that places any value on the rule of law, privacy, and liberty.

The Badman Interrogation Program: A Violation of Human Rights

Badman’s key recommendation is that local authorities should be given the power to:

• Compel entry into the homes of families engaged in home education.
• Separate the child from his or her parents.
• Interrogate the child both concerning his or her wishes and to satisfy the interrogator that the child’s education is “suitable.”

This approach flies in the face of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

This Article, protecting the privacy of both family life and the home, has been made binding on the United Kingdom by virtue of the Human Rights Act of 1998. No reservations to this Article were made at the time that the United Kingdom became a party to this treaty. According to the Human Rights Act, it is unlawful for any agency of government to violate these protected rights of privacy.

The privacy provision in the Human Rights Act has parallel provisions in the American system of constitutional rights. Significantly, American courts have dealt directly with the question of whether a compulsory invasion for home education inspections constitutes an unconstitutional violation of family privacy.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts considered the question of the legitimacy of a compulsory “home visit” for homeschooling families. Under the doctrine of family privacy, the highest court in Massachusetts held that “the school committee … cannot, in the absence of consent, require home visits, as a condition to the approval of home education plans.” Brunelle v. Lynn Public Schools, 428 Mass. 512, 702 N.E.2d 1182 (1998). The court also ruled that “the approval of the home school proposal must not be conditioned on requirements that are not essential to the state interest in assuring that all children be educated.” Home visits are not essential for children to be educated.

Similarly, a New York court held In the Matter of Dixon, No. N-37-86, (Fam. Ct, Oswego County 1988), that the school district’s “desired on-site inspection was arbitrary, unreasonable, unwarranted, and violative of the [home school parents’] due process rights….” Slip. Op. at 5. See also In the Matter of Standish, No. N-125-86, Oswego County, Dec. 23, 1988.

Badman believes that unless officials can enter a home, no one can know for sure what is happening with a child. There is a certain truth to this assertion. However, this is true for all homes, not just those engaged in home education. Unless and until the government is willing to install surveillance cameras in the home of every family, there is no way to absolutely guarantee that officials truly know what is happening in each home. Freedom comes with some risks. But, it is generally believed that the totalitarian alternative is far worse in the long-run.

However, the adherence to principles of human rights and privacy does not mean that the authorities are without power to protect a child’s need for a suitable education. It must be remembered that when there is any appearance that the home education program is unsuitable, the Education Act gives local officials the authority to require proof of the suitability of the education and gives them the power to order the cessation of home schooling if they are not satisfied.

In light of this authority, there is utterly no need for an official to compel entry into a home to make an on-the-spot subjective judgment about the child and the suitability of his or her education.

Would Badman’s Inspectors Be Professionally Qualified to Assess the Suitability of Home Education?

Finally, there is serious doubt that such an inquisitor would be qualified to evaluate the effectiveness of a home education program. Any form of assessment (including testing and measurement) is generally required to meet four professional standards for accuracy and reliability. A clear statement of these standards is found in a publication by the British Council describing certain examinations for English proficiency:

Examinations must be “designed around four essential qualities: validity, reliability, impact, and practicality. Validity is normally taken to be the extent to which a test can be shown to produce scores which are an accurate reflection [of the subject tested]. Reliability concerns the extent to which they can be depended upon for making decisions about the candidate. Impact concerns the effects, beneficial or otherwise, which an examination has on the candidates or other users, whether these are educational, social, economic or political, or various combinations of these. Practicality can be defined as the extent to which an examination is practicable in terms of the resources needed to produce and administer it.”⁷

Any assessment by a home inspector/interrogator would need to comply with these accepted professional standards for educational assessment.

An American court used essentially identical standards for the validity of educational assessment to overturn an improper crafted program of home education assessment.

The legislature of South Carolina required that homeschooling parents be subjected to an examination employed for public school teacher candidates. However, the legislature conditioned this requirement on the performance of a professional validation study to determine whether or not the items being tested were in fact valid measurements of the skills required for successful home instruction.

After the validity study was performed, parents sued claiming that the study was done improperly and that half of the panelists in the study were unqualified participants and had no basis for measuring factors needed for successful home instruction.

The parents relied on the expert analysis of Dr. Lawrence Rudner, the Director of Testing and Measurement for the ERIC Clearinghouse (a program of the United States Department of Education).

In Lawrence v. S.C. State Board of Education, 412 S.E.2d 394 (S.C. 1991), the Supreme Court of South Carolina described the panel members that had been assembled to conduct the study:

[T]he Department of Education contracted with IOX Assessment Associates to evaluate the EEE’s suitability to test home schooling instructors. IOX assembled a panel of thirty-three members; seventeen panelists were home schoolers, the remaining sixteen were public school and college teachers.

Panelists who were not home schoolers were given no description of the requirements for successful home schooling. These sixteen panelists were not familiar with home schooling or were never asked if they knew anything about it.

Task-relatedness evaluations required a panelist to judge whether the EEE item tested some knowledge or skill that was “a necessary prerequisite” to home schooling. Sixteen of the panelists were not qualified to make this evaluation since they were given no information as to what the prerequisites for home schooling were.

This is a very important principle. Public school teachers and college professors of education were held to be “not qualified” to evaluate effective home education. The application of professional educational standards to the task at hand demonstrated that there are significant differences in the methods and strategies of successful home education and the strategies employed in institutional schools. Evaluators who have neither professional expertise nor in-depth study of home education simply are unqualified to make valid assessments.

The Badman method of home interrogations fails all four of the criteria outlined by the British Council for proper assessment and measurement:

Validity. The interrogators would have no objective tools of measurement and would lack the proper expertise in home education.

Reliability. Subjective home interrogations of children would never survive a reliability assessment. This method simply cannot produce results that have any semblance of national consistency, accuracy, or fairness.

Impact. The massive invasion of family privacy as well as the contraction of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights are just the beginning of the negative impact of the Badman home interrogation methodology. The impact on the child must be considered. When a strange adult appears in the home with the announced purpose of interrogating the child separately and apart from his or her parents, a considerable degree of anxiety can be anticipated. Moreover, the long-range impact on the child’s view of a free society is severely damaged. If the government may enter the child’s home, with no requirement of any showing of wrong-doing, the child is left with a residual view toward his government that is not unlike that experienced by children who feared the KGB in the USSR. Even though adults may well be able to distinguish between the KGB and a Badman home interrogator, to a young child all he knows is that a stranger is in his home asking questions of him in private and his future depends on the stranger’s views of his answers. This is an incredibly high-stakes venture with almost no chance of producing results that would survive the other measures of assessment for validity and reliability.

Practicability. The costs for implementing the Badman method of home interrogations would be staggering.

It is once again important to remember that the choices are not between “doing nothing” versus the Badman home interrogation method. The current law has reasonable measures in place. Rather than invading the home, the local school officials may, if they have reasonable grounds to doubt the suitability of a home education program, require evidence of education—not through subjective interrogation of the child—but through the objective method of looking at the work performed by the child.

The Badman method simply cannot survive any review of its appropriateness as a method of educational assessment. The current law does not need fixing. It contains all the tools necessary for a balanced and proper review whenever school officials have reason to believe that improper education is occurring.

The Article 29 Problem

Badman also urges new substantive requirements to be adopted to define what is “suitable” for a child’s education. He cites Article 29 of the UNCRC as setting the standard for guiding such new requirements.

Accordingly, it is crucial to obtain an in-depth understanding of Article 29’s requirements to understand the dramatic nature of the Badman proposal.

Subsection (a) contains little more than current English law requiring a suitable and efficient education. It is sections (b) through (e) that attempt to control the substantive content of the education and require the promulgation of certain worldviews that are controversial, not just among homeschoolers, but among many segments of the population.

In a 2006 treatise entitled The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: An Analysis of Treaty Provisions and Implications of U.S. Ratification⁸, advocates of this treaty make this clear and bold declaration concerning the meaning of these sections: “Article 29(1)(b) through (e) directs state parties to instill particular values in children through education.”

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has issued General Comments concerning the meaning of Articles 28 and 29. This official UN Committee says:

The effective promotion of article 29 (1) requires the fundamental reworking of curricula to include the various aims of education and the systematic revision of textbooks and other teaching materials and technologies, as well as school policies. Approaches which do no more than seek to superimpose the aims and values of the article on the existing system without encouraging any deeper changes are clearly inadequate. The relevant values cannot be effectively integrated into, and thus be rendered consistent with, a broader curriculum unless those who are expected to transmit, promote, teach and, as far as possible, exemplify the values have themselves been convinced of their importance.

The American Bar Association, supporter of the UNCRC, opined that Christian schools, which reject alternate worldviews and teach that Christianity is the only true religion, “fly in the face” of Article 29.⁹

It is not necessary to debate the legitimacy of each of the values enshrined in this list of viewpoints to be instilled in every child in every type of school. A few examples of potential conflicts will suffice.

• Does instruction in “human rights” values require children to be taught the moral legitimacy of homosexuality?
• Does it require the promotion of same-sex marriage to children?
• Does a family that rejects the concept of one-world government violate Article 29? The American Bar Association thinks such views are a violation (see fn. 4).
• Do children have to be taught that religions are equally valid?
• If parents teach and believe that the husband should be the head of the family, does this violate the requirement of equality of the sexes? Any casual reader of the literature surrounding the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women will know that such traditional views are considered a violation of human rights standards.

We need not contemplate an answer to these individual questions. The real issue is: Does England intend to mandate the inculcation of certain “approved” values to children?

England’s current law is clearly on the side of freedom and contrary to any regime of government-compelled indoctrination in any particular system of values.

The Education Act provides in Section 9:

In exercising or performing all their respective powers and duties under the Education Acts, the Secretary of State, local education authorities and the funding authorities shall have regard to the general principle that pupils are to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents, so far as that is compatible with the provision of efficient instruction and training and the avoidance of unreasonable public expenditure.

Nothing in English law allows government officials to dictate the worldview, opinions, or viewpoints which must be taught in home education. Moreover, before Britain pursues a policy to implement Article 29 to control the content of its education law, it might wish to compare its current educational practice relative to religious instruction (which teaches broad-based Christianity) with the practice of Christian education in the state schools of Norway¹⁰, which was held to be in violation of the UNCRC by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

It would be a violation of the principle of equal protection to impose a duty on home schools to teach the values of Article 29, while the English schools operated by the government were in open contradiction with this same Article.

Conclusion

The Badman Report:

• Failed to give a full, fair, and accurate description of the current law governing home education in England. The system has a comprehensive system of checks and balances.
• Inaccurately claimed (by this failure of complete disclosure) that local education officials are limited to informal methods of seeking remediation. They possess effective and powerful tools to protect children.
• Inaccurately claimed that English homeschoolers were governed by the most liberal laws among peer nations.
• Proposed a method of compulsory home interrogations of children that violates the Human Rights Act of 1998 and Article 8 of the ECHR. This method has been held to be an unconstitutional invasion of family privacy in the United States.
• Proposed a method of home interrogations as a means of evaluation of the suitability of home education which fails the four standards for proper assessment: validity, reliability, impact, and practicability.
• Urges that English homeschoolers be required to comply with Article 29 of the UNCRC, which imposes a regime of compelled indoctrination in controversial values.

The Badman Report should be rejected. He advances no sustainable reason for changing current English law on home education.

Endnotes

1. Badman Report, p. 6.
2. Badman Report, p. 2.
3. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf
4. http://www.nheri.org/Research-Facts-on-Homeschooling.html
5. http://www.ncdnpe.org/documents/hhh233.pdf
6. Jonathan L. v. Superior Court, 165 Cal.App.4th 1074, 1089, 81 Cal.Rptr.3d 571, 582 (fn. 17) (Cal.App. 2 Dist.,2008).
7. http://www.britishcouncil.org/colombia-exams-yle-handbook-2007.pdf
8. Jonathan Todres, Mark E. Wojcik, Cris R. Revaz; Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, New York (2006).
9. American Bar Association, Center on Children and the Law: Children’s Rights in America: UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Compared with United States Law, p. 182.
10. Paragraph 20, Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child: Norway, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 39th sess., U.N. Doc. CRC/C/15/Add.263 (2005).

