What a servant is and is not is central to understanding the proper role of government.

When the creatures who run this government and the apparatchiks who operate under them say they are public servants, they lie; it is the same perversion of language that permeates all of their speech. When they say they want to ‘strengthen Home Education’ they really mean they want to cripple and destroy it. When they say that they are ‘public servants’ what they really mean is that they are your masters. This is the way they behave, the posture they adopt when they respond to you and it is evidenced in everything they do.

Servants have characteristics:

• They are deferential
• They do not lie
• They follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters
• They do not command anyone other than other servants
• They obey their masters absolutely
• They cannot instantiate new servant classes
• They are under tight control and audit

The proper posture of a servant can be seen in the behaviour of the people who sweep the streets with brooms in London. When you pass by them, they accept your rubbish into their wheeled bins. They get out of your way when you are walking down the street.

Those people are acting as true servants – they defer to you; they respond to you by making sure they are not interfering with you, and they take your garbage from you without you having to drop it for them to then sweep up.

A street sweeper who is not adopting the posture of a servant would, when you offer him your garbage, ask you to drop it first, so that he may sweep it up, as he is a street sweeper, and not a garbage collector.

Any public servant adopting a posture other than that of an obedient street sweeper or other true servant is not a public servant.

Servants who are serving correctly do not lie to their masters. If a china cup is broken in the household, the proper servant says, “I broke it by accident ma’am”. If accidents like this happen rarely, it is forgiven, forgotten and life goes on. If however, the servant lies and says that she found it broken, then this servant is a liar, and must be sacked. This is the servant who will steal a spoon, who will steal money and do all other sorts of things; this is a servant who cannot be trusted. You would not be able to leave your house with that servant in place, and in the case of Parliament, you cannot leave the power to legislate and declare war in the hands of people who cannot be trusted; you will end up with bad laws and many wars and your money stolen.

Public servants follow proper etiquette when addressing their masters. When a properly behaving servant is asked, “why are my shirts not ironed and folded Isabel?” she does not say, “Please take this matter up with the ironing lady”. She will instead, apologise, then run down to the ironing lady and ask why the DEVIL the master’s shirts are not ironed and in place.

If a servant speaks out of place on a matter, she is apologetic and grateful for correction. She does not raise her hackles, huff and puff, suck her teeth and say, “well if you don’t like it, then lump it”. A true servant who behaved in this way would indeed, be told to ‘lump it’ and be dismissed on the spot.

True servants do not command anyone but other servants. The public servant in charge of street sweepers has the power to command the army of street sweepers that he is in charge of and that is all. He has no power to mandate anything or control anyone or any other aspect of garbage. He cannot, for example, tell you, the master, how to pack your rubbish bin; if he can do that, then he is your master and you are his servant.

Servants who are behaving in their proper role always obey their masters in all matters. If the venal liars who claim to be public servants were actual servants, they could never have illegally invaded Iraq, since the masters did not want this to happen. Each consultation that came up with a result that meant new legislation was not capable of being brought to debate, so total was its rejection by the public, would be obeyed absolutely and without question.

Servants do not act in the best interests of their masters against their masters wishes. No matter what the servant believes is best, the master is to be obeyed in all things at all times, without exception.

The final characteristic of servants that differentiates them from masters is that a servant cannot instantiate another class of servant. Only a master can create a new class of servant. A street sweeper or housemaid cannot hire on their own initiative, and neither can they create a new position in the household.

This demonstrates that, for example, the multitude of Czars that are being created are all illegitimate, since no servant can create a new role for filling by another servant.

In fact, servants cannot create or demand anything that will cause the master to expend money without his permission. When the stable master needs saddle soap, he takes it out of the budget allocated to the stables, which is regularly audited by the master. He cannot order replacement horses, or saddles or anything above a certain price without the express permission of the master. In this respect, servants exhibit another characteristic; they are under control.

Finally, in this equation there is another consistent factor; the behaviour of the master. In all cases, the master must behave like a master, and not a servant.

• When he asks a question, he expects an immediate, truthful and direct answer.
• He does not tolerate breaches of etiquette (insolence).
• He does not tolerate breaches of the instantiation rule.
• He sacks for deliberate misallocation of his monies.
• He sacks for disobedience.

If you do not treat a public servant like a servant, the servant is sent the wrong signals and she begins to behave in ways that are above her station.

Scullery maids are low in the hierarchy of the household, but they obey the mistress of the house in all things instantaneously. They do not owe a greater duty of obedience to the head housekeeper; this is precisely what the appointees of ministers are doing today; their loyalty is not to you, the master, but to the person who appointed them, who they consider to be their true master. You are nothing to them; you are a serf who is taxed to pay their wages. You are to be spied upon, numbered, vilified and squeezed for the pleasure of the true master; a servant running wild.

If there is to be any long term solution to the problem of bad behaviour of public servants, it is absolutely essential that everyone when dealing with these people treat them in the manner that they should be treated.

No master ever begs his servant, or behaves in a deferential way towards them. Masters give orders and make demands of their servants on penalty of the sack should they fail to obey or function properly.

Being a master does not give you license to abuse a good servant. Good servants are like good dogs; you pet them, treat them and treasure them. ‘Please’, ‘thank you’ and all other forms of courtesy are due to servants; being a servant is not the same as being a slave. This distinction is the crucial block that prevents servants from committing immoral acts against others on the orders of their masters. Slaves are compelled to murder on the word of their master, free men who are servants are not. That being said, a servant who is not acting as a servant can never be tolerated, and must be sacked, not only to protect yourself and your household, but as a warning to other servants that should they not behave correctly, the sack is a word away.

No one forces people to become public servants. If they are not willing to behave as proper servants, obeying absolutely the points that are listed above, then they should not enter into public service at all, and should work for companies (where by the way, they will be under a modern version of the sort of discipline that you find in a good household with servants).

Without competent masters who understand their position in all of this, public servants, like untrained dogs, will ride roughshod over you as if they were your masters, and we have all started to see what that looks like.

What are the five most important words in the computer industry?

1. What
2. Are
3. Your
4. Latest
5. Warez?

The luddites are at it again. Sith Lord Mandelson says:

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, warned internet users today that the days of “consequence-free” illegal filesharing are over as he unveiled the government’s plan for cracking down on online piracy.

The real question is WHAT consequences. Everyone who has read the very enlightening academic work ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly’ knows:

• File sharing is not theft
• Patents retard progress
• Copyright hurts society

These are not assertions, but are provable facts.

The consequences of this ill considered legislation will be that people’s connections will be temporarily disrupted whilst doing absolutely nothing to stop the flow of files across the internets.

Anyone who knows anything about computers or file-sharing or the decades old, bigger than ever, Warez scene knows this.

Mandelson, speaking at the government’s digital creative industries conference, C&binet, confirmed that the internet connections of persistent offenders could be blocked – but only as a last resort – from the summer of 2011.

He added that a “legislate and enforce” strategy was the only way to protect the intellectual property rights of content producers.

This is of course, a lie.

The intellectual property rights of content producers are not violated by people who makes copies of files with their computers, any more than sharing a light from a candle diminishes the light of the person who owns the first lit wick:

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Thomas Jefferson

What people copy when they share files are not physical objects, but ideas. Every file is a unique number, and nothing more. It is a representation of an idea, and when you copy it, you merely recite that number using a machine, allowing another machine to listen to it and ‘write it down’ for you. Nothing is lost when this happens. Nothing is ‘stolen’ and in fact, filesharing improves the condition of man and it also benefits the people who made the first copy. The question is how are the people who made the first copy going to be able to make a living out of doing it. Many people have ideas.

Lets be clear; you sharing a file that you got from someone is in every way legitimate if two people are sharing files consensually. If however, someone hacks into a computer in a studio and then shares files that are not released, that REALLY IS stealing, since the owners of those copies had not released them to anyone. Once you get a copy of a record, tape, CD or file, and the transfer to you was legitimate, i.e. did not involve violating someones consent to give it to you, those copies are YOUR copies, and you can do whatever you want with them and no part of that is immoral, including selling those copies.

Against Intellectual Monopoly goes into how this is so in detail; see in while you are at it, the section on the report of the 911 commission, and how that work made a fortune for the publisher who printed copies of it, despite there being no copyright on it.

And speaking of ‘Terrorism’ we all remember how the pathetic, discredited, whorish, corrupt and bias soaked BBC shamelessly and stupidly tried to equate Bittorrent with terrorism and the omni-present Paedophile threat, climbing down later with the statement:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

I wonder how they are going to spin this Mandelson mandate that says filesharing IS theft.

But I digress.

The strategy, which will be officially set out in the government’s digital economy bill in late November, will involve a staged process of warning notifications with internet suspension as a last resort.

The vast majority of people in the country share files. This is the reality (and its not new; people copied cassettes before the internets), and it is an entirely good thing. The only way that you will be able to stop it is by shutting off or crippling the internet. The damage that a crippled internet will do to human progress will be incalculable.

The story of James Watt and his steam engine patent as recalled in Against Intellectual Monopoly is informative:

In the specific case of Watt, the granting of the 1769 and especially of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine: innovation was stifled until his patents expired; and few steam engines were built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occurred immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations. This should not surprise us: new steam engines, no matter how much better than Watt’s, had to use the idea of a separate condenser. Because the 1775 patent provided Boulton and Watt with a monopoly over that idea, plentiful other improvements of great social and economic value could not be implemented. By the same token, until 1794 Boulton and Watt’s engines were less efficient they could have been because the Pickard’s patent prevented anyone else from using, and improving, the idea of combining a crank with a flywheel.

Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills were badly allocated: we find him spending more time engaged in legal action to establish and preserve his monopoly than he did in the actual improvement and production of his engine. From a strictly economic point of view Watt did not need such a long-lasting patent — it is estimated that by 1783 — seventeen years before his patent expired — his enterprise had already broken even. Indeed, even after their patent expired, Boulton and Watt were able to maintain a substantial premium over the market by virtue of having been first, despite the fact that their competitors had had thirty years to learn how to make steam engines.

The wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges is referred to by economists as rent-seeking behavior. History and common sense show it to be a poisoned fruit of legal monopoly. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension was clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Hornblower’s engine is a perfect case in point: it was a substantial improvement over Watt’s as it introduced the new concept of the “compound engine” with more than one cylinder. This, and not the Boulton and Watt design, was the basis for further steam-engine development after their patents expired. However, because Hornblower built on the earlier work of Watt, making use of his “separate condenser” Boulton and Watt were able to block him in court and effectively put an end to steam-engine development.

[…]

http://mises.org/story/3280

This chapter of Against Intellectual Monopoly goes on to describe how the rate of increase in efficiency of steam engines in the years of Watts patent was low compared to what happened after his patents expired; the rate of increase in efficiency shot up spectacularly when people were free to incorporate his ideas into their designs. Society benefited from these new machines, and Watt’s business was not harmed in any way.

It is abundantly clear that if the reason why copyrights and patents exist is to benefit society, then they should be abolished, since everyone is better off without them. This is not an opinion, but is a fact based on research.

“It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over,” Mandelson said. “Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting.”

There is no technical measure that can be implemented without fatally crippling the internet itself. If the goal is to reduce the internet to a Minitel level service, then this imbecile will succeed.

Even if it is not reduced to that level, the artificially and unnecessarily increased cost of access to the internet will have a distorting effect, as will the shifting of scarce resources inside every ISP, as they are turned from being service providers to police men for the monopolists.

Think about it. No one will be able to update their computers; the files for some updates can be 100meg. YouTube will be off limits, as watching to much of it will flag you. Unless they are going to sniff all of your traffic to see wether or not it is infringing, they cannot possibly cut people off for downloading ‘too much’. In any case, if you want to copy the contents of a CD, that is only 65megs, which is nothing in the days of broadband. A movie is 750meg, once again, nothing. This whole plan is absurd on every level, but most importantly, it is an immoral, culturally damaging plan that will retard the progress of everyone who uses the internet.

The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year.

Like so many other pieces of legislation, this one too will be totally ignored.

The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people’s internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year.

Amazing. There is no evidence that downloading movies and music impacts on the sales of tickets or CDs.

Remember FOX’s film ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ that had a work print released onto the internets?

Lets look at the numbers for this movie:

Domestic Total Gross: $179,883,157
Distributor: Fox Release Date: May 1, 2009
Genre: Action / AdventureRunning Time: 1 hrs. 47 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $150,000,000

[…]

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=wolverine.htm

They made all their money back and more. Clearly these creative people were compensated despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people downloaded that work print.