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200907130.asp

Graham Badman’s scandalous, biased, immoral and utterly vile report on Home Education contains a submission from The Church of England. By selectively omitting parts of the entire submission, Graham Badman has engaged in what is called ‘a lie of omission’:

Lying by omission
One lies by omission by omitting an important fact, deliberately leaving another person with a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions. If a husband asks his wife if she’s at a bar, the wife may tell her husband she is at a store, which is true, but lie by omitting the fact that she also visited a bar.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

Lies of Omission:

To lie by omission is to remain silent and thereby withhold from someone else a vital piece (or pieces) of information. The silence is deceptive in that it gives a false impression to the person from whom the information was withheld. It subverts the truth; it is a way to manipulate someone into altering their behavior to suit the desire of the person who intentionally withheld the vital information; and, most importantly, it’s a gross violation of another person’s right of self-determination.

[…]

http://www.choice101.com/19-lies.html#LiesOfOmission

It is one thing to give your opinion, and say that you believe that Home Education is not beneficial, or that Home Educated children are not safe, or more likely to suffer abuse (even if that is statistically not the case as this analysis of comparative abuse stats demonstrates), but it is quite another to deceptively misuse the authority of the voice The Church of England by selectively quoting from their submission, which comes to a conclusion that is the polar opposite of the conclusion you want to manipulate everyone reading the report to come to; that the laws governing Home Education need to be changed. Had this been a scientific paper, Graham Badman would now stand convicted of academic fraud, and his paper would be thrown out by peer reviewers, and his reputation permanently tarnished:

Wow, there’s yet more on the dodgy nature of the Badman report.

Well done those HEors who pursued this line; if they end up working for the investigative team on Private Eye, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. You can bet they will go in search of the truth like dog after a bone and won’t be fobbed off with phoney stats, headlines and soundbites.

Reading Graham Badman’s report, you would have thought that the Church of England were fully in favour of clamping down heavily on home educators. Badman achieves this effect by quoting highly selectively from the C of E submission.

From the Badman Review of Home Education, Section 4.8:

…the Education Division of the Church of England states its concern:

“that children and young people not in formal education are missing the benefits and challenges of learning in community with their peers. Children who do not go to school may not experience the social and cultural diversity encountered there; they will not learn how to deal with the rough and tumble of everyday life; they may never meet people with different faith and value systems. All such encounters, even the difficult or painful ones are enriching. We are concerned not only with the five Every Child Matters outcomes, but also with the spiritual well-being of all children and young people.

[…]

Spiritual well-being arises not only from being cared for in a loving family and/or faith community, but also in encounters with people of different opinions and backgrounds; in learning to listen to a variety of opinions; to encounter diversity and the riches and life-enhancement it can bring. Spiritual well-being depends on living and taking a full part in community life. Children and young people in schools learn about and from the five major religions. This may be a difficult part of the curriculum for home educators to provide, yet it is vital for the Government’s community cohesion agenda that all children learn in a balanced way about the variety of religious values and practices, and to be encouraged to question their own beliefs and practices.”

Badman however somehow failed to mention that the Church of England actually concluded their consultation submission with the following:

“We have seen no evidence to show that the majority of home educated children do not achieve the five Every Child Matters outcomes, and are therefore not convinced of the need to change the current system of monitoring the standard of home education. Where there are particular concerns about the children who are home-educating, this should be a matter for Children’s services.”

Home educators have subsequently received reassurances from the Church to the effect that the C of E does indeed stand by the conclusion above.

“We stand by our position as laid out in our original submission and hope that those with an interest in this subject will read our full position rather than relying on selected extracts. We understand that there are a range of deeply-held views on this subject and are grateful for your appreciation that the CofE’s position was more nuanced that was perhaps suggested in the Badman report.”

[…]

Dare to Know

The statement from the Church’s representative is a diplomatic way of saying that Graham Badman’s report misrepresented the Church of England’s position on Home Education.

Graham Badman has demonstrated a totally appalling lack of integrity. What a completely disgusting and insulting piece of trash. This report should not be the basis of new legislation; in fact it should be the basis of an investigation into the low standards of the people who generate reports like this, and that investigation should produce new rules and minimum standards that should apply to the writing of these reports so that they are at a minimum, peer reviewed in the same way that scientific papers are peer reviewed. If this was the standard, phrases like ‘I believe’ would invalidate a report like Graham Badman’s because personal belief is not a basis for scientific understanding of fact.

Every day, thanks to the hard work of Home Educators, this report is becoming more and more discredited. Soon it will be seen for what it really is; a worthless smear piece with no rigor, no peer review, chock full of hearsay, glaring omissions and baseless opinions.

Legislation that will require all authors who visit schools to be registered on a national database has been branded "Labour's Section 28" by bestselling author Philip Pullman. Section 28, or clause 28, a controversial piece of Conservative legislation, aimed at preventing the promotion of homosexuality in schools, was scrapped in 2003.

From November 2010, professional and voluntary staff working regularly with children in sectors including education will need to be registered on the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) database.

Pullman said: "This is Labour's Section 28—the implication being that no adult could possibly choose to spend time with children unless they wanted to abuse them. What will it say to children? It'll say that every adult is a potential rapist or murderer, and that they should never trust anyone."

The His Dark Materials author added: "Naturally I shall have nothing to do with any such 'clearance', and in consequence, I suppose, 
I shall never be allowed into a school again. I shall regret that very much, but I refuse to be complicit in any measure that assumes my guilt before I've done anything wrong. The proposal deserves nothing but contempt."

Trollogy author Steve Barlow branded the legislation "undemocratic", "ineffective" and "in violation of one of the cornerstones of English law—the presumption of innocence until proved otherwise".

Authors will need to register with the ISA through an umbrella organisation and pay a one-off £64 fee. A spokeswoman for the Vetting and Barring Scheme at the Home Office confirmed that specialist children's librarians, and those librarians and authors visiting schools, would need to be registered. Currently, checks are at the discretion of local authorities. Foreign authors visiting UK schools would also have to register, as will booksellers going into schools once a month or more.
Chair of the Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Group of the Society of Authors Celia Rees said: "We have a number of reservations because it is not clear how people will be affected by this, and what the costs and process of application will be. I am sure that, as more people become aware of it, there will be a groundswell of opinion against it."

However, author Gillian Cross backed the new checks. She said: "I understand entirely why people are enraged about the whole child abuse suspicion frenzy, which is particularly hard on men. It is nevertheless true that many children are abused. Theirs is the real suffering, and if checking can help to prevent that, I'm not opposed to it. Though I would be interested to know how often CRB [Criminal Records Bureau] checks have actually prevented known abusers from working with children."

Cross said that the scheme that replaces the current Criminal Records Bureau checks could be better as it is automatically updated rather than being repeated annually.

[…]

The Bookseller

This madness, like all other madness, will one day just go away. People will scratch their heads, and wonder how it was that people went so completely mad.

Thankfully there are people out there who will simply not comply.

If everyone refused to comply, all the schools in the country that rely upon and who enjoy visits would cry out for the system to be abolished.

Of course, Home Educators can group together and invite whomever they want into their homes, without having to consult with or receive permission from anyone.

But you know this!

Database to track vulnerable children scrapped by Government

A multimillion-pound Government computer system swamped in red tape is to be scrapped after experts said it was a danger to vulnerable children, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

By Heidi Blake

Heidi, how could you…. FAIL like this?!

Local authorities have spent the past four years implementing the Government's £72m Integrated Children's System (ICS) amid threats that critical funding would be cut if they did not comply.

This is fascinating. How much autonomy do these Local Authorities have? If they refuse to implement something dangerous, like ICS, and actually work FOR the residents in the boroughs they run, they are permitted to DO THAT? If this is the case, Local Authorities could bill themselves as proper servants by listing the things they DO NOT DO, like use 'anti terror' laws to spy on the people they are serving, or not interfering with Home Educators, whom they also serve.

Hmmmmm!!!

But the system, described by staff as "an unworkable monster", generated stacks of paperwork 6ins thick for every child, had no way of tracking the siblings of abused children, and absorbed up to 80 per cent of social workers' time.

???!!

'No way of tracking siblings'… this sounds like something another database CAN do that Heidi has, quite inexplicably failed to mention in this article..

ContactPoint.

In response to a damning assessment of ICS by a group of Government-appointed experts, Baroness Morgan, the children's minister, has written to councils telling them they can abandon the controversial record-keeping system. She has left the responsibility for its replacement in their hands.

This is the dictionary definition of Disingenuous:

dis·in·gen·u·ous   (d?s’?n-j?n’y??-?s)   
adj.  

1. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating: “an ambitious, disingenuous, philistine, and hypocritical operator, who … exemplified … the most disagreeable traits of his time” (David Cannadine).
2. Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naïf.
3. Usage Problem Unaware or uninformed; naive.

dis’in·gen’u·ous·ly adv., dis’in·gen’u·ous·ness n.
Usage Note: The meaning of disingenuous has been shifting about lately, as if people were unsure of its proper meaning. Generally, it means “insincere” and often seems to be a synonym of cynical or calculating. Not surprisingly, the word is used often in political contexts, as in It is both insensitive and disingenuous for the White House to describe its aid package and the proposal to eliminate the federal payment as “tough love.” This use of the word is accepted by 94 percent of the Usage Panel. Most Panelists also accept the extended meaning relating to less reproachable behavior. Fully 88 percent accept disingenuous with the meaning “playfully insincere, faux-naïf,” as in the example “I don’t have a clue about late Beethoven!” he said. The remark seemed disingenuous, coming from one of the world’s foremost concert pianists.

Baroness Delyth Morgan KNOWS that ContactPoint is planned to be unleashed, and that the capabilities of ICS are a sub set of what ContactPoint will be able to deliver. To say, "you can do what you want" is simply absurd… its a sort of sideways lie. Absolutely disgusting.

Officials last night raised fears that vulnerable children were still at risk because it could take years to build a working alternative.

Heidi, are you COMPLETELY MAD? How can you write an article about this without at least Googling children database vulnerable UK many results about ContactPoint come up… for heaven's sake, BUY A CLUE.

Tim Loughton, shadow children's minister, said: "Ed Balls has finally had to admit what front line social workers have known all along – the Government's Integrated Children's System was at best a waste of money and at worst a danger to children.

And the same can be said of ContactPoint, only magnified to include EVERY CHILD in the UK.

"This system wasted more than £72 million of taxpayers' money, but the human cost to child protection and to the social work profession has been much higher."

ICS, which stores case records about children at risk of abuse, was introduced in the wake of the Laming report which revealed that information-sharing failures at Haringey Council led to the death of Victoria Climbie in 2000.

It is not information sharing failures that lead to the deaths of children. Databases cannot save children, or stop crime or prevent anything bad from happening. All they can do is put money in the pockets of contractors and take away the privacy of the people who are put in them.

Social services, when they have information about children at risk, should act on that information; sharing it with other people who also fail to act means that nothing is done. Its hot potato protection.

But the Social Work Task Force appointed this March to review child protection practices after the death of a second child in Haringey, Baby P, issued a damning verdict on the Government system.

In a letter to the Department for Children, Schools and Families this May, the Task Force called ICS a "burdensome process" which kept social workers "tied up in bureaucracy" and away from their duties on the front line.

And now, magnify that bureaucracy by the total number of people in the country who are going to be on ContactPoint, ELEVEN MILLION and you begin to get an idea of what a nightmare they are in for. ContactPoint is going to make people less safe, from the statistically insignificant number of people who are actually at risk to the vast, completely safe majority, who are now going to have their personal and sensitive data exposed to all and sundry, should ContactPoint go online.

An Ofsted report published last Friday found that Haringey council was still failing to protect vulnerable children and identified faults with ICS as part of the problem.

Blame the database? What did these people do BEFORE they had computers? Were people more safe before or after the implementation of databases? Are these tools actually getting in the way of people doing the real work that they are meant to be doing?

It stated: "The risks arising from these system dysfunctions are that data are unreliable, managers cannot easily track progress on cases and in some cases professionals… do not have access to critical child protection or safeguarding information."

And ContactPoint is going to magnify this exponentially. Also, the database tables for ContactPoint are going to need to be expanded dramatically in order to store all the information that is mentioned in that last blockquote and more. This means that ContactPoint as it is designed now, is just the skeleton of an even more intrusive monster system that is going to develop incrementally.

KILL IT WITH FIRE.

In her letter to councils, Baroness Morgan told councils she was "making it clear that local authorities will not be required to comply with the published specifications for ICS in order to receive capital funding".

Because ContactPoint is around the corner. Pure EVIL.

She added: "ICT systems which support children's care should be locally owned and implemented within a simplified national framework".

Called ContactPoint. There cannot be any social workers who do not know about ContactPoint. They must be scratching their heads at why she is not referring specifically to it in this communication. Perhaps she did. Heidi has not let us know. She failed to mention ContactPoint at all ini this article. Absolute unmitigated FAIL.