What about ‘The Hulk’, which also had a work print leaked:

Theatrical Performance
Total US Gross $134,806,913
International Gross $128,542,344
Worldwide Gross $263,349,257
Home Market Performance
US DVD Sales: $58,230,676 Weekly Breakdown
Production Budget $137,500,000

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2008/HULK2.php

That movie also was widely available on the internets, and yet, it made a huge amount of money.

There are now, suspiciously, many work prints available on teh inernets. The fact of the matter is that these studios know that leaked copies of movies have no effect on DVD and ticket sales, and might actually increase the two if the film is any good. And who, whilst in production, thinks they are working on a lemon?

Finally, for the biggest example of all, ‘Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith’, which was leaked days before its release:

Domestic Total Gross: $380,270,577
Distributor: Fox Release Date: May 19, 2005
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy Running Time: 2 hrs. 26 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $113,000,000

[…]

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars3.htm

That is a healthy profit, and of course, every Star Wars film is being actively shared every day, with no effect on the bottom line of LucasFilm. Once again, these leaks if they came from theft were immoral acts. This has nothing to do with the correctness of people who share legitimately obtained copies of works.

Are you starting to get the picture? Filesharing does not harm the bottom line of companies that are offering something that people want.

“If we reach the point of suspension for an individual, they will be informed in advance, having previously received two notifications – and will have the opportunity to appeal,” Mandelson added. “The British government’s view is that taking people’s work without due payment is wrong and that, as an economy based on creativity, we cannot sit back and do nothing as this happens.”

An economy based on creativity? The internet is the one of the most efficient ways that that creativity can be spread all over the world. By crippling it, Mandelson will be breaking the legs of this ‘economy based on creativity’.

Mandelson said that the strategy was a “proportionate measure that will give people ample awareness and opportunity to stop breaking the rules”. “The threat for persistent individuals is, and has to be, real, or no effective deterrent to breaking the law will be in place,” he added.

It is clear that ‘the rules’ serve only a handful of people and not the majority of people. Those made up, illogical rules that he claims are being broken are in fact, the thing that will push back the emergence of a culture never before seen by mankind, where fortunes beyond avarice will be made, everyone will be free to share and knowledge and good will spread everywhere.

Of course, this is precisely what Mandelson is against. These people are the snuffers out of light. They are for darkness, ignorance and are opposed to every natural instinct that man has.

They will be defeated. Just as Watts patents expired and steam engine efficiency shot up, Mandelson, Geffen and the monopolists will eventually be destroyed. Linux is destroying Microsoft Windows. Android is destroying Symbian. Human beings are not designed to live in chains as slaves, and they will do anything to get out of them. The question here is wether or not Mandelson and co will succeed in retarding progress like Watt did.

There would be a “proper route of appeal” for those that do have their internet accounts suspended, Mandelson said. He added that he did not want to see internet service providers “unfairly burdened” by the new system.

“ISPs and rights-holders will share the costs, on the basis of a flat fee that will allow both sides to budget and plan,” he said.

ISPs want nothing to do with any of this. They provide your connection, what you do with it is your business. BT is not responsible for the content of your phone calls, so why should ISPs be responsible in any way for what websites you look at or the files you transfer?

The staged roll-out of the strategy will see Ofcom assess the effectiveness of the warning notification system on cutting illegal filesharing, backed by the threat of legal action by rights holders and content companies, in about April 2011.

If the 70% reduction is not achieved the use of technical measures to cut off persistent offenders’ web access will be introduced by about July 2011.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/28/mandelson-date-blocking-filesharers-connections

How are they going to measure this number? Where did this number come from? These are the missing pieces of this article. But this should come as no surprise, since The Grauniad is a 100% Kool-Aid drinking anti-progress copyrights and patents promoter.

Anyone who knows anything about this knows that ‘piracy’ is good for business and the consumer. Tentatively, the people who make software have embraced superdistribution in the form of shareware and crippleware; the more copies you have in circulation, the more likely it is you are going to make money, either from donations or by someone making commercial use of your work.

Remember CoolEdit? That was a free sound editing application that you could download, that was very useful. Some people bought licenses for it, the majority did not. In the end, the people who wrote it sold it to Adobe for a very large sum of money. 16.5 million dollars in fact.

The shareware world demonstrates that people when left to their own devices will find out ways to make money off of their work. What Mandelson is doing is protecting the interests of people who do not have the imagination or means to adapt to the new conditions of business. In effect, they are like Watt going to parliament to ask that his patents be extended. In fact, Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is an example of this happening successfully.

The question you have to ask is this; are you going to allow these small minded, computer illiterate, venal, nasty monopolists to cripple arguably the greatest invention that man has created to date? Are you going to allow them to retard the flowering of human knowledge and interaction that has literally changed the world?

Once again, it is up to business to grow a pair of balls and say that they are not going to take responsibility for the actions of the people they provide a connection to. If they do not, first they will be forced to police ‘piracy’ then they will be forced to police everything else the government does not like meaning speech.

Either way, even if the rise of the internet era of man is retarded by thirty years, it will come to pass, and scum like Mandelson will be swept away. They will be remembered as wreckers of civilisation, the new luddites, idiots, men without vision and the servants of monopolists.

And everyone will be able to look it up on the free internet.

This just came to us over the inernets:

I would like you to take note of, and publicise, the following important situation regarding this governments apparent intention to allow the public’s access to herbal medicines, medical herbalists and herbal manufacturers to go down the pan when new EU laws come into play in this country in eighteen months time. I also want to publicise actions planned to highlight the issue. Here are the details, in brief:

The background: For ten years, following the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s desire to see herbal medicine better regulated (following concerns around the rapid expansion of the Chinese and Indian herbal traditions into this country) much work has been done within the industry, with the MCA/MHRA, with academics and other interested parties to work out a way to better protect the public, the profession and the businesses that supply the professions. The answer was found to be Statutory Regulation.

The newly formed body The Health Professions Council was deemed to be the appropriate umbrella organisation under which professional Medical Herbalists could practice, ensuring the raising of educational standards, continuing professional development, quality control of herbal products etc. The government produced a Public Consultation Document on the matter, and it was due to end on Nov 2nd 9009 (although it has just had a two week extension due to the postal workers strike).

The bigger background: On 30th April 2011 the EU regulations on herbal medicinal products (Directive 2004/24/EC, amending Directive 2001/833/EC) become law in the UK. Only herbal preparations that have been licensed will be marketed. That means that the current manufacturers of herbal medicines, who have Good Manufacturing Practice and thorough quality control and analysis in place, will not be permitted to sell their products to qualified, trained and insured Medical Herbalists (the practitioners), so they will not be able to prescribe tailor made medicines to their patients, who will suffer.

The problem: The government is planning to abandon it’s committment to Statutory Regulation of this sector and leave it to be all but destroyed from May 2011 (18 months away).

The solution: Complete the Statutory Regulation of the sector, as planned and worked through, and then the public can be assured of high quality herbal preparations, and of the training of the professionals.

The action being taken: A demonstration outside Parliament and a Mass Lobby of MPs on November 2nd (next Monday) 12 noon until 4pm, with Medical Herbalists, universities that teach degrees on the subject and produce proficient practitioners, companies that produce high quality herbal medicines, and the UK public, who have always had access to herbs, their birthright, and wish to continue to have the choice of this form of medicine, especially once reassured that they are in safe trained hands.

PLEASE JOIN US IN MAKING YOUR VOICE HEARD. YOU AND YOUR READERS NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU WILL NEED HERBAL MEDICINE (WE ALL EVOLVED WITH IT AFTER ALL!)

Yours very sincerely

Afifah Hamilton MNIMH Cert Phyt
Member of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists since 1993

[…]

If you read BLOGDIAL, then you know that it is immoral to use force to prevent people from ingesting whatever they like into their bodies. This is true of any substance, no matter where it is from, who made it, or for what purpose you are ingesting it.

It is completely immoral to try and regulate or restrict the use of or the practitioners and dispensers of any medicine, including Herbal Medicine. This includes licensing of any kind of either the people or the products.

Once again, any regulations brought in will affect only the poor. The rich will be able to fly to China and receive top class herbal medicine, whilst the poor are left with poisonous pharmaceuticals that are designed not to cure people, but to keep them in a steady state of illness. Just ask anyone who is on anti cholesterol or anti hypertension drugs. They are explicitly told that they will be taking pharmaceuticals for the rest of their lives, and of course, this means ‘customers’ for life for the drug companies, who in countries with socialised medicine, will be taking stolen money from everyone to pay for the endless stream of prescription drugs.

It’s a wonderful scam, and of course, herbal medicine is a direct threat to this stream of stolen money. In China, acupuncture is used instead of pharmaceutical anaesthetics. Do you REALLY think that anaesthesiologists and the people who manufacture their knock out drops want Chinese ‘pseudo science’ in their operating theatres?

Of course they do not.

Not only are the rich going to continue to get superior, natural, individualised and genuinely beneficial health care, but anyone who wants it will be able to get herbal medicine by illegal means.

Does anyone really think that the same government that cannot stop the importation of Cocaine, Heroin and Marijuana or the clandestine manufacture of Acid, Ecstasy and Meth-amphetamines and will be able to stop herbal medicine?

If everyone who wanted it simply ordered it by post, it would be physically impossible for the state to intercept all of the packages without disrupting commerce. And that is something they will not allow.

Of course, a black market in herbal medicine will drive the prices up, and cause all sorts of unscrupulous people to get involved in supplying it, putting people’s health at risk… but the state doesn’t care about your health, or you or what is right and wrong; they simply want to destroy EVERYTHING that does not benefit the people who control them, i.e. corrupt business in vampiric symbiosis with the state.

Demonstrating is, of course, a total waste of time. Lobbying your MP is also a complete waste of time; this edict has come down from Europe, so the vestigial, purely ceremonial MPs will be powerless to stop it. Most of them are spineless or brainwashed or totalitarians in any case, and do not want you to be able to trot down to China Town and get a bag of stinky herbs to eliminate your bad skin:

Think about it; what are they going to do to stop people from reading recipes on the internets and brewing up their own teas from herbs they grow themselves or trade? Perhaps they are going to police the gardens of every house in the UK to make sure you are only growing those plants that are either of no medicinal value or that are deadly to consume.

The people behind this legislation are COMPLETELY EVIL AND INSANE, and anyone who obeys them is nuts.

Only the most simple minded fails to see that the EU is a terrible organisation and the only solution is for Britain to get out completely as soon as possible. If not, even more laws will be dictated to the UK Parliament, who will bend over every time and then enforce the diktats of foreigners that are not only a nuisance, but are now doing actual bodily harm to you.

Once again, lobbying MPs and demonstrating is not going to change anything. It would be far better if everyone who practiced this form of medicine simply put the state on written notice that they are no longer bound by the illegitimate edicts that have been handed down, and that they will continue to serve their patients no matter what. A single full page ad in the Times would be enough. It would cost the same as mounting a demonstration and mass lobbying the MPs and would send a very strong signal that business as usual WILL CONTINUE.

There are not enough aparatchicks to stop everyone from doing exactly what they want and following common sense. We have reached a tipping point where the state has detached itself from reality and the consent of the governed. All you need to do is simply carry on doing what you do whilst completely ignoring them. All they will be able to do is throw up their hands.

This is the response to the Graham Badman proposals by a ‘Neil T’:

1. Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

Disagree

This disgusting war of attrition on a legitimate section of society, which has used every trick in the book, not to mention outright insults, betrays the total lack of decency, integrity, or even safety of this reivew and therefore also of this government. The totalitarian intentions that lie behind this attack on fundamental constitutional freedoms, for no credibly demonstrated reasons forces me to conclude that I can have zero confidence in it to do anything but harm. It has demonstrated to me that it is a completely illegitimate despotism, and I hereby withdraw my consent to its rule. IMO it is unfit to make any changes to current education law or practice.

The government’s role in education has become irredeemably toxic, and the state should get out of education, and repeal the insult of compulsory education altogether, restoring that unmolested natural impulse of the young of our species to learn what it needs to learn without coercion.

The education of my children is none of the government’s business unless it appears that I am neglecting my s7 duty. If LEAs understood and respected this law of the land since my parents generation fought and died fighting for ‘freedom’ while it was being drafted, then children would be protected as well as they can be, and far better than the current dangerously deficient fiasco of universal child molestation and destruction of their privacy embarked on by this government.

2. Do you agree that a register should be kept?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

3. Do you agree with the information to be provided for registration?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

4. Do you agree that home educating parents should be required to keep the register up to date?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

5. Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

6a Do you agree that home educated children should stay on the roll of their former school for 20 days after parents notify that they intend to home educate?

Disagree

Absolutely not. Either parents are responsible for the education of their children or the state is. There is no legitimate reason for this incursion, other than to intimidate and dissuade parents from this course of action altogether, as HEers already experience from those schools and LAs which already assume they have such powers, and for which the Pupil Registration regulations 1995 were always a dead letter, no prosecution ever having been brought for the many breaches of a law never intended to be policed, but given as a sop to Education Otherwise to trick us into imagining that talking to government might actually get us anything we wanted.

6b Do you agree that the school should provide the local authority with achievement and future attainment data?

Disagree

The question makes no sense. Why would a school have anything to do with home education? The state system has no role in monitoring education that is not provided by it, nor should it have.

7. Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

Disagree

I do not need permission from the government to home educate my children.
Why would any sane parent vote to give up such a fundamental freedom?, and that is what registration is. The state also has no statutory monitoring role, despite dishonestly claiming such a function, thereby misrepresenting its powers, and since it militantly and relentlessly determines to misunderstand what HEers do, it perpetually demonstrates its own profound unfitness to judge what it cannot and does not want to understand.

8. Do you agree that children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns should not be home educated?

Disagree

Is this a trick question? Children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns will by definition already be being seen by social services. If in the course of any such contact ‘if it appears’ that a child is also not receiving suitable education, then the LA is already well placed to invoke s437 and involve the LEA. Current protections and procedures therefore seem highly adequate. It is conceivable that a good education might be being provided despite specific welfare concerns for a child, so a blanket ban would seem unnecessary and crude.

9. Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

Disagree

Our home is not a ‘premises’, its our home, and we are entitled under human rights instruments not to have it invaded. The so called home visit, which is really a non legally sanctioned state inspection of families by deception and misrepresentation of powers the state does not possess, should hardly predispose anyone to vote for making such unwanted and unhelpful intrusions legal.

10 Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

Disagree

If this suggestion does not actually have its specific origins in a paedophile agenda, it might as well have. This suggestion invokes necessary child protection actions by any responsible parent against a negligent state (at best), that cannot manage to make its own institutions safe from harbouring dangerous child predators, and at worst, manages to look like a perverts agenda in the first place. This suggestion is beyond vile, and will simply never be tolerated by a large section of society. No decent government could propose such an outrage against families. Powers already exist to enter homes where serious welfare concerns exist, but to suggest this as routine for all families is to debase citizenship utterly, and put all children at a new and totally unnecessary risk.

11 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

Disagree

The LA is entitled to make enquiries, and draw conclusions from non responders, or responses which only state that the parents are home educating and no more. It can then require information to be provided or serve an SAO. That is power enough, or would be if LAs understood the law they are supposed to administer.

HEers have been trying to humanise and get LAs to understand and respect the law, and the validity of what we do, probably ever since there have been LAs, and certainly ever since 1944, but with mostly little success, with one or two notable exceptions. It is pointless to contemplate greatly increased powers of intervention when so many LEAs are already local despotisms that act as if most of these powers already existed anyway. It is to shudder to contemplate what would befall us as a result of giving them these proposed new powers, even if they never exceeded them, but it is already no mystery to HEers, and we don’t believe it is any mystery to government either, which is the principle inciter to ultra vires despotism by LAs.

Government should be aware that the people will not be pushed in the direction of totalitarianism for ever, and that there is a line which government can cross that will not be tolerated, such rule, disobeyed.
For myself and many others I know, that line has already been crossed in this shameless and disgusting process, and as I have said before, and now reiterate, government does not have my consent to this process or any outcome from it. I will not submit to such tyranny. I will not obey this rule.

[…]

http://maire-staffordshire.blogspot.com/

My emphasis, underlined.

This is music to my ears, and of course, I agree with all of it.

We can but hope that this is the strength of sentiment in the vast majority of Home Educators.

Whoever Neil T is, he is a hero, no doubt about it. Blistering, flawless logic, delivered in the correct voice, with a clear declaration that all bets are off.

When these consultation responses are ignored, then the rage will increase exponentially as will the resolve to completely resist.

These people are making enemies of every last person in the country. There are not many people left who are not at the end of their tether. Everyone is fed up, everyone is harassed, pressured, squeezed and pestered.

And for what?

No one wants to be troubled with this sort of nonsense; I am sure that Neil T would much rather be doing something else than boiling his blood over Neu Liebour and its latest perversion.

The fact must be that these monsters crave disorder, ill feeling and violence. It is the only conclusion that a logical person can come to, since everything they do breeds murder, violence, chaos and disruption.

As I have said for years, no one should give them satisfaction.

Protesting in demonstrations merely puts you on cards like this (N.B. not that cards like this mean anything at all in the grand scheme of things; just ask the East Germans, many of whom appeared in their local equivalent. Decades later no one is affected by those records and they are just a bad memory, just as this card and the victims on it, in the long run, will not be harmed by this, when everything changes. In fact, cards like this are a symptom of the impending death of a nation, where ordinary decent people are criminalised because the state is totally illegitimate and completely corrupt: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government” Tacitus. These cards are designed not only as police tools but to spread fear and to shut down people’s willingness to act. It never succeeds in the end, EVER.):

Whilst doing nothing to achieve your goals.

Whatever you might think the solution to any particular problem is, one thing is for sure, doing again and again what has not worked is insane, and everyone who calls for more of what does not work is… not helping.

These are the key parameters that anyone who wants to solve a problem needs to understand:

1. There is not enough money for them to do everything that they want to do.
2. There are not enough aparatchicks to enforce everything they want to enforce.
3. There are too many of any single constituency to control, whether we are talking about motorists, smokers, drinkers, Home Educators, motorcyclists, hunters or any other group of people made up of large numbers.

If you can get all the people in your group to agree to obey only common sense, and do disobey any order or directive that violates your rights, then essentially, there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Common sense and order will prevail and insanity and disorder will cease to exist.

Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality — we judge reality by the responses of our senses. Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules. We judged the bullets to be solid, the guns to be real, therefore they can kill. I know the bullets are unreal, therefore they cannot harm me.

Spectre of the Gun

This is what the hunting crowd have discovered; they keep hunting and nothing has stopped them. It is directly analogous to Neo’s not running anymore, turning around and saying very calmly ‘No’.

It is directly analogous to THX and SEN being shown by SRT that in fact, there are no barriers to escape, and if you try to escape, nothing will stop you.

Finally, there is no need for violence from you. Power is an illusion. If enough people say no, there is nothing that can stop them, in fact, bullets cannot kill what energises them because bullets cannot kill ideas.

Read it and deal with it:

1. Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?
2. Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.
3. Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.
4. Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.
5. If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, the above goes double.
6. Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.
7. We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
8. Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
9. Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.
10. We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
11. Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.
12. If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.
13. Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.
14. Stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.
15. Stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.
16. Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.
17. Stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.
18. If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.
19. Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.
20. Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.
21. Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.
22. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.
23. Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.
24. Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.
25. Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html

Sept. 28, 2009 | It’s a Sunday night at the tail end of summer, and I’ve dragged two squawky kids out of the minivan and into a half-closed rest stop on the Garden State Parkway in search of non-dreadful dinner options. Leslie, their mother, is catching some precious zone-out time in the car. After we sit down with our unadorned burger and fries, I notice the woman at the next table, the one who’s making eye contact and smiling.

“Are they twins?” she asks. “How wonderful!” Then she talks to Nini and Desmond: “Wow, you guys are 5. So big! Are you starting kindergarten soon?”

Here’s where the fun starts.

My son and daughter regard me in grave silence, faces stuffed with processed meat and fried potato product. They field this question themselves fairly often, but they’re going to let me take it this time. For an insane split second, I consider a full-on lie, just some total invention about where and when they’re going to school this fall. Instead, I take a swig of fizzy fountain Pepsi and bite the bullet: “Actually, we’re home schooling.”

After various tense conversations with friends, family members and strangers, Leslie and I have concluded that earnest, heartfelt discussion of exactly how we’re approaching our kids’ education and why we’re doing it is a bad idea. For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices. I guess this is what it’s like to be a vegan, or a Mennonite convert. I can certainly remember having a weirdly defensive response (“You know, I hardly ever eat red meat”), one where I reacted to someone else’s comment about themselves as if it were really all about me.

At the risk of gross generalization, there’s a hierarchy of responses when you drop the home-school bomb in conversation. Childless men don’t much care; the question is too remote from their consciousness. Childless women are often curious and even intrigued; the question is hypothetical but possesses a certain allure as a thought experiment. As for men with children, they may or may not be sympathetic, but they don’t experience the subject as a personal affront. Let’s be honest: It’s almost always mothers who react defensively when the subject comes up, as if our personal decision not to send our kids to public school contained an implicit judgment of whatever different choices they may have made.

[…]

Other stuff is involved as well. Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it — more formal, more “academic,” reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year — is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it’s also one that’s debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we’re not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family — two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan — but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. As Alicia Bayer, a Minnesota home-schooler and blogger who’s one of Leslie’s online mentors, puts it, “People think we’re all conservative Christians who hate the government and wear denim jumpers.”

In order to avoid one or more of these discomfort zones, we try to answer all well-meaning interlocutors with bland, diplomatic and totally unspecific generalities. Not quite lies, but well short of what you’d call the truth. This is a phenomenon known to almost all home-schoolers, from Mormon separatists to off-the-grid hippie anarchists, and a frequent discussion starter in online home-school groups. So it was in my conversation with the nice Garden State Parkway lady in that fluorescent cavern between Burger King and Sbarro.

Mrs. Garden State Parkway: Well, you guys live in the city, right? I guess the public schools are out of the question.

Me: No, that’s really not true. There are some perfectly good schools in Brooklyn.

Real answer: There are, indeed, and in any other municipality you care to name. Now, it is true that the zoned public school in our multiracial, middle-class neighborhood has, let’s say, a checkered reputation and is mainly attended by children bused in from other parts of Brooklyn. It’s a uniform school run on a paramilitary model, ruthlessly devoted to driving up the test scores. Oh, and last semester the principal was arrested for assaulting a teacher. But, honestly, that stuff played only a marginal role in our decision making. There are numerous pretty good to very good schools in nearby neighborhoods that we could have applied to but never did.

[…]

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/09/28/confessions_homeschooler/

And this, my friends, is what it looks like when you are far down the road to Home Education being totally accepted as normal and in fact, desirable.

The man who wrote this stresses the fact that he does not hate the government, does not hate the idea of school, and is not running away from his local schools. He is a perfectly average person who simply has chosen to ‘Home School’.

This is exactly the point that has to be reached in the UK, a point in time where there is no one left who does not understand, see as desirable and most importantly, trust the idea of Home Education.

Right now, we have totally ignorant people making the claims that this author refutes nicely and even more troubling those same ignorant people pushing for unnecessary legislation to control something that is not a problem in any way. In fact, the only thing that the ignorant Diana Johnson wants to eliminate is her own ignorance about Home Education and she is using legislation to try and do this rather than Google.

Now get a load of this:

Ofsted visit faith schools and give them glowing reports

Independent faith schools give pupils a strong sense of personal worth and help them understand the importance of being a good citizen according to a report published today by Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills.

Then we go to the BBC and Schools Minister, Diana Johnson and all of a sudden things a Faith based education is BAD

Some evangelical parents need monitoring by the state because they may ‘intimidate’ their children with ideas about God, sin and hell, a BBC radio host has said.

If that isn’t a perfect example of the anti home ed focus of government…

[…]

http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/9088-faith-schools-faith-home-ed.html

You CANNOT make things like this up!

These people REALLY ARE INSANE!

Perhaps Roger Bolton and Diana Jonson could take some money from the BBC, fly on a research mission to the USA to meet Home Educators and then come back enlightened. Certainly Johnson has heard from Home Educators in the UK, and for some reason their words have gone in one ear and out the other, there being nothing in between to stop them.

But I digress.

Clearly, when people of the social class Andrew O’Hehir belongs to start to Home Educate, the tipping point is passed. They have access to influential media, know how to use it, and by that use, educate all the people who have not yet thought about Home Education as to what it really is and who does it; every type of person does it, and what it is is entirely natural, beneficial and wonderful. It has nothing to do with child safety issues or being against the government; it is only occasionally politicised because misguided governments are staffed by people who are ignorant of what it is, or who are philosophically opposed to it. Home Educators do not have any desire to engage with politics. They are busy enough doing what they do, but when push comes to shove, they are, as we have seen, more than capable of entering that nasty arena and defending themselves.

Priceless…

You will, if you eat anything containing flour, soon be forced to eat folic acid.

Folic acid should be added to bread on a mandatory basis, the Food Standards Agency has advised government.

Basically HMG is saying a certain percentage of people, through choice or ignorance or any number of reasons, do not take folic acid as currently advocated by… er, HMG… and so the entire population must be force-fed folic acid to compensate.

Note that there will be no opt-out. Folic acid will be added to flour, not bread, meaning that even home bakers will be forced to swallow this.