Local authorities had previously been forced to use Government-authorised computer systems, known collectively as the "Integrated Children's System", in order to qualify for crucial funding.

Blackmail.

But despite telling officials they could abandon the Government model, the children's minister denied that ICS was effectively being scrapped.

Illogical.

She said in a statement: "Part of developing a highly skilled and professional workforce is ensuring that the IT system social workers use is accessible, workable and secure.

Databases can never be secure. Highly skilled workforces existed before databases. This is nonsense on stilts.

"The Social Work Task Force agreed that ICS is the right system but made a number of recommendations. Today we are driving this change forward."

How can it be the right system, but be optional, and now abandoned? Oh yes, hot is cold, day is night, and 2+2=9.

Council officers said they would have to "junk" the Government's specifications and start again from scratch.

Whith whose money? And what this will do is put massive pressure on government to expand the capabilities of ContactPoint; why have lots of little unconnected databases when you can save money with economies of scale by rolling out ContactPoint 2 that has tables for everything everyone could possibly need?

This is the chess game that this dying bunck of Aparatchicks is playing. If they scrap ICS now, they believe it will be harder for the Tories to scrap ContactPoint since the Local Authorities up and down the country were told to destroy their bespoke systems. The Tories will also be forced to expand ContactPoint to save money as I described above.

Sadly for Mutterschwein of Drefelin ContactPoint is being scrapped because it is dangerous and immoral. No matter how much efficiency it provides or what its capabilities are, it should be scrapped because its existence is an affront and danger to all decent people in the UK.

No matter how difficult you make it with these pre death of Neu Liebour moves, nothing can change this. Your police state apparatus is going to be dismantled and you are already disgraced for overseeing and agreeing with its implementation.

Andrew Christie, Director of Children's Services at Hammersmith and Fulham, said: "The Government has left social workers and vulnerable children at the bottom of a black hole that it will take years to climb out of.

Actually, this is an opportunity for you to build something clean and decent that does what it needs to do without being immoral or dangerous.

"We have already spent a huge amount of time and money implementing this labyrinthine system and now we will have to spend more time and money unpicking it and retraining staff."

But you MUST do this to be a moral person, so GET ON WITH IT and don't complain.

Staff at Kensington and Chelsea council, which had its funding cut for refusing to implement ICS in 2005, said they were being "inundated" with requests from other councils wanting to buy the alternative system they have built.

I wonder how it works?

RBK&C is also the council that publicly voiced skepticism about ContactPoint and offered shielding to whoever wanted it:

The Council has reservations about the scheme. These include concerns about the lack of publicity surrounding it and about security and confidentiality issues.

There are 33,000 children in Kensington and Chelsea. The Government expects their details to be included on ContactPoint and has made the Council responsible for the upkeep of that information.

The Government wanted the first 17 councils that are introducing ContactPoint to be using it from April 2009, with other councils – including Kensington and Chelsea – following in due course.

Although glitches in the system may delay the start date, the personal information of children living in the borough will be available to those first 17 councils as soon as they ‘go live’. Information on ContactPoint will include name, address, gender, a unique identification number and name and contact details of the child’s parent or carer. It will also show the child’s GP practice, health visitor, school and school nurse but not the detailed information that a GP or school would have.

Access
The Government currently estimates that around 390,000 people who work with children will be able to access the database nationally. They will be fully trained and follow strict confidentiality guidelines.

Safeguards and confidentiality
Although the Government maintains that the security of ContactPoint is of paramount importance and that it has been rigorously tested, Kensington and Chelsea Council is concerned about security issues and the ability of the database to keep information about children who are adopted confidential.

At the time of writing representatives from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) were still trying to remedy security issues that had been identified in the system.

Shielding
The Government has proposed something called ‘shielding’ as an extra measure to protect children and families from harm. Shielding means hiding details of the child’s, young person’s or family member’s whereabouts and reflects the fact that the Government accepts that a small number of children, young people and their parent(s) may be put at significant risk if their whereabouts become known. If a child is shielded, only their name, date of birth, gender and unique number will be visible.

The Royal Borough is encouraging parents and carers to consider shielding for their child or children. The Council will deal with each request for shielding individually and according to its shielding policy. Parents or carers who want the Council to exercise its discretion regarding their data should get in touch as soon as possible. Children and young people themselves can also apply for shielding.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is determined to support the best interests of its children and to address the understandable anxieties of parents/carers. Any request to ‘shield’ a record should include the reason why ‘shielding’ would safeguard the child. The Council will need to verify the applicant’s relationship to the child.

To enquire about shielding contact the CAF and Integrated Working Team on 020 7598 4694 or email: contactpoint@rbkc.gov.uk

What do you think?

[…]

http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/RBKCDirect/rdcouncilpriorities/cp0904_contactpoint.asp#shielding

I think you should not be implementing it at all. I think you are morally obligated to refuse it. I think ContactPoint is going to be scrapped.

A lurker sent this in; it is from ‘Barefoot Social Worker a radical social work perspective’:

Growing calls for greater regulation of home education need a social work response. Social workers are being asked to exercise greater controls over families who reject state education and keep home educated children under closer surveillence. This move is authoritarian and inconsistent with social work values and should be strongly resisted.

[…]

Apart from the threat to civil liberties there are serious questions to be asked about whether local authorities should be taking on additional responsibilities at a time of financial cutbacks. There is a workforce crisis in child protection social work and many frontline workers are already struggling to cope with large caseloads. Extending the social work role with home educators is definitely not a priority while high-risk cases go undetected.

Hilary Searing

http://www.radical.org.uk/barefoot/heducation.htm

Hmmmmmmm

It seems that there are some social workers who are against the Badman and Balls show.

Good.

The fact that there are SOME against it makes the problem just the same… if you are unlucky. If you fail to win a home in a decent place, you will be subjected to a ‘post-code lottery’ for Home Education where if you live in a place where there is naked hostility to HE, you are going to be brutally harassed, whereas if you live somewhere else, you might never be troubled at all. Clearly this is unacceptable; you cannot leave to the judgment (or lack of judgment, or prejudices) of individuals wether or not a family’s way of live is ‘acceptable’ or not. We have just seen what happens when the completely insane are let lose to exercise their power, judgement, mad appetite for destruction on people that they do not like for whatever reason. The future will be one of a wide spectrum of abuse like that, from ambushes and kidnapping down to incessant nuisance letter writing and everything in between. The law must not be altered to allow ANYONE to harass or interfere with Home Educators. Period.

It would be nice to hear social workers saying, “this is a step too far, we will not cooperate with the Badman and Balls proposals”. Teachers are already refusing to operate the levers of the police state; its up to professionals to refuse to destroy Britain by pushing back from their side.

Please read this article in the Telegraph, which describes how a father was ambushed in front of the school his children were attending by social services:

[…]

Details of yet another shocking case, which comes to its climax in a county court in eastern England this week, have recently been placed in the House of Lords Library. This follows a comprehensive investigation carried out on behalf of the family by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who, as a hereditary peer, does not sit in the Lords, but has passed his dossier both to an active life peer and to this column.

Until six weeks ago, Mr and Mrs Jones, as I must call them under reporting restrictions, lived happily with their three young children, two sons and a daughter, aged under 13. Mr Jones, a business consultant, is related to various European royal families and his brother is a senior Army officer seconded to the UN. If he has one weakness, as he admits, it is to refer to these connections, as he did to the heads of the schools attended by his two older children, saying that he was particularly concerned for their security. He asked that he could be allowed to drive into the school grounds when picking up his daughter, because he did not want to leave her waiting, potentially vulnerable, in the road outside.
The headmistress agreed to this, but, concerned about other children's safety, contacted the local police, who in turn passed on their concerns to social services. The result of this was that, on May 18, when Mr and Mr Jones, accompanied by their younger son, arrived at school to pick up their daughter, they were met by a group of strangers, one as it turned out a female social worker. She asked, without explaining why or who she was, whether he was Mr Jones. When she three times refused to show him any ID, he was seized from behind by two policemen, handcuffed and put under arrest.

He was driven by a policeman to a nearby mental hospital where he was told that, because of "a number of concerns", he was being detained under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act and "sectioned" under S.2 as of "unsound mind". His wife, it turned out, had been similarly arrested, for loudly protesting at the handcuffing of her husband and the forcible seizing from her arms of her young son. The three children had been taken into care by social services.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

This is a comment from this blog post about this deeply disturbing story:

I too was shocked by this latest example of State terror. I agree with everything Gareth says. But what's happened here is no different from the post-Stalin Soviet Union. There, people who, it was decided by some lowly apparatchik, were "insane" because they had criticised the state implicitly or explicitly in some way were routinely sectioned, their children sent to orphanages and their futures wrecked.

They were forced to put all their energies into clearing their name, but they often never saw their children again regardless of whether they achieved this, or not. And "common sense" was regarded as a bourgeois concept. Apparently, that's exactly how it's regarded in socialist Britain, too these days.

The comparison between the UK and the Soviet Union of 1955-85 is not just some convenient satirical device for political point-scoring, it now must be viewed as a genuine one.

Personally, I think just before the social workers and their bosses, the police and theirs, the magistrate and the psychologists who with an abusive diagnosis "sectioned" this man and forced him into the British equivalent of a Psikhushka, and the government who created this climate of justified fear in its ongoing war on the middle classes, are all summarily fired, the headmistress who started the whole process should be. She's the worst of the lot.

None of them is fit to sweep our streets. They are the real danger to society. They should be treated as such.

What the hell is a ‘Psikhushka’?!

Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture.

Psikhushka (Russian: психушка) is a Russian colloquialism for psychiatric hospital. It has been occasionally used in English since the dissident movement in the Soviet Union became known in the West.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union

Unbelievable.

What this story means is that no one is safe in Britain. You can be picked up at any time for merely saying something that an apartchick does not like. You have no avenue of redress, no court to appeal to and no way to fight back.

Another blogger chimes in BLOGDIAL style:

That gives us ground to lock up and remove the children of all those MPs who voted for their children, and the children of celebrities, to be exempt from the child database then, does it?

[…]

http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/2009/07/child-snatching-it-really-happens.html

Actually, no it doesn’t, because THEY say what reality is, NOT YOU.

What should happen is this:

The magistrate (who is on the board of governors of the Psikhushka where this man was held, i.e. totally corrupt)
The ‘social workers’
The police officers who ambushed him
The school head who made the call

Should all be named.
Should all be prosecuted for aiding and abetting kidnap.
Should all be fined and or imprisoned.
Should all be fired and lose all benefits.

Everyone involved in this should be tarred and feathered. It should happen immediately, and not after a long procedural delay. An example must be made of them to strike fear into any ‘social worker’ or the people they swirl around who thinks that they could do this to another single person in this country.

If that does not happen, every other ‘social worker’ will take this as a message that they can do anything they want with a guarantee of complete immunity.

The question is, who is next, and under what trumped up pretext are they going to snatch some children and lock the parents up? Just when you thought it could not get more insane, it does.

In a move backed by children’s charities today, Baroness Delyth Morgan has announced routine mandatory checks on the genitals of all female children in England and Wales for signs of circumcision. The yearly examinations are to take place in the homes of every British family with a female child.

An amazing, impossible headline and story you would say yes? The fact of the matter is however, that this is exactly what is being asked for by Baroness Delyth Morgan, with her absurd and insulting assertion that Home Education is a cover for arranged marriage, and that all Home Educators need to be registered and then examined regularly to make sure that arranged marriage is not taking place.

A blogger we admire, Renegade Parent, has actually been called a racist for questioning the logic of this. She is right to say that this is insane, and her logic in this matter is flawless.

Arranged marriage does not occur in the families of the ‘ethnic British‘, who are the majority in this country. To force EVERYONE to be regularly examined for ‘signs of arranged marriage’ by compelling them to register with their Local Authority and then to submit to arbitrary inspection in their own homes is therefore, totally insane.

Only those people who come from cultures that do arranged marriages (which by the way, is their absolute right) should be targeted, if anyone is going to be targeted at all. Of course, if you target one type of person based on their ‘race’, the politically correct lunatics will accuse the government of being racist and of using racial profiling, both of which would be true in this instance.