Last month there were calls for all Scottish women to take folic acid – even those not planning a family – after 15 babies were born with spina bifida since the start of the year.

I sympathise with those families, but I will not have a bizarre form of collective guilt expunged by forcing me to eat something I do not wish to eat.

Cereal has long been fortified on a voluntary basis by manufacturers, but suggestions that bread must be supplemented by law have been rejected by those who argue it is tantamount to mass medication.

Not ‘tantamount to’, is mass medication. As is fluoride in water.

Concerns about the how the potential risks weigh up against the benefits have been expressed.

As well as suggestions of a link with colorectal cancer, studies have also shown it may speed up cognitive decline in elderly people with other B vitamin deficiencies.

SACN did look at these issues for a report in 2007, which ultimately recommended fortification. But following publication of that report it was also asked to analyse two more studies relating to bowel cancer.

The FSA said that since SACN’s advice on fortification has not changed significantly as a result, its own recommendation in favour remained the same.

There is good evidence to suggest a link between excess folate and increased incidence of various cancer (look up what happende in the US and Canada after folate madation).  Even if inconclusive, the doubt is enough to block mandatory addition. Or should be, were we living in The Real World.

Discussions planned

The government’s Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson is expected to discuss the issue with counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland having received the updated advice.

Sir Liam is known to be in favour of mandation.

Legislation would be necessary to introduce the measure, and it would also mean stricter controls on fortified foods like cereals to ensure people did not exceed recommended daily intakes.

How the hell is that going to work? Please, tell me? Will it be mandated that we all eat 2 slices of bread and 30g of cereal per day, and consume no foods containing natural folic acid? Will all folate supplements be withdrawn for risk of overdose? That, my friends, is one fucked up idea. In fact, so little thought, so little forward thinking at all has gone into this proposal that it does not even qualify as an ‘idea’. It is just the ramblings of madmen. Madmen who wish to mandate what you eat.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “We will now consider their recommendation for the introduction of mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid alongside controls on voluntary fortification.”

There, a man-made analogue of something you can get better from real food will be present in everything from bread to cakes to fish and chips … anything containing flour.

Now we must ask the questions, why do they wish to do this and for whose benefit? The mandation of folic acid has been pushed several times in the last decade.

Delaying folic acid fortification of flour

Governments that do not ensure fortification are committing public health malpractice

The failure of European governments to mandate universal fortification of flour with folic acid has allowed a continuing epidemic of preventable human illness. It is ironic that the United Kingdom has not required fortification, as it was a randomised controlled trial from the United Kingdom that conclusively proved that supplementation with synthetic folic acid prevents about 75% of spina bifida and anencephalycommon and serious birth defects.¹ This study provided the primary scientific basis for the United States, Canada, Chile, and other countries to require fortification.

This is an editorial from the British Medical Journal (one of the most important journals in the world) from 2002. It is a sick and twisted viewpoint, based on the opinion that ‘We Know Best’. It is belittling, patronising and enslaving. It demands that the populus kneel before it and take the medicine, and be thankful that we are being saved from our own stupidity. It makes me want to spit in the face of Godfrey P Oakley, author of this piece of sanctimonious shit and ‘folic acid ambassador‘.

In 2006 they tried again.

FOLIC ACID will be added to bread within a year to reduce the number of babies born with spina bifida and other defects in a U-turn by the Government’s food watchdog. The Food Standards Agency will recommend this week that the vitamin be added to all loaves and flour, The Times has learnt.

And in 2007 Sir Liam himself had second thoughts and blocked it, based on meaumeau’s rebuttal, no doubt.

Dr Sian Astley, from the Institute for Food Research and also quoted in todays BBQ article,  said at the time…

Dr Sian Astley from the institute said: “Fortifying UK flour with folic acid would reduce the incidence of neural tube defects (such as spina bifida).

“However, with doses of half the amount being proposed for fortification in the UK, the liver becomes saturated and unmetabolised folic acid floats around the blood stream.

“This can cause problems for people being treated for leukaemia and arthritis, women being treated for ectopic pregnancies, men with a family history of bowel cancer, people with blocked arteries being treated with a stent (an internal splint) and elderly people with poor vitamin B status.”

She said it also increased the likelihood of multiple births for women undergoing IVF treatment.

She does not appear to have changed her mind.

You can read the FSA letters and reports here.

So we are left with a scenario where around 100 neural tube birth defects per year (20% of total) may be eliminated, balanced against an unquantifiable increased risk of cancer for the entire population.  Best case, this is a 100:0 balance. Worst case, who knows?

So again, why do they wish to do this and for whose benefit?

Other than a mass exercise in control-freakery, I don’t know. Perhaps one mandation begets another.  But it will be whole grain for me.

Read the following response to the sham consultation, and the voice of a third year student in Oxford:

First the law undergraduate:

What it feels like: to be homeschooled

I don’t have a single GCSE or A-level, but I’m in my third year at Oxford University, studying law. I was home educated from the age of 8 until 18. One of the universities I applied to responded by e-mail, saying: “Did you forget to fill the form in?” It’s tricky and expensive to get GCSEs and A-levels if you’re home educated, especially if you want to do lots of them — it can cost more than £100 per exam. And there’s no incentive for schools to assist non-pupils. Oxford was marvellous, though — it was very open-minded and accepted my qualifications from the Open University.

Home education was never the plan. My school closed down when I was 8, at an awkward time of year. Knowing that we would need to make some provision, my parents asked me if I’d like to give home education a go. I agreed, and I always enjoyed it. My father is a barrister and brings in the income, and my mother runs a children’s rights organisation, but was at home all the time for us. She had done a bit of teaching before, although she isn’t qualified.

Home education is much less drastic than people imagine. You’re not in your house all day, never meeting people. Other children are only in school for six hours a day. The only difference is that for those six hours, you are not in school, but around the place — it’s quite possibly less sedentary.

My parents allowed my younger brother and me to take an autonomous approach. The parental input was hugely irregular — we were supervised, but it was very informal. We never had deadlines, exams, homework or even a timetable, but I don’t have a problem applying discipline. I might do nothing on a Wednesday, but work all weekend. I’d go through phases of hiking through Snowdonia or reading in a corner for two weeks. In the beginning, however, I did spend a few months watching appalling TV and playing computer games. Had it gone on, my parents would have acted, but I got over it. There’s only so much daytime television you can watch.

I became fascinated with Antarctica, so my mother persuaded me to look at it in more detail. She would also take us to museums. The national curriculum only applies in schools — and my parents certainly didn’t follow it, although they did nudge me into subjects that I’d need, such as French and maths, and we had a French tutor who came weekly, over an extended period. Education is much broader than someone sitting you down and telling you things. Mine was a question of working out what areas I was interested in, then finding the relevant book, website or museum.

I discovered that academic institutions — the British Antarctic Survey and the Science Museum, for example — are incredibly willing to respond to an interested 10-year-old. I appreciated the freedom — I am interested in politics, and I was allowed to study that to a greater extent than the national curriculum would allow.

[…]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6872998.ece

“I was allowed to study that (politics) to a greater extent than the national curriculum would allow.”

That is not by accident of course.

And now the HEYC chimes in with the sort of language and insight that makes me have hope:

Question 1: Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

Answer: Disagree

There is no imbalance between parents’ and childrens’ rights at the current time. Any changes would cause an imbalance, though not between the rights of parents and children. Rights are given by nature, as well as law, and are immutable, hence the word ‘rights’. The proposed changes would allow the government to take more power from parents, but would not increase the power of children – the power to ‘protect’ the child’s rights would remain with the government.

Question 2: Do you agree that a register should be kept?

Answer: Disagree

Any home educating families who are not in contact with their LA probably live within the jurisdiction of an LA ignorant or hostile towards home education, and wish to avoid interference. Additionally, those parents who are malicious and abusing their children (if such parents exist) would not bother registering, as they are already breaking the law in a much more serious manner.

Question 5: Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

Answer: Disagree

This could provoke interference beyond the state’s justifiable jurisdiction. It should not be a criminal offence to educate your child in the way that seems best. Under Section 7 of the Education Act 1996, parents have a duty to ensure their children receive a suitable education, and so have a duty to educate their children away from school if they believe that to be the best course of action. Many home educating families try to avoid contact with their LA because they are afraid of interference with that duty. Parents could be branded as criminals for complete adherence to primary law. This proposal would not stop child abusers, who could simply stay under the radar, or stay hidden in some other way, but it leaves law abiding parents with a stark choice: to follow the proposed legislation, and avoid being branded as a criminal, or to be prosecuted for adherence to primary law, and doing their duty to their children.

Question 7: Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

Answer: Disagree

Here the DCSF is attempting to assert authority over parents, which misses the point that government are meant to serve the people. The DCSF is a government department and could not always issue appropriate guidance for local operation, especially something as varied as home education, which should be dealt with on a case by case basis.

Question 8: Do you agree that children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns should not be home educated?

Answer: Disagree

Education is nothing to do with safeguarding. This blurs the boundaries too far, education is education, and child protection is child protection, it is illogical and counterproductive to combine the two. Measures are already in place to ensure that children educated at home receive a suitable education, and that they are not being mistreated. If there are any ’safeguarding’ concerns, these should be referred to Social Services, rather than applying an arbritrary and pointless measure against a parent who has been presumed to be guilty. If the inspectors see that a child might be being mistreated, they could revoke registration and leave them no alternative but to go to school. The idea originally behind this proposal is that children are seen in school, so signs of abuse could be spotted. This is a serious misconception; children educated at home are seen plenty, definitely enough for signs of mistreatment to be spotted, just as effectively as they would be in school, via contact with their community, doctors, and friends. This proposal is not even true to its ideology; if an inspector has sufficient concerns about the welfare of a child to revoke registration, they should follow it up, rather than forcing the child into school–where they would supposedly be seen more than at home–if concerns had already been raised.

Question 9: Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

Answer: Disagree

The logical reason for LAs to inspect schools is to allow them to truthfully tell parents that their children are receiving a suitable education. If children are educated at home, this would be an unnecessary job for the LAs; parents would see their children and be able to satisfy themselves that their children are receiving a suitable education. An inspection of this sort in a private residence would be totalitarian. LAs also inspect schools so that the government can see whether or not it is achieving it’s goals, in terms of schools’ achievement levels. The government does not have any goals in terms of home educators’ achievement levels, so inspections would be a waste of time. On the child protection issue, measures are already in place to ensure that children are not abused. No additional measures are needed for home educated children, especially given the evidence that they are less at risk, as found by AHEd through FOI requests.

Question 10: Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

Answer: Disagree

No authority is allowed to see a child alone, without the parent present, in present law. To change this is actually a move against children’s rights, as in the case of a child who does not wish to be seen, it contravenes UNCRC articles 2 (by discriminating against home educated children), 9 (by removing a child from their parents against their wishes), and 16 (in that this process is arbitrary). Also, this power would not have the ability to force a child to speak, and children will not open up to untrusted strangers identifying themselves as authority. It would also be an opportunity for renegade inspectors–especially dogmatic believers in the school system, or paedophiles who have infiltrated children’s services–to make a some sort of harmful move on children, when they would not be able to protect themselves, and would not be seen by another adult who could help them. This proposal conflicts with parents’ biological instinct to protect their children, which must not be ignored.

Question 11: Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

Answer: Disagree

Aside from the point that local authorities should not even be entering private premises without willing consent from the owner, most children need time to be able to settle into home education before the local authority even considers the quality of their education. The frequency of the LA’s inquiries should be determined by the deemed quality of education in previous years; if a parent is providing good quality of education over a consistent period of time then there is no reason to continually monitor that parent.

https://heyc.org.uk/news/2009/10/heyc-consultation-response-badman-report

Note that this link is a secured page, so that no one can see what you are reading on that page; the contents of your connection to HEYC are private.

I’m Lovin it.

These are the enemies of the state, the threats to the current authority that I have been talking about.

One is an autonomous learner that is a lawyer. Once he starts practicing law, he will NEVER turn against Home Education, and in fact, he could quite easily run for and be elected to parliament. He has explicitly said that he is interested in politics.

If this were to happen again and again, the ‘establishment’ would face being co-opted by Home Educated free thinkers, short circuiting their corruption at every level.

This is why HOME EDUCATION MUST BE STOPPED.

The HEYC group is another perfect example. They are ruthlessly logical, well informed, organised and able to respond to the totalitarian ideas of characters like that creature of the night Ed Balls.

HEYC is a GROUP of young people, and for every one of them there are many more who for whatever reason are not connected to HEYC, but who are similarly well informed and free thinking.

These people are a CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER to the status quo; what the government cannot afford is ANY MORE of these people being produced, which is why the rate of increase of home educators needs to be curtailed right now, through a carefully coordinated plan of stigmatisation, character assassination, restrictive regulation, press smears, conflated horror stories and whatever other dirty tricks they can come up with to convince parents that only schools can teach, only the state curriculum is valid and everything else is PAEDOGEDDON.

The truth about Home Education, when you see it in these two forms is breathtaking in its attractiveness; what parent would not like their child to behave and function in the way these young people are doing?

Note also that the parents of Alex Dowty were both highly educated professionals. This is precisely the sort of story that should be told in every newspaper and lifestyle magazine to once and for all, dispel the idea that Home Education is in any way abnormal, or connected to anything abnormal.

These people WILL enter government and when they do, if there are any laws governing Home Education, they will be removed. It might take ten or twenty years. The question you have to ask yourself is this, “why should I wait for everyone else to catch up to the rightness of what we are doing?”. The answer is, “you should not”.

The people of the Soviet Union had to wait seventy years for the penny to drop that socialism was unworkable. Generations of people had their lives destroyed. The same goes for the people who had to suffer miscegenation laws. Their lives were blighted for no good reason, and now that these evil laws have been repudiated, all the people who suffered their lost loves are either dead or very bitter that their lives were spoiled by the pig ignorance of a minority of swines in power.

There is absolutely no reason why you should be interfered with in ANY WAY with your Home Education. You should not stand for it, tolerate it, accept it, be resigned to it or cooperate with it, should they dare try to legislate against it.

There are two strains of ignorance swirling around Home Education in the UK.

The ignorant people of the first strain believe mistakenly that Home Education is a ‘safeguarding issue’ and that children are ‘hidden’, ‘unaccounted for’ and so therefore need to be registered separately from children who, for example, go to school.

This is utter nonsense of course, and if you substitute ‘Home Educated Children’ for ‘Catholic Children’ you begin to unravel the illogic of this thinking. Home Education is not a means to hide children. It never has been. It is only about a type of education and nothing else, and Home Educated children are identical to all other children in every respect.

The ignorant and illogical people who falsely claim that Home Education is a safeguarding issue concede that the vast majority of children who are Home Educated receive an education that is greatly superior to that which is offered at state run schools, and there is academic research to back up this claim.

Let us now take a look at the second strain of ignorance.

Home education review sparks battle over lack of regulation

Rights to inspect children and assess lessons sought by social workers concerned about safety and standards

Social workers are calling on local authorities to increase the monitoring of home-educated children as a government review into the safety and welfare of the controversial practice gets underway.

The National Association of Social Workers in Education (NASWE) has warned that the current lack of scrutiny denies many children an effective education and often leads to them suffering harm.

Of course, this is total nonsense, and not only that, because it attacks parents who are doing nothing but the very best for their children, it is an attack of the sort that is unforgivable. The second strain of ignorance is demonstrated by people who believe that whilst Home Education is not an issue of child safety, the quality of education is something that needs to be looked into, because it may not be ‘sufficient’.

NASWE says that parents should be required to notify their local authority if they home educate and inspectors should have access to the child and their place of education.

These imbeciles do not understand that a home is not ‘a place of education’ like a school, and that how parents choose to educate their children is not the affair of the state until parents voluntarily agree that their child be educated in a state school on a temporary and conditional basis. The National Association of Social Workers in Education would be doing a greater service to the children that it claims to care so very much about if it concentrated its efforts on the army of illiterate children that are coming out of the state school system.

The right of parents to educate children should be taken away by the courts if the education being provided is not suitable, NASWE said.

This is once again the second strain of ignorance. We already know that Home Education is vastly superior to what is provided by the state schools, and anyone taking ten minutes to use the Google will find this out. These are the words of people who make a living off of the management of children. If there is a trend away from putting children into the systems that they are connected with, they will lose their jobs. That is why teachers and groups like The National Association of Social Workers in Education are so bitterly opposed to parenting and Home Education. If you eliminate parenting and everything that goes with it, these people will have jobs for life.

The National Association of Social Workers in Education is:

(An) Association and group of professionals who are committed to: The promotion of education inclusion for all children

Their principles include:

(being) fully committed to ensuring that all children and young people have access to and benefit from a wide range of educational opportunities.

and

…believes that all children and young people their parents and carers have an entitlement to be treated with dignity and respect. This includes being listened to, consulted on any decision affecting them, and giving due regard to confidentiality.

…fully supports The 1989 United Nations convention on the rights of the child.

‘The rights of the child’ which of course, translates to the ‘right’ of NASWE having unfettered, unsupervised access to your children.

…believes safeguarding should be reflected in every aspect of practice. Children and young people can best benefit from educational opportunities if they feel safe and secure from harm.

According to them, children cannot feel safe and secure from harm… in their own homes. You cant make stuff like this up. They want legally enforced power of entry into homes to interrogate children away from their parents, a violation, and yet claim that children can best benefit from feeling safe and secure from harm.

Children who are removed from school and Home Educated because the local schools are violent nests of bullies feel safe and secure at home. The very people who run the places they have escaped from then chase them right back into their own houses, and then, by force conduct an interrogation by a complete stranger without a parent being there. Why yes, this will make a child feel very secure!

These monsters are sick and deluded beyond imagining.

Here it comes….

NASWE president Andy Winton said the “majority” of home educators worked hard, but that his members were becoming “increasingly concerned” over the lack of regulation and monitoring.

He said this has “in a small but significant number of cases, led to children not just being denied their right to effective education, but to have suffered significant harm”.

“The legislation only makes it possible to consider the education on offer and this goes against all other aspects of their work with children.

“Elective home education is not in itself a safeguarding issue, but it removes the opportunity for what is a very efficient method for monitoring and surveillance through attendance at school. Consequently, the issue has become conflated with safeguarding concerns which may exist regardless of the method by which a child receives education.”

[…]

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6011938

Pure unrefined ignorance. This very deluded person concedes that Home Education is not a safeguarding issue, but then says that it removes the opportunity for monitoring and surveillance at school. The epidemic of bullying and illiteracy at state schools proves that schools are not places where any sort of efficient surveillance is taking place. If that were not the case, then bulling would not exist in schools (for example).

They cannot have it both ways. They cannot on the one hand say that schools are the best place for children to learn and be perfectly safe when they are neither perfectly safe nor is any absolute guarantee of learning taking place.

Both of these ignorant sides are wrong. There is no problem from either the educational provision aspect, or the ‘safeguarding’ aspect. The problem with Home Education is that ignorant people with vested interests in managing children do not like it, and are threatened by it.

And finally a comment from the article:

“The association acts as the voice for those working to promote school attendance and social inclusion in education across the UK.” So come on people, how surprising is it that they want to clamp down on home ed? It’s like a national association of master butchers demanding closer monitoring of vegetarian foods!

This is very true.

The solution to this problem is simple; you make the people who believe that Home Education is a safeguarding issue but not an educational issue understand that the safeguarding case is absurd, and then you make the ones who accept that the safeguarding is not an issue but the quality of education might be a problem understand that they are gravely mislead.

There will then be no one left who has any questions about what Home Education is or what it does.

The latter group are easy to convince; there are many studies out there to show them – shut them up – as it were. The other group has to be defanged by pure logic, since they will extrapolate one case to all cases. This is the way perfectly innocent things like kitchen knives become the subject of new law; someone somewhere has an accident or a crime committed against their child and then suddenly there are normally sane people calling for kitchen knives to be banned.

It is possible to turn this perception problem around, the question is a matter of will not the task itself.

We now have another uncorrected transcript of evidence given before the select committee. It is full of rubbish that is easy to tear to shreds, and quite surprisingly, has a moment or two of honesty, decency, clarity and morality.

I am not going to tear it all to shreds. There are others out there who are busy doing good work on that, and I and everyone else has been over the merits of the witnesses. But I will take a look at some interesting parts.

First, a definition:

Straw man Argument

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position.[1] To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern:

1. Person A has position X.
2. Person B disregards certain key points of X and instead presents the superficially-similar position Y.

Thus, Y is a resulting distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:

1. Presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent’s position and then refuting it, thus giving the appearance that the opponent’s actual position has been refuted.
2. Quoting an opponent’s words out of context — i.e. choosing quotations which are intentionally misrepresentative of the opponent’s actual intentions (see contextomy and quote mining).
3. Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person’s arguments – thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.
4. Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.
5. Oversimplifying an opponent’s argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.
3. Person B attacks position Y, concluding that X is false/incorrect/flawed.

This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious, because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to constitute an attack on the actual position.

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

Now that you have that definition clear in your head, look at these this example of the straw man argument used by Mr Chaytor:

Q75 Mr. Chaytor: Do you think that parents should be able to give their children medical attention at home without any registration? What is the difference between setting yourself up as a teacher or as a doctor at home?

That, as you can see, is a classic straw man argument.

Here are two more straw men, with some anecdotal evidence thrown in:

Q49 Chairman: Zena, as a Member of Parliament, I know children disappear all the time in my constituency. It’s a very real concern. It isn’t only runaway children, but children who disappear overseas and when you try to track them it is impossible because we don’t have the data. I am sorry, I have to correct you on that as a working constituency Member.

Q65 Paul Holmes: Simon wrote “Children raised in this way may well spend months pursuing a favourite topic, but they are unlikely to study a well-rounded curriculum…and therefore to acquire formal qualifications…The restriction of a child’s life chances by the early decision of a parent, sometimes when the child is only four or five, must surely be examined.”

Some years ago, I was approached by one person in my constituency who had been home educated. In his mid to late-20s he found that he did not have access to the professional qualifications that would allow him to take over his father’s accountancy firm. So, the home education choices that were made quite a long time earlier, and that he had thoroughly enjoyed, meant that he now could not do what he wanted to do as an adult.

Be on the lookout for this debating tactic, and do not let them slide by you unchallenged.

The chairman contradicts himself, when someone goes down a line of questioning that he does not like:

First he asserts:

Chairman: Let me put this down very straight: this is a Select Committee. There are 14 members and they have their own opinions and ask their own questions. You interpret us as having moved position in 15 minutes, but that is not the collective view of the Committee. This is a group of very distinct individuals who want to find out the facts, and that is why we are asking the questions. It may be that questions from David are from a different angle than those from Graham, but that is the nature of Select Committees.

Mr. Stuart: That is certainly true.

And then later:

Q115 Mr. Stuart: My point is about failing schools. You say that you cannot see the argument against registration. The irony is that, on average, four in 10 boys leave primary school unable to write properly according to Government levels. That means, in the worst schools, it is massively hard now. The worst parents in this country, as we know from our looking into looked-after children-

Chairman: No other member of the Committee would recognise that.

Mr. Stuart: That is not necessarily the case. I often don’t recognise what is said by other members of the Committee; you don’t have to agree with all the questions, Chairman. The point is that when you look at children in care, you will see that the worst parents in the country appear to be corporate parents. So we have local authorities who are failing with schools and with looked-after children, and they are sending officers to the homes of people who have withdrawn their children very often as an act of safeguarding from failing local authority provision. Can you not see an irony there, and should there not be a very high bar before the state, regardless of the responsibilities you hold-

So which one is it? are the members of the committee ‘a group of distinctive individuals’ or are they thinking as a collective with the Chairman as their sole arbiter and voice?

Finally the good stuff.

Q112 Mr. Stuart: Do you all accept the fundamental right of parents to home educate?

Phillip Noyes: Yes.

Peter Traves: Yes.

Ellie Evans: Yes.

Sir Paul Ennals: Yes.

Q113 Mr. Stuart: Peter, you said you didn’t understand the argument against registration. Isn’t there a principle that regulation and registration in almost any area should have to pass a high hurdle of need before it is brought in? There should not be an assumption that the state regulates and registers us all in business or our personal lives for its convenience. You said that there are responsibilities and that it is not very helpful for us not to have all that data. Parents and children are not there to help you meet your responsibilities.

Mr. Stuart seems to understand what is at the core of this. Bravo.

This is good and bad:

Q76 Mr. Chaytor: I agree, but should there not be some objective assessment of levels of capability? Is there not a wider issue for the community in that the child is not the personal possession of the parent, but a member of the wider community?

Jane Lowe: The child is not the possession of the state, for the state to impose its rules on.

Mr. Chaytor: No, but the child is a member of the wider community.

So, Jane Lowe obviously understands that children are not the property of the state.

Mr Chaytor seems to think that children ARE the property of ‘the community’. When he says they are ‘members’ of the community, what that actually means is that they belong as a form of property and have a responsibility to that community from birth. And of course, you can substitute the word, ‘community’ for the state if you are speaking plainly.