There is no reason whatsoever to check ethnically British families (or the families of Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Americans, Canadians, Russians etc etc) to see if arranged marriage is taking place. The fact of the matter is people with a different culture, one in which arranged marriages are normal, are now entrenched here. You have to accept them for what they are, since they have no intention of changing their ancient and completely legitimate ways. It’s either that, or destroy your own culture and ways in a vain attempt to try and force them to adapt, i.e. erasing the rights of parents, destroying civil liberties, dismantling the family, making the state a third parent just as New Labour are doing right now.

None of this has anything to do with racism. It is common sense.

This attack on Home Education is completely baseless, evil and fraudulent. The people behind it are weak minded, paranoid, delusional, ignorant, tunnel visioned family wreckers, who if they had one brain-cell and shred of decency between them would have researched Home Education and seen that it is taking off in the USA and world-wide reaching over 1.5 MILLION children in the USA alone and that it is something to be encouraged, not banned, like their spiritual leader had it banned. US State legislatures are now routinely removing the artificial and immoral barriers to Home Education whilst Backward Britain™ created by Neu Liebour is moving in precisely the opposite direction, turning Britain from one of the best places to Home Educate into one of the worst places.

How. Stupid.

Back to the subject at hand. Let’s look at it another way for the lulz (courtesy of Mimi Majick); imagine this statement from Baroness Delyth Morgan:

All girls in the UK are to be screened for testicular cancer. We are doing this so that we do not appear to be sexist in our quest to eliminate this terrible disease.

These examinations would obviously coincide with the proposed mandatory checks for female circumcision.

You think that is insane of course, and that nothing remotely like it could ever happen… and you are WRONG.

The deadly anti cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil has been proposed for BOYS as well as girls. If I remember correctly, only the female of the species has a cervix. Home Educated people of course, are up on their anatomy, unlike their state schooled counterparts.

These people are completely mad, and when the little boy (in this case Renegade Parent) stands up and says, “the empress has no clothes” the morons come out of the woodwork and start calling names. Well, I have some news for you morons; 2+2 always equals 4. It will always equal 4, until the end of time. You are WRONG.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, Graham Badman, Ed Balls and all the other creatures of the night are wrong in what they think, what they do, what they propose and the conclusions they come to. They are the wreckers of civilization, the enemies of common sense and liberty and their time has come to an end, even if they do not yet know it.

Finally, to Renegade Parent directly, you are a voice of pure common sense, a true voice for liberty and the rights of man. People like you are what made this country great. We support you, we know that you are correct, and join with you in denouncing these pig ignorant brainwashed monsters that are trying to kill everything that is good.

Even if you were to say something that we do not agree with, we defend your right to publish it. I have said it before; this is what distinguishes us from the rabble, the sheeple, the sleeple and the eloi; our philosophy does not require anyone to obey us, whereas their philosophy requires everyone to obey them.

We are the best.

And that means YOU.

Long time readers of BLOGDIAL know that we use substitution to find out what something really means. Lets find out what happens when we use it on the amendments tabled by Lord Lucas:

LORD LUCAS

311 Insert the following new Clause—
“Support for Miscegenation
Support for Miscegenation

1. The Secretary of State shall establish a body to be known as the Miscegenation Consultative Committee (the “MECC”).
2. The Secretary of State shall appoint to the MECC such persons as he considers appropriate.
3. The Secretary of State shall consult the MECC whenever he intends to make proposals that will have an effect on Miscegenated families.
4. The MECC may undertake investigations into areas of policy or practice in relationships between the government and the Miscegenated community.
5. The MECC may produce and promote guidelines and examples of good practice in relationships between the government and the Miscegenated community.
6. The MECC may make proposals to the Secretary of State for changes in practice or policy of Miscegenation.”

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldbills/042/amend/ml042-iih.htm

See what just happened?

In case you didn’t know…

Miscegenation (Latin miscere “to mix” + genus “kind”) is the mixing of different racial groups, that is, marrying, cohabiting, having sexual relations and having children with a partner from outside one’s racially or ethnically defined group.

[…]

Usage

The term “miscegenation” has been used since the nineteenth century to refer to interracial marriage and interracial sex, and more generally to the process of racial admixture, which has taken place since ancient history but has become more global through European colonialism since the Age of Discovery. Historically the term has been used in the context of laws banning interracial marriage and sex, so-called anti-miscegenation laws. It is therefore a loaded word and is considered offensive by many.

Today, the word miscegenation is avoided by many scholars, because the term suggests a distinct biological phenomenon, rather than a categorization imposed on certain relationships. The word is considered offensive by many and other terms such as “interracial,” “interethnic” or “cross-cultural” are more common in contemporary usage.[1] However, the term is still used by scholars when referring to past practices concerning multiraciality, such as anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriages[2].

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation

For the record, many entries in Wikipedia are… ‘confused’ about the issue of ‘race’. This article is certainly one of them.

What this substitution does is demonstrate the absurdity of having the Secretary of State establish a body to regulate Home Education. Home Education is not the business of the state, and neither is it the business of the state who you want to marry or live with. Both are as natural as sunshine, or clouds in the sky, and all of these things regulate themselves perfectly well without interference.

I could have just as easily inserted ‘Muslim’ in place of ‘Miscegenation’. Can you imagine ANYONE proposing that there be a ‘Muslim Consultative Committee’ that would, “…make proposals to the Secretary of State for changes in practice or policy controlling Muslims”? The idea would never cross the minds of anyone in the legislature; they are frightened to death of any vocal grouping that has established itself as ‘normal’. Sadly, Home Educators have failed to understand the need for professional and ongoing PR to make just that establishment a reality for themselves, and now, unless something is done immediately, they are going to watch their families be destroyed, forced to leave the country, harassed and hounded like criminals, very much in the same way that ‘mixed race’ couples were harassed in the USA.

The question is, do you, Home Educator, want to wait until the time where there is an equivalent of the current US president to dispel myths about Miscegenation – a time, which is certainly coming, where Home Education is completely accepted as the absolute norm, or are you going to go through twenty years of hell waiting for the rest of the country to wake up? Are you going to take the bull by the horns and use the tools available to you to make the reality change to accept you, or are you going to sit there and cry like a baby?

I must point out also, that Lord Lucas has tabled this amendment after having been told explicitly and overwhelmingly on his blog that this is NOT what is required.

All of you who have faith in politics had better get a grip on reality; these people exist to create new legislation, not to protect you and your family. Seeking your rights from them is what a slave does. Free people TAKE their rights, and do not beg like serfs.

But you know this!

Gavin Webb is a Libertarian Liberal Democrat councillor for Stoke and Trent Vale ward on Stoke-on-Trent City Council.

He has just written something that was sent to us, so lets look at it shall we?

Those who can, teach – like parents!

As a matter of principle, Liberal Democrats should support home educators in their opposition to Graham Badman’s recommendations in the Review of Elective Home Education in England. However, I fear the Party leadership will not do so.

That is because they have no principles, obviously.

Instead, it looks at though it will be seeking to find a ‘balance’ between the rights of parents to decide for themselves how best to educate their children, and the collective welfare of children as a whole.

Why am I so concerned that the Party may side with collectivism as opposed to defending individual rights? Upon seeking clarification on the Party’s policy on home education from Cowley Street’s policy boffs, and in particular on the Badman recommendations, I was reliably informed of the need to find that balance. In short, I was told the Party is generally supportive of the Badman recommendations.

Which is just what we expect from a party filled with irrational people.

I have several problems with siding with this subjective piece of rubbish. As a libertarian, I say the Party should not be endorsing coerced collectivism at all. Sure, if a group of parents want to voluntarily come together and register their children with the State and the evil database that is ContactPoint, then let them do so. I would say they are foolish in their choice but they should be free to do so nonetheless.

Parents should not be ‘free to register with ContactPoint’. That is completely absurd. If the government of TODAY says its voluntary, any future government could suddenly make it COMPULSORY. This is why we should never support totalitarian infrastructures being built in the first place; you may trust Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, but in the future, someone who you do not trust may take the reigns and do something dastardly with all that collected data. Also, for some parents to be able to use ContactPoint, the parents who do not want it will have their money stolen from them to pay for it by the state. The state should never put something like this together. If parents want to create and run their own private ContactPoint, that is another thing, but one designed and run by the state is always unacceptable to Libertarians. This is pretty basic stuff, how can you get it so very wrong AND support No2ID?

If however, parents decide they want nothing to do with the State, they too should be free to exercise their rights.

They should be free to live without interfacing with the state.

Under the Badman proposals home educators will not be permitted their rights.

They will have their rights stripped from them. They will not be free to exercise their rights.

They will be forced to register their children with their local education authority, and their children will be entered onto the ContactPoint register, and if parents’ standard or type of education doesn’t conform with that which is prescribed by the State – which most of us know to be crap – then the freedom to home educate their children will be denied them. Opposition to this is a matter of principle for all Liberal Democrats.

No, it is a matter of principle for all libertarians. Liberal Democrats HAVE NO PRINCIPLES except BAD ONES.

Of course, if a child is being abused – which, as an aside, government do-gooders have attempted to use as a justification for more regulation and control of home education – then that is another matter. No-one should be aggressed against contrary to their will. If there are victims of abuse, then the full weight of relevant laws should fall upon the aggressors.

Home Education has nothing to do with children at risk. The two should never be used in the same context, except to refute that vicious lie.

And the current laws and systems in place are more than adequate. In fact, in every one of the cases that the state trots out as pretexts for more control, the social services and police were fully aware of the families involved, were concerned and took no action. The fact of the matter is that they consistently fail to protect children; this is the message that is never propagated and brought to light. More powers will not help them improve their common sense. Putting ALL children into a database harms ALL children; it creates a needle-in-a-haystack scenario where people are looking into the affairs of perfectly innocent and ordinary people for no good reason.

If however a child is not receiving an ‘adequate’ education, this in itself should be no business of the State’s to resolve. Despite it being written in man-made Human Rights laws (that by the way also protect the State so should perhaps be referred to as Human and States’ Rights laws) the truth is that under natural law no-one has a right to education.

Agreed.

Yes, it would be nice if every single human being on this planet had access to not just a ’suitable’ education, but excellent education too; but I say this again, no-one has a ‘right’ to education. For if they had, the question is then what standard of education? Mediocre to poor? For that is the general standard delivered by the State to our children.

True.

If people want better than the State can provide, they should be able to opt out of State provision without fear of threat and hindrance from government and its agents. They should have unrestricted freedom to choose what they believe is best for their own kids because – and this is a fundamental point – the kids belong to the parents, not to society or government!

True!

Once bureaucrats gets involved and starts dictating the terms, quoting laws and targets, the already high standards that are achieved in most cases through home education – and indeed independent sector education – will be dragged down to State level.

True.

I hope the Party leadership sees sense and doesn’t allow the collectivist malaise undermine home educators’ freedoms, for if it does, it may as well ditch the word ‘Liberal’ and replace it with ‘Social’.

It is YOU that clearly have no place in the Liberal Democrat Party.

Are you a Libertarian, or are you a Liberal Democrat? How can you possibly remain a member of a party that explicitly wants to eradicate the rights of people to run their families as they choose?

You cannot serve two masters; you can either be FOR liberty or AGAINST it, and liberty is indivisible. Its like someone who is a member of the BNP saying on the one hand that they are FOR immigration but at the same time they are members of a party that is explicitly AGAINST immigration.

Gavin Webb’s council is going to run ContactPoint. Unless they say otherwise, he will be involved in the mass violation of children by working in a place that runs that system. I would like to see a written declaration that he is going to refuse to do any work that comes from, is in any way touched by ContactPoint.

When populations are being rounded up for ethnic cleansing, many people working in the apparatus simply got on with their jobs, even though they might not have agreed with what was happening. Every person who works at a council and who touches ContactPoint instantly becomes an accessory to the sale of children. By using that database, they are helping the contractors make money out of the children they have been paid to put into that database.

I do not immediately see a policy position on ContactPoint at Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s website but we do find this:

Elective Home Education

Information for Parents/Carers

The education of your child is a great responsibility, one that Stoke-on-Trent City Council takes very seriously. We have 93 schools across the city, catering for a wide range of needs and abilities. We are proud of the way they meet the challenges of an ever changing environment, whilst continuing to provide a rich diversity of experience for pupils of all ages.

It is a legal duty of parents/guardians to secure appropriate full-time education for their children. Most parents/guardians do this by ensuring that their child attends their local school. However, for a variety of reasons, a small number of them decide to take on the duty to educate their child themselves. In Stoke-on-Trent there are about 45 families educating their children at home, out of a total school population of over 32,063.

Educating at home is sometimes known as ‘Education Otherwise’, named after one of the independent charities set up to support such parents. More information about this charity can be found on the ‘Useful Contact and Links’ page.