This disturbing attitude is the second possible explanation of who owns children (property) given by Rothbard:

Another man or set of men have the right in that child, i.e., have the right to appropriate it by force without the parent’s consent

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=2200

What Mr. Chaytor is saying is that the community (the state) has a prior claim on your child; that your child is the property of those people from birth, and that you have no say in what is best for that child. The ‘community’ is the parent of your child.

This opens up a whole slew of questions. WHICH community does your child belong to? If you are a part of a community that believes that honour killings are perfectly legitimate, should your child be subject to that, simply because other people believe it?

If you live in Tower Hamlets where there are literally dozens of different communities living together, which partiular group should take precedence over your right to own and rear your own child?

As you can clearly see, the only way that everyone’s rights are protected, and all children are reared in a way that is suitable to them, is that NO ONE but the PARENT should be able to say what is or is not good for a child.

It is very encouraging that there are Home Educators out there that at least in part, understand that the state does not own children. The more people are woken up to this fact, and then to the reality that they in fact own their children or someone else does, the less likely it will be that there will ever be another Badman report written by the next imbecile in waiting who wants to impose her personal prejudices on total strangers and free people.

Someone emailed me the link to the uncorrected transcript of the Select Committee. It is quite simply, one of the most amazing things I have ever read.

As I said before, this meeting will not change anything. It may however finally provide the push to galvanise Home Educators to mount a proper campaign to stop this insanity.

Q1 Chairman:

[…]

Graham, we have chosen this topic for a short inquiry because there is great public interest in it, in terms of wanting to make sure both that every child in our country has the full possibility of a good education, and that they are protected during their childhood. On the other hand, there is a strong movement towards home education, and a significant proportion of our school-age children benefit from home education. You have conducted a swift inquiry into this-I believe it took five months-and you have been doing some further research. That is why we have chosen this topic. We hope that we can help at this juncture, before legislation is introduced.

See? They are hell bent on introducing legislation. It is now a matter of how bad it is, what you are going to do in response to it, and what the Tories are going to do do dismantle it when they take over.

Ms Diana R. Johnson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee. I am pleased to be here this afternoon. I would first like to set out the Government’s position in a basic, plain way. It remains that it is a fundamental right that parents should be free to educate their child at home, if they wish to do so.

The question is not the right to educate at home, but what the shape that education takes, and the liberty to choose whatever form you like, without interference from the state. Autonomous learners know exactly what I am talking about.

We acknowledge that views on home education are polarised, with home educators feeling that local authorities do not understand the range of approaches that they can take, and home educators unwilling to accept that in a minority of cases home education may not be up to scratch.

This is a matter of principle. Local Authorities should only be concerned with the schools they have responsibility for. They should not be responsible for anyone who is outside of their schools. Home Education is a form of private education; Local Authorities do not inspect the homes of children who are sent to private schools, and they should not be sent to examine the homes and education methods of Home Educators.

In 2007, the Government published non-statutory guidance on monitoring home education which set out the legal requirements, and the approaches that we expected local authorities and home educators to take in working together to ensure that home-educated children receive a good education. However, it became clear during 2008 that neither home educators nor local authorities felt that the guidance was working, and that is the reason for the review.

The introduction of non-statutory guidance was a mistake. It put Local Authorities in an impossible position, and has led to this incredible, foul and loathsome report to try and solve a problem that did not and continues not to exist, but for the pointless and ignorant interference of agents of the state.

Graham’s recommendations fall into three broad categories: first, registration and monitoring; secondly, providing far greater support to home educators; and, thirdly, mechanisms for home educators’ needs to be considered explicitly in local authority strategies.

‘Registration’ and monitoring are an affront to every parent in this country. The reasons given for it are completely bogus, and furthermore, the use of the word ‘registration’ is completely disingenuous an an abuse of the English language. What is being proposed is the licensing of Home Educators. They will not use the correct words because they know that no one will accept the idea that they are to be licensed to be in charge of their child’s education.

I need to say at this point that I am not able to go into very much detail about the proposals on monitoring and registration today. As you know, they are out for public consultation, which ends on 19 October. We will have to consider carefully the consultation responses before proceeding. I would like to emphasise that no firm decisions have yet been taken.

Except that there will be licensing of Home Educators, no matter what the consultation says. This is a fact. The decision HAS been made, and anyone who believes otherwise is delusional.

Home educators have repeatedly asked for additional support,

Support is fine. Force the schools that you are in control of to accommodate Home Educators that want to take exams on demand. Really these schools should be for this, as Home Educator exam takers will boost their lacklustre league table positions.

and I am pleased to say that we have listened to them.

ROTFL!

[…]

If we proceed to legislate, we intend to require local authorities to broker arrangements so that home educators who want to take public examinations can do so at centres reasonably close to where they live and at no cost. We will also put arrangements in place for authorities to consider home educators’ needs strategically, so that they are systematically considered and appropriate service is provided.

IF they proceed to legislate? Now that is the best thing I have read on this subject in months!

Finally, if and when the recommendations of Graham’s review are fully implemented, home educators will still have a considerable degree of freedom.

This is simply not good enough. “We will be taking away your freedom, but you will have some left, so do not complain… PEASANT!” is what this woman is saying.

They will not be operating outside the law, as is the case in the Netherlands and Germany where home education is illegal.

“We could have made it illegal altogether, so count your blessings… PLEBS!”

They will not have to sit national tests, as in Finland and Norway, nor follow the national curriculum, as in Denmark.

Now this strictly speaking is not the truth. Autonomous learners, who do not follow anything but what the child wants to learn as the ‘curriculum’, are without a shadow of doubt, going to be told that they can no longer do this if the recommendations become law. Is this person really saying that if the LA licenses an HE family and the annual plan they submit is that they are going to be autonomous learners, that this is going to be accepted?

I think not, and all of them know this but will not say it.

England will still be one of the most liberal countries in the developed world in its approach to home education, reflecting the careful balance we have to strike between a child’s right to education and a parent’s right to educate their child in conformity with their beliefs and philosophies. I very much look forward to the report that you will produce after you have taken evidence.

Education is not a right it is a good. Home Educated children ARE EDUCATED, and the form of that education is not the business of the state.

Q2 Chairman: Thank you for that, Minister; it got us off to a good start. Is there anything you would like to add, Graham?

Graham Badman: My thanks for this opportunity. I have not actually said anything about my report since I submitted it to the Secretary of State, and there are some good reasons for that. There were lots of invitations to talk about it, but I chose not to because I thought it would be prejudicial to an open process of consultation. To echo the Minister’s comments, if all the recommendations are implemented, there is nothing to stop home educators, many of whom I have met who do a thoroughly good job for their children, continuing.

Once again, it is not the matter of it continuing that is the subject; it is the FORM of that continuance, and of course he knows this.

They would be subject to registration and to what I regard as light touch monitoring,

Why should they be subject to licensing? By what right does the state and its foul aparatchick think that it has the right to license parents? As for light touch, this is nonsense beyond measure. This man wants to remove the right of parents to educate their children as they see fit. There is nothing light about this at all; in fact, the status quo is a light touch approach, where the LA have no right to interfere with you and your HE activity.

There are many people in the UK and all over the world reading this, and shaking their heads in disbelief. I am sorry to report that you are not asleep, this is real, you are not in a bad dream!

but as the Minister as pointed out, in one of the most liberal regimes in terms of a developed education system,

That is an interesting choice of words; REGIME.

we now have greater access to a range of services. I stated in my report that it seems perverse for any Government to express concerns about this group of people, yet not offer any resources to them.

Fine. Force them to offer resources to Home Educators. That would have nothing to do with onerous and immoral regimes of licensing that are being proposed. What these people are doing is conflating several different and unrelated items in order to get to the final goal of outlawing Home Education.

Strangely enough, if they opted just for forcing schools to offer exam facilities to HE families, they would get some registration; everyone who wants to take an exam has to register with someone, and in this case, it would be with the school. But this would not be enough for them. They want EVERYONE to be registered and EVERY autonomous learner family brought to book.

If I were before you, Chairman, as a Director of Children’s Services and you asked me, “What do you know about the 80,000 children in your care?” and I replied, “I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t tell you very much about them,” I suspect that I would not remain in the post for very long.

First of all, the 80,000 HE children ARE NOT IN THE CARE OF THE STATE they are IN THE CARE OF THEIR PARENTS. The state has no right to license these people simply because they chose a non state form of education. Be aware, Home Education is not a non-sanctioned form of education, it is simply like being at a private school.

That, frankly, is the situation in relation to elective home education. That doesn’t mean to say that it is bad; it means to say that we don’t know.

And you have no business knowing. The doctors that service these families know about these children, so does everyone surrounding the many social circles that they inhabit. These people ARE KNOWN they are NOT HIDDEN. Just because YOU PERSONALLY do not know what a group of people are doing, does not imply anything other than your own ignorance. You do not know what all Catholics are doing; are you now going to say that they too should be licensed because you do not know what all Catholic children ‘in your care’ are doing? This is the purest illogic of the most oily kind.

Children have a moral right to education;

That is not true. Education is a good, not a right. It is a good that all parents want for their children. This is why so many families are opting for Home Education both here and in the USA where there are ONE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND of them.

I place great emphasis on that. My report, I hope, sets out to balance the rights of the child with the rights of parents.

Children do not have rights in the same way that adults do. This false reasoning is nothing more than a pretext to set the state up as the ultimate parent of all children. You will see below the result of this highly suspicious and sinister thinking.

It seems timely on the 20th anniversary of the UN convention that we seek to examine whether or not this sector of the community actually honours children as expressed in the UN convention. I spent some time in my report discussing that and placed the recommendations in that context.

The UN is irrelevant. No Home Educator in the UK is a signatory to the UN convention, and they should not be bound by it at the word of one of its aparatchiks. You say it seems timely. Others say that it is not timely. By what power and right does one man declare unilaterally that the time is right to do this, and so, by his diktat, it should be done? Those who still believe in democracy ask yourself, “Who voted for Graham Badman?”

All that being said, if anything, the report is most critical of local authorities. If implemented, it will hold them to account through an audit regime for their systems of monitoring elective home education. I think it raises real questions about the support they have given and should give to statemented pupils; about their training, or the absence of it, of staff; and it crucially requires them to determine and analyse why those children left school in the first place. Ask that question: why did they leave, if indeed they ever attended?

This is absurd. The reasons why people are leaving schools are well understood. What is less understood is why nothing is being done to fix those schools, and why time and money and effort are going to be spent on Home Educators while the schools continue to rot.

I tried very hard to represent the views of the countless elective home educators who often spoke of their despair-I do not use that word without some caution, but it was genuine despair-at the schooling system. They had concerns about the understanding of local authority officers who did not appreciate the aims of elective home education. Elective home educators often viewed elective home education as a place of last resort where their children could escape bullying. They felt that many young people, particularly those with special educational needs and those on the autistic spectrum, were not being catered for. Added to that, there was a whole group of parents who had a philosophical belief in educating at home. There was a clear conviction on the part of many of them that they could do it better, and I respect that belief.

No, you do not. If you did, you would not have designed licensing and annual re licensing and a mandatory submission of a plan of what the HE family is going to do over the year. You do not respect in any way the beliefs of Autonomous learners or anyone that does not share you precise view of what education should be or what the legal status of a child is or what the proper relationship between the state and families should be.

But in turning now, to safeguarding, I recognise that this was the most controversial element of the report. Many parents felt that the initial press coverage of the review found them guilty, and they had to prove their innocence. I regret that, because I don’t think that is true, and I cite what they said to me-that hard cases make for poor legislation. And where there was no evidence-for example, on forced marriage, where I actually looked at the report that went to the Home Affairs Committee-where I could find no evidence, I said so.

And yet you continue to trot out the nonsense of Home Educators being statistically less safe than those at school. Furthermore, if you truly regretted the harm and hurt you were doing to Home Educators with your scandalous and vile report, you would have stepped in immediately to stop the press from misrepresenting your report, and you would have said that Home Education is perfectly safe, normal and of no concern. Of course, that would have meant rubbishing your own report which says the opposite of that.

In regard to safeguarding I simply ask two questions about well-being and safety. They are on page 28, paragraph 8.2. Basically, my two questions were, “Are the concerns for child protection over-represented within the elective home educators community; and if so, what could have been done through better regulation to ameliorate those effects?”

But it is the purely sinister recommendation that Local Authority workers be given the power to interview children alone without the parents present that is the thing that has astonished everyone; so gravely evil, so unprecedented that it was the true surprise of this report. No decent person would ever put such a proposal on the table. But there you go.

Finally, with regard to education itself I recommended further work to be done, to determine, in the context of what constitutes not 21st-century schooling, but the 21st- century education system that is required, what is suitable and efficient, now.