Children should not be taken out of school simply because of a disagreement with the local school. There are many ways of solving such problems and talking to the Headteacher, or consulting with Children and Young People’s Services, will often resolve any difficulties. In Stoke-on-Trent, we will always make every effort to find a place at the most appropriate school for your child.

Home education is a major undertaking for a family. It will require serious amounts of time, patience and energy, and can have financial consequences.

[…]

http://www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/education/home-education/

It is not the place of Stoke-on-Trent City Council to ‘take seriously’ the education of children who they themselves admit, are ‘yours’. How many schools you have is irrelevant… and for that matter, lets take a peek inside one of the schools that you ARE responsible for:

Peer Support at Longton High School

Longton High School is a large comprehensive on top of a hill on a mostly council housing estate on the edge of Stoke-on- Trent. The building consists of a tall tower block and a maze of buildings on the ground floor.

The kinds of problems students face are racial and bullying problems such as harassment, name calling, violence and singling out occurring both in between lessons on the schools corridors, and during break and dinner. The school has had a few major racial disputes but mainly faced with minor disputes between students, which with the skills we have been taught through our training, we are confident to deal with.

[…]

Anti-Bullying Alliance

Uh huh, just as we thought, your schools are as bad as everyone else’s.

They then say that:

It is a legal duty of parents/guardians to secure appropriate full-time education for their children.

This is a LIE. The actual wording of the law is:

Duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age
The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—
(a)to his age, ability and aptitude, and
(b)to any special educational needs he may have,either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

As you can see, the word ‘appropriate’ is not there. What is or is not appropriate is the affair of the parent, not Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Also, as someone clever said on a blog, if a parent sends their child to a school that they know is not providing an efficient full-time education, are they not ‘in violation’, since it is the duty of the parent to ensure that their child receives such education? Or are they relieved of all responsibility under that section of the law should they hand their children over to the state?

Hmmmmmmmmmmm!

Educating at home is sometimes known as ‘Education Otherwise’

Say WHAT?

Children should not be taken out of school simply because of a disagreement with the local school.

Says who? It is precisely because of disagreements with the local school that children are removed from school.

Home education is a major undertaking for a family. It will require serious amounts of time, patience and energy, and can have financial consequences.

Having a family is ‘a major undertaking’ educating your children is a part of it. Raising a family requires serious amounts of time (whatever that means), patience and energy, which parents (especially women) have in abundance, and having a family costs money.

We know this.

Major digression there, but I just could not let it lie. I will leave you to splutter your tea over your keyboards at their useful contacts page and their outrageous FAQ, where you will find gems like:

What evidence will the Local Authority expect to receive?

Basically, we are satisfying ourselves that the education received by the chid is ‘efficient, suitable and full-time’, so the sort of evidence will be:

• long and short-term planning;
• possibly a weeks outline programme;
• a diary of work covered; and
• evidence of the child’s own work.
• Often talking to the child will be important evidence

and

What does the law actually say about the parent’s duty?
A parents’ duty is actually defined under section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, which says:

“…to cause the child to receive efficient full-time education suitable to his/her age, ability and aptitude and to any special educational needs he/she may have either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.”

Unfortunately the words ‘efficient’ and ‘suitable’ are not defined. ‘Efficient’ is usually taken to mean that the activity achieves what it sets out to achieve, and it is ‘suitable’, if it prepares the child for life in our society and enables the child to fulfill their potential.

My emphasis on the last one.

We are now at the stage where everyone has to draw a line and say, “I am morally obligated to refuse to work with this.” Everyone has their limits and their pain threshold, however it is clear that unless people refuse to take a stand and refuse to assist this infernal machine, it will continue to gain momentum and end up turning us all into hamburger meat.

Its good to read words from people who are waking up; we must give credit where credit is due, every time. At the same time, illogic, inconsistency, errors of judgment etc have to be flagged, otherwise, people persist in believing nonsense. Im sure Gavin is a nice guy. Clearly he can think, and he is aware of what is going on to a great extent. What I cannot accept are inconsistencies that actually hurt people. By all means, everyone can believe what contradictory stuff they like. When it becomes a matter for concern is when those people have their hands on the levers of the machine.

FURTHERMORE

I updated and reinforced the section about parents who want ContactPoint being entitled to it.

People are waking up to what all of this really means, and how all the dots join up.

By Chris Buratta

A father has refused permission for his daughter's Oxford school to take her fingerprints – fearing it is step towards a 'Big Brother' state.

IT IS a step towards exactly that, and even if this library system is self contained, i.e. does not connect to any other database anywhere, the very fact that they have it serves to soften up the students into accepting this sort of technology as a part of ordinary life, when it is not. It is a total invasion and violation, and as we can see below, even the ignorant pigs administering it do not know how it works.

Ben Emlyn-Jones's daughter Louisa, 12, attends St Gregory the Great School in Cowley – which is planning to use fingerprint recognition software in its library.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Windale Primary School, Glory Farm Primary School, Matthew Arnold Secondary School and The Cherwell School currently use fingerprint systems in libraries and Cheney School uses the technology to register pupils.

Absolutely ridiculous. Whats more, I would like to know how much this system cost the school. I wonder how many BOOKS you could buy with the same money….hmmmmmm!

Mr Emlyn-Jones said: "I am really quite disturbed about it, it reminds me of a Big Brother state.

"There may be advantages in having a fingerprint database, but the price you pay is too high."

There is NO advantage to it. Library books in a school, where all the pupils are known and where only pupils can enter has no need to install a system whose purpose is to uniquely identify an individual. The people who allowed this to be introduced into the school simply cannot THINK.

He refused to allow his daughter's fingerprints to be taken and was also concerned that the school had not contacted parents.

Well done Mr Emlyn-Jones, you are a hero, and a good parent.

He added: "It is as if they know it is wrong and have done it secretly, hoping no-one finds out."

That is EXACTLY what they are doing, otherwise, they would have contacted everyone in advance. The amount of time, effort to explain and money to roll this out is a complete waste of scarce resources.

Mr Emlyn-Jones said he was opposed to the principle of biometric data being used by schools.

"Once people are on a computer then the world's your oyster as far as the Government is concerned.

Exactly right.

"It also desensitises kids. When they're grown up and they apply for a passport and apply for jobs they won't bat an eyelid about having fingerprints taken or a laser being shined in their eyes."

This man's brain is switched to 'ON'. And what is great is that his daughter will also have her brain switched on also.

This week, Liberal Democrats called for Government guidelines to be introduced to control the use of the technology in schools.

But Mr Emlyn-Jones said that would not satisfy his concerns.

He said: "Once the infrastructure is in place those guidelines could be abolished. That's my concern."

Once people have their brains working, its impossible to placate them with doubletalk and weasel words, at which the Liberal Democrats are masters. They want to cancel ID cards because of the 'privacy concerns' but then want to replace the rates with a local income tax which would mean the council getting into far more of your private affairs than they do now, either by having data shared with them or by collecting it to calculate your new 'more fair' rates. You see? COMPLETELY STUPID. But I digress…

Now comes the ignorant pig part:

St Gregory the Great's learning resources manager Hilja Bassett said the library system, which would be operational next term, was very efficient and secure.

Just because it is efficient, that does not make it right. And in what way is it more efficient? By what measure? Does that library exist for the convenience of the students or the convenience of the staff? As for 'secure' how does she know it is secure? Did she design the system? Does she know wether or not it connects to any other computers over the internets? Does she know ANYTHING ABOUT IT AT ALL? Or is she just repeating verbatim from the sales pitch?

She added: "It can only be used in this one place, in this one way, for this purpose."

And that one way and one purpose are illegitimate.

She said fingerprints were not stored, just certain data taken from the print.

And there is the proof that Hilja Bassett is a completely ignorant pig, computer illiterate student violating jackass. NO biometric fingerprint system stores the ENTIRE PRINT. They ALL work by mapping the print, finding points to store and then storing those points; that is enough to (90% of the time) uniquely identify the person whose finger it is on the scanner. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT YOU STUPID RETARD its not about actual images of the fingerprints, its about being identified by a part of your body that is unique to you. And of course once it is in the database it can then be transferred (along with all the prints and the names and addresses of the other students) to other databases and systems where if the admins are corrupt, your UNIQUE IDENTIFIER can be placed alongside a criminal profile turing YOU into the criminal, even though you have never done anything whatsoever. Don't believe me? IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING:

Old news department, or a taste of how NIR information will be implemented. I emphasise.

A FYLDE coast student was arrested after posting Christmas cards to his family

Stunned David Atkinson found himself at his local police station under suspicion of stealing the festive greetings he last saw when he put them in a postbox five years ago. Due to fingerprints found on the mail – which was stolen then recovered – police thought they had their man. However, it transpired the “suspect’s” fingerprints were those of the student who had innocently sent the cards to relatives when he was 15.

Mr Atkinson, now 21, of [address omitted – gosh, to think that his address was posted online after this, mm], was arrested because his DNA and fingerprints had been kept on record under controversial Government laws to combat terror.

It was only after Mr Atkinson asked officers to look more deeply into the crime his innocence was proved.

The law student said it has shattered his confidence in the system. He said: “The potential incompetence, laziness, or over enthusiasm of an individual officer means an innocent, law-abiding citizen can never truly have confidence in the giant police database.”

It was the second time Mr Atkinson had been arrested – twice for crimes he did not commit. He has now lent his support to a campaign to force a rethink by the Home Office.

The mix-up began last March when Mr Atkinson was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage – but, when the real culprit gave himself up to police, he was released without charge.

During his short time with the police, he had his fingerprints and DNA taken as part of the arrest procedure but, under recently passed laws, all details – no matter whether the person is innocent or guilty – are kept on a national computer.

Mr Atkinson thought nothing of it until he got a call from officers a month later asking him to go along to the station. He said: “I was arrested as soon as I went in. “The officer told me he had a computer report which had automatically matched my fingerprints with those recovered from a number of items of post which had been stolen from a letter box in December 2000.

“As a result of this report alone, and no further investigation, the officer advised me to ‘get the matter out of the way quickly and take a caution now’.

“After refusing to admit a crime I’d not committed, I was bailed while further investigations were made.”
“The recovered letters were in fact my family Christmas cards which had been taken after I had posted them five years ago.
“This innocent explanation had not even crossed the officer’s mind and, as far as he was concerned, if his computer report said I was guilty then I had to be.”

Mr Atkinson complained to Lancashire Constabulary and eventually received an apology. But, he claims, without the Government’s “menace to our freedom”, he would not have been put through the ordeal. A police spokesman said: “We can confirm that we did receive a complaint in August about a wrongful arrest concerning stolen post. “This was investigated thoroughly under our normal complaints procedure and dealt with locally to the satisfaction of both parties. “Under current legislation, all police forces can retain and record DNA taken for arrestable offences no matter what the eventual outcome of the investigation.”

ben.rossington@blackpoolgazette.co.uk

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=304

And there you have it. These systems are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, and should not be in schools for any reason WHATSOEVER.

Parents had been informed through a newsletter, she added, and pupils who did not wish to use the system could still make use of library services.

Oxford Mail

So out the window goes Mutterschwein Hilja Bassett’s claim that it is for efficiency; if people can opt out of the system, that means they will be running two concurrent systems, the old and venerable Library card system and the new one, causing inefficiency.

And apologies to all Mutterschwein out there; calling Hilja Bassett a pig is an insult to pigs.

If you are a Home Schooler, you never have to deal with any of this of course!

FURTHERMORE

This courtesy of Home Ed Forums:

The truth about biometric systems used in schools (using verifiable references)

“People have to be stark, raving mad to use conventional biometrics to improve the efficiency of a children’s lunch line.” Kim Cameron , Microsoft’s Identity Architect, 05 April 2007 (read more from Kim Cameron)

“If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime. Once a child has touched a scanner they will be at the mercy of the matching algorithm for the rest of their lives.” Brian Drury , IT security consultant, 12 March 2007 (read more from Brian Drury)

Schools that introduce fingerprinting usually try to reassure parents by saying “the system does not store a fingerprint, just a number. It is not possible to reconstruct an image of a fingerprint from what is stored”.

• The short answer is that fingerprint templates are what is stored on these systems. These are the equivalent of fingerprints – rather like the difference between a drawing and a photo – otherwise the systems simply wouldn’t work.
• Police, the security services, and governments use fingerprint templates to identify criminals.
• There are international standards to ensure that biometric templates from different manufacturers are compatible – so what’s stored on one system can be read by any other, including government systems.
• Where fingerprint templates are stored in an encrypted form, it is impossible for anyone to guarantee that this won’t be broken during a person’s entire lifetime. A PIN number can easily be changed. A fingerprint, and the template dervived from it, cannot ever be changed.
• Moreover, the Government has the power to demand encryption keys from the system supplier, under the terms of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 Part III.
• In the future, fingerprint templates will be used to authenticate passports, bank accounts, etc. Thus biometric templates are extremely valuable and need to be kept in a highly secure environment.
• In addition, fingerprint templates can be used to rapidly link different databases and to build up a disturbingly accurate profile of an individual without their knowledge or consent.
• The US government’s official National Science & Technology Council says you CAN reconstruct a fingerprint image from a fingerprint template.
• Government security experts have successfully hacked the fingerprint scanners used in schools.
• Schools cannot possibly provide the level of security necessary to protect children’s data.
• A school might not even be aware that children’s data had been compromised until it was far too late.

“If you want to find out who owns a fingerprint, just convert the fingerprint to a template and do a search for the template in one of these databases. Call the template a binary number if you want to. The point is that all you need to save in the database is the number. Later, when you come across a “fingerprint of interest”, you just convert it to a number and search for it. Law enforcement can use this information – and so can criminals.”

Kim Cameron , architect of identity and access in Microsoft’s connected systems division, 09 May 2007

http://www.leavethemkidsalone.com/facts.htm

You can get very tired of people voicing their ill-considered views about home-based education with no apparent knowledge of the research of the last 30 years in UK, USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere on the subject. They are also forgetful of the dire effects of ‘compulsory mis-education’, as Goodman put it, in the day-prison system of learning called schools.

One response is to point out that their comments on home-based education might be construed as a kind of treason. After all, the Queen is a home-based education graduate, so accusations of ‘missing out on socialisation’, ‘no exposure to approved forms of knowledge’, etc., must apply to the monarch. The response to this line of argument is usually an uncomfortable silence.

Those who prefer Presidents democratically elected to unelected monarchs can look at the USA situation where of the 42 or so past presidents, 17 were home-based education graduates. Moreover, the various studies trying to rank them in order of success, consistently put the first five as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, you have guessed it – they are all home-based education graduates.

There is a second kind of treason, to the evidence of other well-known people who were home-educated. Thus, Yehudi Menuhin went to school for only one half day.

“When I came back from the morning, my mother asked me what I had learnt. I said, ‘I really didn’t learn anything. I sat at the back of the class, and there was a little window high upon the wall, through which I could see branches. I hoped that a bird would alight. No bird alighted, but I kept hoping’, and that’s about all I could report. So my mother promptly said, “Well, we’ll educate you at home.”

He got on well enough without school to become a world-class violinist.

Patrick Moore, the astronomer and broadcaster, was educated at home and did not go to university. He tells us that he chose his curriculum at the age of seven as learning to type, which he thought would be useful, by copy typing some tomes in astronomy. This, he thought, would inform him about the subject that interested him, and would also serve as a course in improving his English. He would also spend some time on his xylophone and later the piano developing his musical skills. This ‘unbalanced curriculum’ served him well, he explains, since the central activities of his life have been astronomy, journalism and music. All other knowledge and skills that he needed were gained incidentally on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Then there was the Headteacher of Wolverhampton Grammar School who was a party to educating his two daughters at home until they were eleven because the local primary school was not able to facilitate a personalized learning system to take into account their own keen learning interests in gymnastics and music.

Bertrand Russell, distinguished philosopher and mathematician, was another home- based education graduate. He observed that:

“I was glad I did not go to school. I would have had no time for original thought, which has been my chief stay and support in troubles.”

The roll-call of well-known people can take up a whole book – see An “A” in Life: Famous Home Schoolers by Mac and Nancy Plent (1999) Unschoolers Network. It includes George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Claude Monet, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, The Wright brothers (the aeroplane inventors), Agatha Christie, Noel Coward, Margaret Mead, Pearl Buck, C.S.Lewis, John Stuart Mill, two Wimbledon tennis champions, and several contemporary film actors.

There is also a third kind of treason, to the respect for research evidence, which shows that the bad news about home-based education is very hard to find and confined to a few odd cases – reported in the press, for I have never come across any myself and I have encountered thousands of home-based educating families in the years I have been researching the subject. The Home Education Research Journal has been publishing systematic studies on home-based education for over 30 years in USA. The research shows that, in the vast majority of cases, home-based education is a good news story. Mike Fortune Wood’s two books, The Face of Home –based Education 1: Who, Why and How, and The Face of Home-based Education 2: Numbers, Support, Special Needs, are two recent surveys of the scene in UK showing the same outcome.

Members of the establishment, despite showing the signs of being damaged by their mis-education at school themselves, can be won over in time. Thus, a school inspector, quoted in D. Smith, Parent Generated Home Study in Canada, 1993, said: “I so wish I’d given my daughter the opportunity you’re giving your sons.”

Roland Meighan: D.Soc.Sc, Ph.D., B.Sc.(Soc)., L.C.P.., Cert. Ed., he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Writer, publisher, and consultant/research er on learning systems, past present and future. His work on “The Next Learning System” has been translated into more than twelve languages. Roland is also Director of Educational Heretics Press, Director/Trustee of the Centre for Personalised Education Trust Ltd. He is also a former Special Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Birmingham.

He is an acknowledged Educational Heretic for his view that mass compulsory schooling is an obsolete and counter-productive learning system which should be phased out as soon as possible and schools should be recycled into something more personalised, flexible and humane. He began researching home-based education in 1977, appearing as an expert witness in key legal hearings.

UPDATE

A wise Home Educator chimes in on Roland MeighanL

Roland Meighan has long been seen as a “champion” of home education. He spoke at a conference in Glasgow a few years ago. I cheered him and enjoyed watching some establishment types squirm. We dined with him and his wife afterwards and enjoyed the company. I do not *want* to think badly of him.

The language of “alternative education” for want of a better phrase, or “personalised education” to use a Meighanism , has been nicked, perverted, re-branded and is being used to sell some very nasty outcome-based “education” eg: http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/352-radical-learning-reform-unveiled.html (lazy link to some of our discussion of CfE in Scotland – obviously just one example).

Roland does not seem to mind this. Recently, in the light of this “not minding” and prompted by discussion on one of the lists, I had a look back at what he had actually said in the past.

Sadly, I found this rather telling quote – afraid the link is no longer live (have emailed the person who owns the site to see where it has gone).
Roland Meighan, 2003 –

“There’s an important sense in which the people who are home schooling are trail-blazing their way to the next learning system.

They are not the next learning system but they are trail-blazing their way towards it.”

http://www.thebluecrane.com/BLUECRANEMEDIA/subhtm/education-germany/EducationOtherwiseVideoTranscript.html

This article is not quite so clear cut but is in a similar vein:

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=305041

I accept that it is easy to be wise with hindsight but surely, at best, this shows an incredible political naivety?

And then he says this in his response to the Badman crap?

“Education Otherwise and similar organisations could form a monitoring body if given the finance and resources to perform this task well. OFSTED and LEAs are not competent to do this task having been trained only in the authoritarian crowd instruction and crowd control approach to learning – ‘you will do it our way, or we will find something nasty to do to you’.”

Have a look at the connections between PEN /BECTA/ARCH/ EO and Heppell (man loves himself so much one link would be meaningless).

+++++++

I read his response to the Badman report, and those quotes jumped out. This matter is about the autonomy of parents as much as it is about Home Educating parents. EO have no business monitoring Home Educators (which will mean registering with them) or anyone else for that matter, unless people volunteer to be a member of their organization.

Having said all that, I found this piece to be worthy of posting. As usual, we do not have to agree with everything everyone says; at the same time, at a time when EO are maneuvering for the job of being the masters of all things Home Education, with funding and power handed to them by the state, it is a good idea to know precisely who is who. By posting this article and exposing the name of the author, it is possible (but unlikely) that this mans voice could be amplified by the BBC, and clearly, his ideas about EO are anathema to many Home Educators.

‘The Fog of War’….

This just came to me over ‘teh internetz’:

Elizabeth Mills response to the regulation of Home Education seemed to echo the common response from home-educators. Another opportunity for the state to control how we treat our children. And so on. It’s something I find an increasingly tiresome argument, as I seem to be one of the few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing.

Here we go…

I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was, in the most polite terms, a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then I think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child I barely left the house except maybe once a week to help do the shopping in Morrisons. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manics fan, otherwise I suspect I would have never had that.

Your problem is that your mother was a ‘manipulative bitch’. I would also say that she failed to teach you any logic. It does not immediately follow that Home Education is bad for everyone else, just because your mother was not a very good parent. All the families in the UK should not have to suffer at the hands of the state because you were born to a dysfunctional family.

Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier. My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.

I feel very sorry for you, just as I feel sorry for all the people who have ‘bad parents’. Once again, this story and all other ‘horror stories’ are not enough to smear ALL PARENTS. We do not live in a world where if there is one nutcase in the country, everyone gets a new raft of laws eliminating ancient freedo….. oops.

Yes, some people are just honestly supporting children with learning difficulties or trying to embrace their own culture, but there are cases where it does just turn into abuse. The chances are, like me and my sisters, that it isn’t really reported or known. The reason for that being that, with no real or completely accurate figures oh home education, its possible for the worst situations to slip between everyone’s fingers. Who would have considered themselves responsible for my welfare when I was growing up? We just went on living in a dysfunctional and destructive family until we were old enough to be dysfunctional adults. I’m not even sure if my sisters can read or write properly.

And there are abusive families who send their children to school. The point is, once again, that no natter what the statistics are, people have rights. People are innocent until proven guilty. They have the right to privacy. They have the right to organize themselves and their families as they see fit. We are now starting to see what it is like to live in a country where because a few people get hurt, the government tries to ban everything that could potentially cause harm, we now call it ‘the nanny state’ and everyone agrees, its not a very nice place to live in.

It seems like the majority of opinions on this are all about embracing positive alternative education. I don’t dispute that home education can be a positive experience for many and take them leaps and bounds beyond others in their schools. Equally though, I fail to understand why so many parents can’t see that it could turn into a nightmare. Surely, if you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of, then no harm will come of someone checking that your children are being educated.

‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear‘ only the most naive of people believe this. Thankfully, their numbers have dwindled to almost nothing.

My sisters and I are all completely estranged from our mother now. She hates us because we stole her life because she had to teach us. As soon as I got to sixth form I felt that even the weakest student, with Cs and Ds, was better educated than I was. Around this time we fell out. She denies my existence now.

This is all very sad, but is has nothing to do with Home Education in general, our rights, right and wrong, or anything else. There ARE bad parents out there. There will ALWAYS be bad parents. You can never have perfection or the elimination of crime, bad parenting or any other ill. What we need to do is pay attention to the vast majority of people who are good, trustworthy and decent, and not allow ourselves to be sucked into a totalitarian nanny state because an EXTREMELY small minority of people have a bad time of life.

Your best revenge is not to try and destroy the lives of all the decent people in the UK by calling for them to be violated, but to use your pain and your experience to make the world a better place, without trampling on the rights of other people.

Surely someone checking that your children meet a standard of numeracy and literacy, and aren’t raised to believe that the world is controlled by Jew-hating-lizards from outer space is something that should be done, not beaten down by shouty hippie parents with anger issues towards the local education authority, or Labour, or Catholicism or various other issues, is a good thing? If parents become ill, or must work more, and can’t support their children’s education, shouldn’t there be someone to step in and make a stand about that?

You sound like an angry person who has deeply seated problems that you have not resolved. You want to lash out at all parents because your parents were bad. Hurting other people will not make your pain go away. You need to get some psychiatric help to get you over your problems.

After all, when you’re young, whoever teaches you tends to be your earliest guide in the world. Did you know how you should be educated when you were 8 or 9? You don’t really have any authority on this yourself when you’re young, parents decide it for you. If you did, you’d probably just sit in the dirt chopping hair off dolls and eating refreshers all day.

This is not an argument.

I fail to understand why there’s such opinion that the government/ LEAs/ the big bad whoever are anti-home education.

That is indeed, a big failure on your part. A failure to read, a failure to empathize and a failure to understand what a real family is like. This is understandable, since you never had one.

The attitude against this regulation does seem to broadly be part of a much larger anti-Labour grudge, or a grudge against local education authorities and regulation.

This is simply not true. No matter what political party is in charge, if they were to propose what New Labour are proposing they would be rounded upon. You really do not understand what this is all about!