What is suitable is not your business. I can absolutely guarantee that if a group of Muslims set up a school in London where the only thing that is taught is the Quran, you would not DARE to say that the provision is not suitable. Suitable to whom? Who are YOU or anyone else to determine what is or is not suitable for ANY family? The fact of the matter is that only the parent is qualified to determine what is or is not suitable for their children, the state should have no say in it whatsoever. The state has plenty to take care of in the schools that they are in control of – those factories of illiteracy – and that is more than enough. The responsibilities and obligations that Ofstead manages should not be superimposed on families. Schools operated by the state provide a service that has to be accountable to parents; that is totally different to Home Educators providing for themselves. Once again, we see a group of people who do not understand the difference between the private and public spheres, and the reasons why people who work for the state should be accountable.

The definitions that we have got are only defined by case law. They are not legal, and they are pretty woolly. Although I came to no firm conclusions I recommended that further work be done on that; indeed, in the same way that I recommended that we explore more about autonomous education. We don’t know enough; we don’t know enough in terms of research, particularly on what are the outcomes for young people as a consequence of that.

You do not know enough because you do not care to look. In the USA, unschooling is widely practiced and the products of it are willing to talk about it. There is no mention of them, their results or how successful it is. Why not? Because to reference them would throw a spanner in the idea that what a suitable education is needs to be defined.

Lets be clear about this; this is a philosophical battle between statists who believe that only the state should provide education, and that the state is the ultimate parent of all children, and people who do not believe that. The people who want total control of education are behind this report. They are no different to the people in Germany, save that they are incrementalists and not smashers of people’s rights.

I began by saying that I’d written this report in seeking to balance the rights of children with the rights of their parents. I hope that, if implemented, it gives children a voice.

What this actually means is that the report is designed to supplant the parent as the ultimate guardian of the child. Since a child is not legally able to represent herself in any situation requiring informed consent, the state will step in and be the parent. See below to find out what this really means from the mouth of Graham Badman himself in one of the most sickening passages you will ever read.

I know that in itself is contentious. But I have also tried to give elective home educators a voice.

This is not at all true.

I recommended that they be engaged in the process of determining what is efficient in education, that they be involved in training, that they be involved in all the things that follow, and that, crucially, local authorities create a forum whereby they regularly hear from elective home educators about the services that are provided.

Home Educators have been involved in the many consultations, have been repeating the same things over and over again, and they have been ignored each time. That is why we are at this point. If Home Educators had been listened to, there would be no problem. The reality is that the decisions have already been made, and all the consultations and everything else are just window dressing and theatre. There is not a single Home Educator in the country that does not understand this, no matter what side they are on. The results of the consultations were overwhelmingly in favour of the status quo, and this made no difference to the outcome again and again.

I believe that the EHE community has much to offer in developing our understanding of the effectiveness or otherwise of the schooling system. It holds a mirror up to the schooling system,

Nonsense. Schools in the UK have been deteriorating thanks to a well understood process of interference in the teaching process. Home Education is a signal that a breaking point has been reached; many people are coming to it because their schools are failing their children. The philosophical crowd will always be there, but it is the new escapees that are the real testament to the failure of management culture, political correctness, zero discipline etc and their disastrous effect on the state school system. This is not ‘holding up a mirror’ this is a warning sign.

and to that end, I have to say, Chairman, I have been somewhat surprised by the reaction of a vociferous minority-and I do think it is a vociferous minority;

You do not know wether or not it is a minority, because no one is registered in your bogus system.

I can actually count the number of people who have done it. I have found the remarks of some of them offensive, but I draw comfort from an academic friend of mine who says that often personal attacks are made when logic has been defeated.

No one cares a damn about Graham Badman. If you had never written this terrible, offensive and horrible report, I doubt that there would be many people who even knew that there was a real surname of ‘Badman’. It is what you have written and what you are suggesting that has infuriated Home Educators, and quite rightly too.

I don’t regard those people as a majority.

And so, the minority does not have rights in the view of Graham Badman. This is rather like the idea of voting for the culling of redheads because the majority would find it satisfying.

The rights of everyone are equally precious and deserving of protection, and by rights, I mean real rights, not goods misconstrued as rights.

I think that I have benefited enormously from learning of their experiences, but I actually think that the change in regulation and greater scrutiny is essential for the children.

This is an opinion, and it is an opinion formed in a cauldron of simmering ignorance.

There is no excuse for any of this. This report should never have been commissioned or written. I hope to God that none of it becomes law, and that it is consigned to the garbage where it belongs.

I will leave it to others to take apart the drivel, misrepresentations factual errors, and other nonsense in this woeful transcript. But I will go down through some of the things that jump right off the screen.

[…]

Q24 Chairman: I read the report and imbibed as much as I could. On the one hand, as Chairman and member of this Committee, of course I want to make sure that every child who is home educated gets a good deal, and it is obvious that there are some absolutely fantastic experiences for a certain percentage of home-educated children. But there is obviously real evidence that for a significant percentage there are some pretty bad horror stories.

Where are the horror stories? WHAT horror stories? And even if there were horror stories that the chairman could cite, this is as nothing compared to the epidemic of illiteracy that the state system is responsible for, not to mention all the bullying, abuse and violence that dwarfs the numbers of any alleged cases of harm in Home Education, which no one can cite!

Ms Diana R. Johnson: The worrying thing for me as a Minister is that we do not have full data sets; we do not know about who is educating their children at home. The figures that we are looking at-perhaps 20,000 or 25,000-are estimates. There was work done by York Consulting a few years ago, trying to give figures, and even that body found it difficult. So, I think it would be very helpful to know who is home educating and what numbers we are actually talking about, and then as a Government we can feel confident that we know who these children are and be satisfied that they are getting a good education.

The only worrying thing here is that these people think they have a right to measure everything. Do they imagine, because ‘they do not have data’ that they should be measuring the amount of food children eat? Perhaps they do, and the only reason why they do not legislate for it is that it is not technically feasible. As a Government, you need to fell confident that you are properly serving the people who are already in your schools. This cannot be overstated. You are FAILING to educate millions of children.

Chairman: That does seem sensible. Annette, back to you.

It only seems sensible to people without morals or common sense.

Q25 Annette Brooke: I want to probe on registration and I will perhaps put my cards on the table: I am actually in favour of a simple registration scheme because I don’t want children disappearing below the radar.

This is nonsense reasoning, driven by a complete misunderstanding of what Home Education is. Home Educated children are NOT BELOW THE RADAR. They are known to their doctors, their community etc etc. This is just nonsense, and what infuriates Home Educators is that these ignorant people trot out this crap and are never pulled up on it at the time they are spewing it.

I think that point is important. However, I wonder if we could just look a bit at the applications for registration. Surely it is going to be fairly clear-cut that a local authority will have a right to refuse registration on the grounds of child protection, and presumably there will be a right of appeal because that would be a British justice situation. Can I ask you about the appeals process that might have been thought of?

Call it what it is, licensing. They will not have the ‘right’ to refuse licensing, they will have the POWER to refuse. There is nothing simple about a ‘registration’ (licensing) scheme; only a simple minded person would put it in those terms, or someone who does not want the true nature of this to be revealed too early. Just ask the people who were forced to write down their religion fifty years ago, or the people in South Africa about ‘simple registration’ schemes.

Ms Diana R. Johnson: I think you are absolutely right in that any process that is set up needs to be fair.

Utter nonsense. It is in no way ‘fair’ that parents should have to license their families with the state, and then be subject to a possible refusal.

We all know that having a right to appeal would be part of the fairness of any procedure. These matters are out for consultation, which does not end until 19 October. Therefore, I am not at this stage able to give you any definitive view about how an appeals procedure would work. All I can say is that being fair would obviously be a key part of any procedure created.

No one believes any of this is fair, representative, democratic or just. And that is a FACT.

[…]

Q29 Mr. Pelling: Could the flexibility go so far as to drop the idea of registration and just have the approach that there should be an obligation to receive advice? Could you go that far in terms of flexibility?

‘An obligation to receive advice’ I have never heard of such a thing, but if it means that you would be sent a letter upon de-registering from school, well that would be perfect. After having received the advice, you can then freely, without interference, discard it and get on with educating your children.

Ms Diana R. Johnson: I would say on that point that the reason why local authorities need to have numbers on how many children are being home educated in their local authority area is so that they can plan services and make resources available. That would be very difficult if you did not actually know how many children were being home educated. That is part of the problem that local authorities are describing to us at the moment-they do not actually know.

Once again, we see how this sham operates. They create a false need for information that makes licensing a prerequisite. After everyone is registered, then they can start to put the links into the chains of total control.

Once you accept the position that the state has no business interfering with HE, then the ‘problem’ of knowing how many there are becomes moot. And councils do not need to know how many HE families are in their catchment areas; as I said above, if HE families are given access to exam centres, the students would have to be registered well in advance of any exams they were going to take, this would give everyone concerned more than enough time to make accommodations. But this is not about accommodating anyone but the state, its functionaries and its most sinister elements who want unsupervised access to children.

Q30 Mr. Pelling: But there is a sanction, is there not, in terms of the local authority having gone through its registration process?

Ms Diana R. Johnson: Are you asking if there will be a sanction?

Mr. Pelling: Yes.

Ms Diana R. Johnson: Again, this is the consultation period, so I cannot say what will come out at the end of the consultation. Certainly, a lot of people have been writing in about the registration requirements, but it closes on 19 October and then the Government will have to look at it.

Once again, we see why these people can never be trusted. Anything that is to be licensed must have a sanction that can be imposed on those who refuse to comply, otherwise, there would be no compliance. This is the violence of the state, stated plain as can be said.

Q31 Mr. Pelling: So, in terms of the open-minded approach that is being taken to the consultation, it will still be a possibility not to have registration with sanctioning.

Ms Diana R. Johnson: I don’t want to pre-judge things. Clearly, in having a registration process, you would think that if you didn’t register, that would have to be thought through. It seems to me silly not to be registering everyone.

Actually the only thing silly here is Diana Johnson, this insane plan and all the people who are for it.

Graham Badman: I don’t want to fall foul of the trap of forgetting that hard cases make bad law. It is nevertheless the case that registration is a relatively simple process.

Physically it is only writing down your name and address and the names of all your children. Simple really. The only thing is that if you refuse, you will be fined, say £5,000. And then if you refuse to pay, you will be taken to court, and violence will be used against you to throw you in gaol if you refuse to pay. Then your children will be put into care, once again by force, because you are not there to look after them, and will have been put on the ‘children at risk’ register; nothing to hide, nothing to fear right?

Yes indeed, very simple.

You are talking about it happening only annually.

Can anyone tell me why something is called ‘registering’ when it happens more than once? Do you register for Sky more than once? Of course not. Once they have your name and address and the names of your children, you are REGISTERED. You will then be given a LICENSE to Home Educate, which will be renewed or not every year, subject to you satisfying them that you are good parents. To say call this ‘annual registration’ is completely idiotic.

It is not a great intrusion into families that are conducting a normal process of elective home education.

What is or is not a great intrusion to YOU is YOUR AFFAIR. There are many people who deeply resent this idea, people who operate on moral principles. And who has the power to say what is or is not ‘normal practice of Home Education’? By some people’s standards, autonomous learners are not in any way normal nor conforming to any standard; should those people be subjected to the petty, ignorant prejudices of the people in the Local Authorities who will be tasked with this? I think not.

What a nauseating and revolting line of garbage. But it gets WORSE!

But there are hard cases. There are some tragedies in our country that we need to try to prevent as far as we can. Let me cite something said by Daniel Monk, an expert in the legalities of home education, in the Child and Family Law Quarterly of 2009: “Parents who home educate are not simply performing a private duty, but also a public function. For all these reasons the case for compulsory registration is logical, legitimate and compelling.”

ANOTHER EXPERT!

This man has given his OPINION that Home Educators are not simply performing a private duty, but also a public function. Many people believe that people are not the property of the state, and so therefore the duty of education is a purely private affair, and registration is therefore illogical, illegitimate and the arguments for it not at all compelling.

Q32 Mr. Pelling: Is it not the philosophy of this approach that it is important for the state to intervene in the life of the family to ensure that the rights of the child are protected? Is that not the backbone behind this approach?

Graham Badman: I interpret it in a slightly different way. The UN convention represents the wishes of this country for all the children in it.

This country does not have the institution of slavery. The children who live in Britain are not the property of this country, and are not subject to the wishes of it, nor are they subject to the wishes and whims of the UN. The UN convention represents the wishes of a small and perverted minority of statist social engineers whose desire is to incrementally dismantle the family world-wide. That is the truth of this matter.