Regulation seems to be a dirty word to these people, implying control when it equally means protection.

Regulation does not mean protection. Get yourself a dictionary. You have no experience in parenting or of parenting, you have no idea of what the nature of the state really is… you are ignorant.

Home education has grown as an alternative option since the 70s or so and there really has been very little regulation on it at all, and yet it concerns one of the most important factors in a persons life being decided by what could be the whim of an unstable parent. What seems to be recommended is an enforced and compulsory regulation of what is currently very loosely done. The suggestions made by the recent review have flaws, which have been pointed out on the previous post’s comments, but I view them as caring for the education and welfare of vulnerable children who are currently beyond any particular authority and whose lives are solely controlled by one or two people.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/06/18/regulating-home-education/

Those ‘two people’ are called PARENTS they are not just ‘people’.

Compulsory school education is a relatively new phenomenon:

Whilst the intentions of compulsory school laws were good, what we have now is a system that serves to brainwash people. Now that there is a trend away from state schools, there are many forces that want to reverse it.

Teachers unions are bitterly opposed to Home Schooling. Departments of education are against it. Communists are against it. Fascists are against it. Well meaning busy bodies are against it.

What is most bizarre is that you come off sounding just like a person who is a product of the state school system with its ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ doublespeak lines learned by rote.

Either way, The point remains the same; your deeply saddening story of suffering at the hands of your parents is not a reason to destroy the sanctity of the family in general by mandating that the state become the parent of all children.

Finally, there are only a few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing because it is wrong; most people understand the threat that the state represents, what their freedom is worth and have a naturally powered ferocious desire to protect their children.

And this comment, says it all:

I feel for you, I really do, but…

The current proposals would have instead turned your once in eight year beating to coach your responses into a once a year beating.* I’m sure your mother could have turned in a report every year to show she was trying, and she would have been approved, even supported, by the authorities. She was in your own words “a manipulative bitch”, and who’s to say that she, like Baby P’s mother, like Eunice Spry, couldn’t wrap the authorities round her little finger.

Your story is repeated over and over with schooled children as well, with school staff at the very least ignorant, if not complicit in wilfull silence.

The authorities have shown that they cannot prevent abuse in schooled children, or children which are under the tightest scrutiny available to them. They have also demonstrated that people who are not manipulative, who are simply anxious in the presence of authority, get their children removed from them on the weakest of grounds because social workers don’t want to be the ones in the headlines for inaction.

The hostility to authorites is not due to some airy-fairy anti-establishment dogma, but due to a history of abuse of authority, coupled with a demonstrated inability of authorities to use their existing powers effectively.

I think you’ll also find that most people who believe the world is truly ruled by jew hating lizards from outer space were, in fact, schooled, along with the vast majority of British Islamic extremists, BNP supporters, climate change believers / deniers (delete where you agree) and people who vote on Britain’s Got Talent. Being schooled does not, on present evidence, innoculate you in any way against collective insanity.

*Yes, I’m sure there were more beatings, just this one was for coaching before the authority visit.

NO $ALE!

Before the Balls and Badman review nastiness, I have had some interesting discussions with Home Schoolers in the UK. To a man, all of them bristle when they are referred to as ‘Home Schoolers’. At any other time, I would simply take note of it as one of the many beautiful differences between people, and go on to discuss something else.

Sadly, we live in a world where there is a concerted and international governmental effort underway to totally eradicate Home Schooling in all its myriad forms.

Under such circumstances, it is plainly the height of total insanity, shooting yourself in the foot and foolishness, that parents who Home School should split themselves into non cooperating factions in the face of this powerful, single minded and organized enemy.

I had a tweet from a Home Educator saying sarcastically that, “apparently all homeschoolers should register, so we are OK since we are Home Educators not Home Schoolers!”. Then came some snide comments about Britain not being a part of America. Then followed another tweet from a different person saying that they would not sign a petition whose aim is to safeguard the rights of parents because the petition has the phrase ‘Home Schooling’ in it.

Oh dear me.

Regular readers of BLOGDIAL know that the age of writing and signing petitions an demonstrating as a tactic to get what you want is over, that they do not work and that doing them is nothing more than a time wasting feel good activity, but that is not the point here. The point is that over the phrase ‘Home Schooling’, some parents are not willing to join with others to fight people who are trying to kidnap and brainwash their children.

That is INSANITY.

The facts of the matter are these.

Whatever you might call yourself, all parents have one thing in common; they are parents, and they have the best interests of their children at heart, and they all have the absolute right to bring up their children as they see fit, without interference from the state.

This is the thing that binds all parents, and which binds all Home Schoolers, Home Educators, unschoolers, autonomous learners, structured learners, or whatever term happens to be en vogue at the moment.

Let me tell you something; the people who are trying to destroy your way of life do not care a damn what you call yourself. As far as they are concerned, you are ALL trash and your children are CANNON FODDER and you are ALL GOING TO BE MADE TO CONFORM.

The fact that you squabble over terminology to such an extent that you will refuse to help each other demonstrates to them that you really are a totally clueless bunch that have no right to be in charge of an empty carton of milk much less your own children. They laugh at you as you bicker like morons over this, all the while, rolling out their plans to take your children from you if you do not implement their brainwashing programmes and testing regimes IN YOUR OWN HOUSE.

There are lots of things that I do not agree with. I keep them STRICTLY private, and only share them with my inner circle. Whilst we are in the battle of our lives, I strongly suggest that if you want to HELP destroy the Badman and Balls agenda, that you keep irrelevant distinctions out of the discussion, and join with other parents who are fighting for the true goal of this battle, the rights of all parents.

You have the right to say whatever you want, join with whomever you want, not join with people that you disagree with and express yourself in any way you see fit. What you CANNOT claim however, is that it helps to factionalize people when we are all fighting against a common enemy.

And speaking of americans, we have this from the Home School Legal Defense Association:

UN Treaty Jeopardizes Homeschool Freedom in Britain

June 16, 2009

Ever since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and opened to nations across the world for ratification in 1989, HSLDA has been deeply concerned about the implications of this treaty for U.S. homeschoolers, if the U.S. were to ratify the treaty.

We have consistently warned that this treaty could be the vehicle opponents of home education could use to effectively ban or severely regulate homeschooling. On February 16, 1995, when Secretary of State Madeline Albright signed the UNCRC, the United States took a major step along the path to ratification which would make the UNCRC, as stated in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

For the UNCRC to be ratified it must gain a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate. If this happens then the UNCRC will automatically supersede all state laws and U.S. judges will be obligated to follow the provisions of the treaty. Currently, family and education laws are state-based; however, ratification of the UNCRC would transfer the jurisdiction for making family and education law to the U.S. Congress. Congress would, in turn, be obligated to follow the UN mandates contained in the CRC.

While HSLDA has been sounding the alarm about this treaty for years, proponents of the UNCRC maintain that our concerns are invalid.

One such claim relating to homeschooling is from the Children’s Rights Campaign website, a group of 300 organizations arguing that we have nothing to fear from the UNCRC.

They say: “There is no language in the CRC that dictates the manner in which parents are to raise and instruct their children. Ratification of the Convention would not prevent parents from homeschooling their children.”

Sadly, HSLDA’s position has been proven to be correct. Contrary to what proponents like the Children’s Rights Campaign claim, UNCRC will be used to significantly restrict the freedom to homeschool in England.

On June 11, 2009 a report on home education in England by Graham Badman, a former Managing Director of Children, Families and Education in the County of Kent, was accepted in full by the British Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. The report makes the case that homeschooling should be extensively regulated in England.

Aside from registering with the state and mandating reports by homeschoolers, the Badman report makes references to balancing the rights of parents with the rights of children. This idea is expressed in the UNCRC.

As Mr. Badman says:

I am not persuaded that under the current regulatory regime that there is a correct balance between the rights of parents and the rights of the child either to an appropriate education or to be safe from harm.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) gives children and young people over forty substantive rights which include the right to express their views freely, the right to be heard in any legal or administrative matters that affect them and the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. Article 12 makes clear the responsibility of signatories to give children a voice:

“Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”

Yet under the current legislation and guidance, local authorities have no right of access to the child to determine or ascertain such views.

Mr. Badman has a solution for the lack of access of the state to homeschooled children in order to fulfill this provision of the UNCRC.

He proposed the following:

That designated local authority officers should:
• have the right of access to the home
• have the right to speak with each child alone

And:

That a requirement is placed upon local authorities to secure the monitoring of the effectiveness of elective home education.

Mr. Badman’s rationale for placing the state in charge of determining the effectiveness of a home education (i.e. deciding which curriculum is used) is based on Article 29 of the UNCRC. He asserts:

Such is the demand and complexity of 21st Century society and employment that further thought should be given to what constitutes an appropriate curriculum within the context of elective home education. Such a curriculum must be sufficiently broad and balanced and relevant to enable young people to make suitable choices about their life and likely future employment. Article 29 of the UNCRC states that:

1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

1. The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
2. The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;
3. The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own;
4. The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin;
5. The development of respect for the natural environment.

In short, the Badman report recommends that the state should have the authority to choose the curriculum for homeschoolers and he used Britain’s treaty obligations under the UNCRC to justify this intrusion.

Remember, the Badman report has already been accepted by the British government. It is now only a question of time before the legislation is introduced and a vote occurs in the British Parliament. Not surprisingly, the estimated 80,000 British homeschooling families are outraged at the Badman report.
The Badman report is a stark reminder of how government officials in an English-speaking democracy have interpreted the UNCRC. It’s clear that the right to homeschool in America will be negatively impacted if the U.S. Senate ever ratifies the UNCRC.

Ultimately, the answer to completely defeating the UNCRC is to amend the U.S. Constitution. This is the purpose of the Parental Rights Amendment being advanced by HSLDA and ParentalRights.org. The PRA would uphold the current U.S. legal framework which only allows the state to intervene where there is credible evidence of abuse or neglect. Otherwise parents are free to raise their children, which includes the right to home educate. Amending the Constitution will permanently protect the right of parents and homeschoolers. It’s a right we cannot surrender to any U.S. government present or future and certainly a right we must not surrender to the United Nations.

[…]

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200906161.asp

I am very grateful that there are people in other countries that are paying close attention to the problems that parents are facing in the UK. Especially a country where there are about THIRTY to FORTY times as many Home Schoolers as there are in the UK. I am willing to discuss with them, join with them and coordinate with them to protect my rights. I don’t care what they choose to call themselves. In the same way that I am willing to deal with any Home Educator on this matter, I will deal with the HSDLA if it serves the greater purpose of protecting my rights.

Come to think of it, I cannot think of a single Home Schooler that I know, to whom I have asked, “How do you Home Educate your children?”. It would never occur to me to ask that question; it is none of my business. I am able to communicate with other Home Schoolers, laugh with them, get incandescent with rage with them, down some beers with them, let my children play with theirs and just be a human being.

Yes, I typed that and thanks to Debs for the heads up.

Take a look at this:

Judge warns over family breakdowns

A senior judge has called for the creation of a national commission to tackle the “epidemic” of family breakdown.

More must be done to promote marriage, a senior judge has urged;

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, said the consequences of family break-up for the wider society are now so great it can no longer be treated as a purely private matter.

Action is needed, he said, to achieve a “fundamental change” in individual attitudes and behaviour to re-establish marriage as the “gold standard” for relationships.

The problems are so great that no one political party on its own could resolve them and only a national commission drawn from a wide constituency would have any any chance of success, he said.

Judge Coleridge sparked controversy last year when he said family relationships in Britain were in “meltdown”, likening the problem to a “cancer”.

In his speech to the Family Holiday Association at Westminster, he blamed unrealistic expectations about relationships for the extent of the disputes and breakdowns which “overwhelmed” the family courts.

“What, I hope in all humility, I am drawing attention to is the endless game of ‘musical relationships’, or ‘pass the partner’, in which such a significant portion of the population is engaged, in the endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship which will be attained, it is supposed, by landing on the right chair or unwrapping a new and more exciting parcel,” he said.

With many children growing up “scarred” by the effects of their parents’ break-ups, he said that it could no longer be seen as just a matter for the individuals involved.

“The fundamental change in individual attitude and behaviour that is required is in our assumption that the way in which we conduct our private lives in relation to both the production and parenting of children, or the break-up of a parental relationship, is a private matter which only affects the individuals directly concerned,” he said.

“Although, superficially, these are private issues, they become matters of public concern when they are happening on such a huge scale and affect detrimentally such a significant proportion of the population of all types and ages.”

[…]

Yahoo News

First of all, Marriage is not the business of the state. It is a purely private (and often religious) commitment that should not be regulated by, licensed by or interfered with by the state. The only cancer here is the government.

If you are a Catholic, and get married as a Catholic, then you cannot expect a divorce. The state should not be involved in marrying people (‘Civil marriages’) and were that the case, would not have any right to offer to dissolve marriages that it has not sanctified.

The very idea that the state can marry people is at the heart of this problem; the state is not God, or a replacement for a philosophy or religion. It is not a sanctioner of people’s commitment to each other. The idea that the state can act as a replacement for something that is private is what has caused the problems that this Judge is whining about.

The state has made it easy for people to get married and divorced. When people take advantage of these rules and regulations and the consequences are the destruction of the family (which pre dates the monolithic state) everyone reels back in horror. This Judge decries the ‘musical relationships’, and ‘pass the partner’, behavior of people today, yet it is the judiciary that facilitates this by sanctioning divorces on demand.

What is worse, they do not diagnose the problem correctly, and prescribe MORE STATE INTERFERENCE through commissions, the inevitable raft of consultations written by the worst possible, most inappropriate, monstrous creatures imaginable to be followed by guidelines and then legislation putting the state right into your business where it does not belong.

The state will define what a family is, outline precisely what each member of a family must do etc etc, and then they will have a whole army of apartchicks to inspect, tick box and monitor these state ordained model families.

Oh! so you don’t think it will come to that? You must be one of the delusional ‘It can never happen here’ people who never thought that Britain would try and outlaw Home Education.

I hope you are paying close enough attention to notice how this Judge says, “…the production and parenting of children“.

PRODUCTION, used in the same way that that word is applied to cars made in factories; this is the beginning of the defining of children as products that are the property of the state. Home Educators in the UK are starting to feel what this is like, with the looming and soon to be destroyed recommendations of Badman and Balls. What this judge is proposing will end in people having to apply to the state for a license to produce children, who will not have the same relationship to the mother and father as has been the case for thousands of years, but who will act as ‘carers’, provisionally, since the children will be the registered property of the state. You will nave no say in how your children should be brought up, taught, treated medically or anything else, and should your children become dissatisfied with your parenting, they will be able to seek a divorce from YOU.

The fundamental change that is needed here is not in individual attitudes, but in the role of the state in the private affairs of human beings. It is the courts and these Judges using the powers of the legislature that have caused these problems, not the individual, who only ever acts in her own interest.

Throughout all of this, the ‘primitive’ third world, that has retained its sanity throughout the twentieth century will have the benefits of strong families. As the west descends into total chaos and confusion on every fundamental level, dehumanized beyond all recognition, the people of the third world will sit back and watch while the populations of the west disappear up their own arseholes; there will be no one left to carry on their culture as it has all been legislated away, regulated away and relegated to history. Like the inbred members of dead aristocratic lines, British culture will disappear because it will have become fundamentally unhealthy, unnatural, ugly (no sane person from the third world would marry into a death culture like the one that is being engineered here), impotent, infertile and useless.

Unless they turn it around RIGHT NOW, starting with the reversal of the Home Education attack.

Finally and for the record, if we are going to have any sort of gold standard, it should be money that is 100% redeemable in gold coins.

In 1939 1,800,000 children were moved out of London to escape the bombing of that great city.

How it all happened is relevant to us today, in the light of New Labour, and its infinitely repulsive, shocking and sickening disregard for what Britain is and was, and what it is meant to be.

London was being bombarded nightly. Londoners spent their nights in shelters or deep in the Underground on the platforms as the bombs hammered away.

It was decided that children living in the areas that were being Blitzed were to be evacuated to safe parts of Britain. The first evacuations began on Friday 1 September 1939, and was code named 'Operation Pied Piper'.

The evacuated children were put on trains in London, had tags pinned on their clothes stating their names, and were then despatched to different parts of the countryside.

When they arrived at the various train stations and evacuation centres, adults who were to take in the evacuees were waiting. The children were selected on the spot, by a point of the finger and words like, "I'll take the one with red hair just there", and taken away to their new homes; those who were not wanted, judged solely on the look of the child were simply left behind:

[…]

The whole school (Sellincourt Road Infants) marched through streets to Tooting Junction station. I was carrying a small rucksack for my luggage. I remember the cornfields en route and that we changed trains at Exeter. We stopped at several villages and at each stop we got off and lined up in the road so the villagers could take who they wanted. Those of us that remained then re-boarded and went onto the next village. Those of us not selected were then deposited at a commandeered camp belonging to NALGO (trade union).

[…]

BBC

[…]

“We were walked to the rail station at Clapham Junction and from there we caught the train to Waterloo, from Waterloo we travelled all the way to north Cornwall.

“After a short period of time, I was evacuated to a farmer and his wife who had no children, and I became part of the family.”
Children at the time would wait at temporary evacuee centres were they could be selected by a family who liked them. He felt he was one of the lucky ones who got a good home.

[…]

BBC

[…]

I suppose there was about 20 of us from class seven of Christ Church. The children from other classes went elsewhere to nearby villages. I remember standing in a line next to Kenneth, my friend, feeling hot, tired and somewhat unsettled. The long journey, just undertaken, left me slightly bewildered. Was it all a dream?

Standing opposite us in the hall was quite a large group of villagers. These people had agreed to take us into their homes and become our foster parents. They had, previously, signed the necessary forms and stated their preference for boys or girls. Soon a rather awkward process of selection began, and after, watching, waiting and wondering. My friend Kenneth and I found ourselves being paired up and being led along by a tall, kindly-looking gentleman, Mr Ware, the village postman. At that moment, to use the official term, he had become our foster father. Waiting outside, no doubt very interested to see what we looked like, were two of Mr Ware's daughters, Maureen and Barbara.

[…]

BBC

And so on and so on. What an incredible story!

Now, fast forward to 2009.

We have a government that wants to force everyone to carry an ID Card that is linked to a giant database of fingerprints and faces that can identify you in a fraction of a second from one of millions of CCTV cameras that are everywhere. A country where if you change your address and do not tell the government, you can be fined £1000, where you will not be able to buy wine or withdraw money from your bank account without presenting this card. Where you cannot even buy a teaspoon without showing ID. We have a government that believes that all parents are child abuse suspects, and as such, must be put into a database.

Just what the HELL has happened to Great Britain?

How has it come to pass that in a country where people were trusted and trusting by default, to such an extent that children could be given away to total strangers without any doubt whatsoever that strangers will have nothing but absolute concern and care for the welfare of their wards, in close to two million instances… that this trust is all but completely destroyed?

How is it that the people of this fair island have become so ground down, so inured to slavery and tyranny that when over 100,000 parents are accused in a most vicious and dastardly way, without a shred of evidence, of being potential child abusers, that almost nothing is said, and that there are even parents who AGREE with the totalitarian government responsible for the perverted claims and insane recommendations?

How is it that two men, named 'Balls' and 'Badman' can get away with such a thing, and no one thinks this combination of names is in any way odd, or unusual, or freakish, monstrous, sinister or nightmarish? Are we living as characters on the pages of an edition of 200AD?

What the HELL is wrong with everybody?!

Even if you accept that it is the role of government to organize education and protect children (which I do not), any reasonable person would require that there is evidence of a real problem before you legislate; in this case, the author of the review, the singularly unqualified Badman, admits that there is no evidence that Home Educated children are at risk and that Home Education is not being used as a 'cover'. Even by those standards the conclusions and recommendations of this scabrous review are completely illogical in that light.

The fact of the matter is, quite apart from the natural rights aspect of this, parents are the most trustworthy people when it comes to the care of their children. The vast majority of people are also completely trustworthy, as the example of the evacuees demonstrates. The only people who cannot be trusted are, CRB Checked, ‘trusted’ agents of the government; the social workers, local authority workers etc etc, who are a self selected group of control freaks whose only desire is to exert their will upon others. They never refuse new powers, are keen to enter into and interfere with the private business of every family, down to the food that is eaten in the home.

The men and women of the 1930s adn 40s would never have accepted a government like New Labour; in fact, they were willing to die fighting against a government just like it; a government that explicitly banned (and continues to ban) home schooling.

They did not need to check every adult against a database before they did the evacuation. Even if they had time and the means to do it, they would not have done it, just as in the 70’s ID Cards were rejected as ‘un-British’ when the IRA was attacking England and the attackers were visually indistinguishable from the attacked by virtue of both groups being ‘European’ in appearance.

The men of that era would never accept a government like New Labour:

Clarence Henry Willcock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clarence Henry Willcock, (23 January 1896 – 12 December 1952) a member of the Liberal Party, was the last person in the UK to be prosecuted for refusing to produce an Identity Card.

On 7 December 1950, Harry Willcock, 54 year old dry-cleaning manager was stopped while driving in Finchley, London by police constable Harold Muckle who demanded that he present his identity card at a police station within 48 hours. He refused, reputedly saying "I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing". He was prosecuted under the National Registration Act 1939, convicted and fined 10 shillings.

Willcock appealed, in the case Willcock vs Muckle. Although he lost the appeal, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Goddard, spoke out against the continued use of compulsory Identity Cards and commented that they "tend to make people resentful of the acts of the police".

As a result of the court case, Willcock became well-known and he founded the Freedom Defence Association to campaign against ID cards. In a publicity event he tore up his own identity card in front of the National Liberal Club, inspiring a later similar action for the press outside Parliament by the British Housewives' League. When the Conservative government elected at the 1951 general election decided to abolish identity cards in 1952, Willcock received hundreds of redundant cards through the post to auction for charity.

Willcock was the Liberal candidate in Barking in 1945 and in 1950. He came third in both contests, losing his deposit in 1950. He had been a councillor and magistrate in Horsforth, Leeds.

Willcock was born in Alverthorpe, Wakefield, Yorkshire and died, while debating at a meeting of the Eighty Club at the National Liberal Club.
Goddard's comments are thought to have influenced Winston Churchill's decision to scrap compulsory national Identity Cards in 1952.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Henry_Willcock

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is now your turn to defend your rights; the rights that people died to protect and give to you. If you give them up as if they were nothing, if you compromise one inch, go half way for a little peace, go along to get along, or sign up so that you can continue to get ‘free’ rail cards and other ‘benefits’…. then you are not fit to breath the air of this great country. You deserve whatever they put upon you. You lose your right to complain, to make a fuss or to whine about 'civil liberties'. You are already dead.

You are at the same time, very lucky. In this case, all that is required of you is that you refuse to comply. Refuse to register. Refuse to take the ID card. Refuse to engage in any way with anything that comes from ContactPoint. Never use or agree with weasel words of compromise and, 'seeing the other point of view'. Do not bow and scrape to anyone, and thank your oppressors for 'being on your side'.

There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to put up with the incessant abuses, violations, invasions, smears and the totalitarian apparatus that this government, New Labour, is pouring out on the land.

Enough is enough. Just as this venal and murderous government stubbornly refuses to submit to the will of the public, as it should, since it has no legitimacy (so the textbooks say) without the consent of the governed, so too can anyone also refuse to obey any illegitimate law or regulation.

Those of you who believe that you have a sacred duty to protect your family from evil are already on this page.

Those of you who have doubts, who are frightened about the consequences of 'going silent' or who are swayed by the soothing weasel words of men with an air of authority, or who are actually dumb enough to believe that what is planned is in any part a good thing; be warned – the reason why we are at this abysmal point is because the weak people between the days of the evacuees and today, allowed small concessions to their liberties year on year that mounted up to become the totalitarian state that now looms over you, and which is about to tip over and crush you, splitting open to unleash a torrent of aparatchick ants that will swarm over you and your family and bite you to death.

The only way to stop this is to draw a line in the sand and say, "this far, and no further" The power of the totalitarian state is derived directly from the cooperation of the people who are its victims. The aparatchicks who use ContactPoint (for example) will be sitting in offices on the phone, compiling lists and contacting people, trying to arrange interviews etc etc. If no one speaks to them or answers their letters, they will be completely stymied. If no one registers, they will have an intractable task on their hands of tracking everyone down, writing to them, chasing them up on foot… They will never be able to pull this off. And remember; all of this is going to happen whilst they are taking care of all their other duties, with which they are already overwhelmed. This is why it is important to make it absolutely clear; this report is rejected. We will not comply with any of it, should it become the law. You are wasting your time, and we will not waste any more of ours responding to you now, or in the future.

WE ARE DONE.