All I am saying is that there need to be some changes to guarantee absolutely that the rights of children to an education and freedom of speech, so that they are able to give a view about their lot in life, are met. I agree with you, but I argue the case from the point of view of the rights of the child.

This is completely sinister. Children do not have rights in the same way that adults do. They are a special class of property with natural rights given to them by their creator. Education is a good, not a right, and freedom of speech in all of this is utterly irrelevant. This is most amusing from a man who actively wants to stop freedom of speech by blocking access to the submissions he used to craft this dastardly report.

Once again, the ‘rights of the child’ is nothing more than a pretext to make the state the parent of all children. Children cannot represent themselves in court, cannot sign contracts or do anything else that adults do that requires informed consent. If children have these artificial, synthetic rights foisted upon them, then the state has a way to access them by accusing the parent of violating the ‘rights of the child’. The whole idea is a sinister fiction, cooked up by social engineers and sick minded people who want to destroy the family. Do not be fooled by any of it. It is this sort of thinking that has destroyed the state school system. These people are not to be trusted, not with anything, at any time or at any place, and certainly not with your children.

Q33 Lynda Waltho: One of the areas on which I and my colleagues have been lobbied by many people is the proposal to interview the child and to enter the home. Many home educators have pointed out that even police officers need a suspicion or a warrant so to do. In your report, you concede that some local authorities are not making effective use of current powers. Will you spell out why local authorities need new powers rather than just a better understanding of what they can do already?

Here it comes….

Graham Badman: Let me quote a local authority, which said, “Given that Local Authorities do not have the power to see the child or enter the house, we have no direct way of ensuring the safety and wellbeing of children currently being educated at home.

Is this about safety and wellbeing…

By submitting a report in the post, we cannot guarantee that children ARE receiving the provision identified, moreover, we cannot see if the child is meeting the every child matters outcomes.

or is it about the provision of education? That was an oily change of subject.

There is no way knowing that they are even in the country and we cannot be certain that they are living in the address provided. This has huge implications re: the ‘Children Missing from Education’ guidance and procedures.

This is true of EVERY CHILD IN THE UK. Are you suggesting that EVERY CHIHLD be subject to this sinister, sick and perverted intrusion? Because if you are not, the logic falls apart. Children spend the summer holidays ‘missing’, they may even be out of the country, or living at other addresses. Are you suggesting that these schooled children be subjected to this insanity? If not WHY NOT? There is no difference between schooled children and Home Educated children in this respect!

We feel as a LA that we have a duty of care to the children educated in our area and that we cannot fulfil this duty of care if we have no access to the child or the family.”

These feelings need to be put aside, and the LA’s need to be given a clear brief that does not include ANY responsibility for Home Educators that do not want anything from them. The fact that they are saying this is because they have been given duties that are beyond what they should be doing.

That is an accurate view of the response from local authorities, almost universally, in terms of the feedback on the report. Yes, of course, I understand the sensitivities of interviewing the child and the child alone, but I hope that, given what we have said about training, it is, in a sense, the last resort-that proper relationships are established and that it would only be in extremis that a local authority would want to use the powers. We have those powers, but it does not mean that we need to exercise them.

This is the same trash that was talked about the anti terror laws that were used for everything BUT terrorism. When they have these powers they WILL use them and they will use them FREQUENTLY and WILLY NILLY.

Crucially, I have also argued in the report that there should be the presence of another trusted adult.

Trusted, as in CRB checked, like those paedophile nursery workers who were all ‘trusted’?

The person does not necessarily need to be an unknown officer alone with the child. I understand those sensitivities and, again, I make the point in the report, in a direct quote from Jane Lowe, from whom I think you are getting evidence. She wrote a very good book full of case studies on the good practice in home education, and said that, if you educate at home, it is still first and foremost a home. Whatever training is given, officers need to respect that, and they need to caveat their approach by asking, “Have I assessed the risk appropriately? Do I need to do this?” I am arguing for a greater flow of information that would enable anyone with a quite proper regard for the safety of children to exercise the power without being draconian.

These statements make the blood of decent people curdle, they are so antithetical to what a moral, principled human being thinks.

But it gets EVEN WORSE!

Q34 Lynda Waltho: That is helpful. We have all been talking about the voice of the child throughout today’s proceedings. What if the voice of the child is not to meet with the officer? What do we do then?

Graham Badman: That is the one question that I was dreading from this Committee.

Lynda Waltho: Oh, sorry.

Graham Badman: It is a very good question.

Chairman: As you have been dreading it, can it be repeated?

Lynda Waltho: What if the voice of the child is that he or she does not want to meet, or refuses to meet, someone from the authority?

Graham Badman: My view then would be that it is up to the sensitivity of the officer to judge whether or not that is truly what the child wishes or whether it is a view that has been given to them by the parent that they have repeated. That is quite difficult to determine. That being said, we are making provision that other trusted adults can be engaged, and I repeat that speaking to the child and the requirement to speak to them would have to be used after a whole range of other avenues of approach and co-operation had been explored.

Chairman:And that my friends, is one of the most sick, twisted, perverted things I have ever read.⁽¹⁾

These people are out to kidnap your children, by any means necessary. They want to license and control you and your family, invade your home and measure you, force you to report to them, and to satisfy them.

They do not care about your welfare, the welfare of your children, your children’s education or anything else about you. They all want a pice of you; some desperately want the data, some want to have access to your children so they can be forced to learn what they want them to learn, and still others want your children themselves for their own sinister ends.

Some Home Educators were hoping that this committee would offer a ray of light that this shabby, scandalous, thoroughly bad and sinister report would be discredited and somehow thrown out. They now see that this was an absolute impossibility from the start.

Whatever happens, the Home Educators that I know have universally said that they will not obey ANY regulations of any kind. Some of them have already left the country, many have plans to leave just in case, and others are hunkering down for a very nasty fight.

One thing is for sure; if you cave in and obey any new licensing laws, you will have only yourself to blame when you find that your LA is hostile to you and you are being ordered to send your child to school.

Personally, I never believed that this sort of fascism could emerge in Britain. There was always a feeling that there were some things that NO British government would propose, no matter what. It seems that I was wrong, and that ether the nature of Britain has changed, or the monsters have crawled out of the woodwork and found themselves on committees and writing reports with scabrous recommendations.

I would like to think that this is just a particularly sick and repulsive lot, and that somehow, balance (that much abused word) can be restored to this very beautiful land.

We shall see!

Originally, passengers had to remove their jackets when passing through airport security. Then it was belts, and soon shoes had to come off too. But those who feared that losing one’s trousers was the next logical step will find scant comfort in the news that an x-ray machine that produces “naked” images of passengers will be introduced at a British international airport today.

As well as enabling staff to instantly spot any hidden weapons or explosives, the full-body scanner being trialled at Manchester airport will leave little to the imagination of airport security staff. It will reveal a clear outline of passengers genitalia, as well as any false limbs, breast enlargements or body piercings.

Guardian.

It makes you wonder what evil the people at Manchester airport are supposed to have done to deserve this trial in addition to the requirement for staff to get biometric ID cards.

But of course an unfounded supposition of guilt would be no excuse for rolling out this sort of scheme and you know this.

You also know that it is part of the ‘security theatre’ to inure people to more intrusion into their lives. This was said at the time of removing belts and shoes and now we see the attempted introduction of this technology (for at least the second time). This incrementally increasing intrusion cannot be disputed, however it can and should be resisted.

The Guardian fails in questioning this (are the existing detection methods effective or already too onerous?) or alerting the general reader.

Travellers can refuse to undergo the virtual strip at Terminal 2 and choose a traditional “pat down” search instead, according to the airport, which admits that some travellers may feel uncomfortable about using the new technology.

This of course makes the system unable to enhance security. Another parroting fail too.

The scan’s black and white image will be seen by one officer in a remote location before it is deleted, said Sarah Barrett, head of customer experience at the airport.

The image will be transmitted across a computer network and (at least temporarily) stored in some form memory. The procedure will create of images of a very personal nature that are not under the control of the passenger and will be viewed by someone unknown.

Anyone being scanned is being asked to consent to someone else creating and owning the following property; an image of themselves unclothed to be viewed by an unknown third party in unknown circumstances. You know yourself whether this acceptable.
The transmission and ‘remote access’ of the images may be compromised, at the least the remote viewer may be able to take screenshots. The article does not mention a lower age limit.

Is the ‘head of customer experience’ the best person to ask about such technology? Guardian mega-fail.

“Most of our customers do not like the traditional ‘pat down’ search, they find it too intrusive, but they still want to be kept safe. This scanner completely takes away the hassle of needing to undress. The images are not erotic or pornographic and they cannot be stored or captured in any way,” she said.

What hassle of needing to undress? Why is an increased level of search required? Is it purely to remind passengers they are being ‘kept safe’ because they are now used to pat down procedures?

Pornography being a subjective matter of course.

Storage? See above.

As passengers will not have to remove their coats, shoes or belts, the scanner will – in theory – speed up the check-in process. Frequent flyers will not be at risk from the low-level radiation, which is 20,000 times less powerful than a dental x-ray, Barrett said.

“Passengers can go through this machine 5,000 times a year each without worrying, it is super safe and the amount of radiation transmitted is tiny,” she said.

Hmm presumably this will be marketed to frequent flyers as a way to jump queues. Nothing like eager volunteers to make a trial run smoothly.

The scanners, made by the firm RapiScan Systems at a cost of £80,000 each, were trialled at Heathrow airport in 2004. The Department for Transport will decide whether to install them permanently at the end of the trial, which is expected to last for a year.

A nice little earner for the vendor. Now, this technology has been on trial since 2004 and not implemented, in the intervening period the actual ‘enhanced security’ at airports has not been compromised, so why exactly is it necessary to trial it again other than the vendor wants another bite at the cookie.

Why will the Department of Transport take the decision to install these devices rather than the Home Office? Is it because they know less about border control issues?

Electromagnetic waves are beamed on to passengers while they stand in a booth, and a virtual three-dimensional “naked” image is created from the reflected energy. Security officials in the US have pioneered the use of the scanners at New York and Los Angeles airports and they are gradually being introduced at other airports in the country.

What the US does is its own business and irrelevent to the argument.

Everything in the world that involves human interaction can be broken down to property rights, and as I have said before, children are a special case of property. Let’s begin with some Rothbard:

Let us take, as our first example, a sculptor fashioning a work of art out of clay and other materials; and let us waive, for the moment, the question of original property rights in the clay and the sculptor’s tools. The question then becomes: Who owns the work of art as it emerges from the sculptor’s fashioning? It is, in fact, the sculptor’s “creation,” not in the sense that he has created matter, but in the sense that he has transformed nature-given matter — the clay — into another form dictated by his own ideas and fashioned by his own hands and energy. Surely, it is a rare person who, with the case put thus, would say that the sculptor does not have the property right in his own product. Surely, if every man has the right to own his own body, and if he must grapple with the material objects of the world in order to survive, then the sculptor has the right to own the product he has made, by his energy and effort, a veritable extension of his own personality. He has placed the stamp of his person upon the raw material, by “mixing his labor” with the clay, in the phrase of the great property theorist John Locke. And the product transformed by his own energy has become the material [p. 32] embodiment of the sculptor’s ideas and vision.

[…]

As in the case of the ownership of people’s bodies, we again have three logical alternatives: (i) either the transformer, or “creator,” has the property right in his creation; or (2) another man or set of men have the right in that creation, i.e., have the right to appropriate it by force without the sculptor’s consent; or (3) every individual in the world has an equal, quotal share in the ownership of the sculpture — the “communal” solution. Again, put baldly, there are very few who would not concede the monstrous injustice of confiscating the sculptor’s property, either by one or more others, or on behalf of the world as a whole. By what right do they do so? By what right do they appropriate to themselves the product of the creator’s mind and energy? In this clear-cut case, the right of the creator to own what he has mixed his person and labor with would be generally conceded. (Once again, as in the case of communal ownership of persons, the world communal solution would, in practice, be reduced to an oligarchy of a few others expropriating the creator’s work in the name of “world public” ownership.)

The main point, however, is that the case of the sculptor is not qualitatively different from all cases of “production.” The man or men who had extracted the clay from the ground and had sold it to the sculptor may not be as “creative” as the sculptor, but they too are “producers,” they too have mixed their ideas and their technological know-how with the nature-given soil to emerge with a useful product. They, too, are “producers,” and they too have mixed their labor with natural materials to transform those materials into more useful goods and services. These persons, too, are entitled to the ownership of their products.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p23

If we replace the sculptors sculpture with a child, the logic is not broken; in fact it is even more powerful.

There is nothing in the world that a human being can make that is more personal, more ‘of you’ than a child. A child is the product of the mixing of the seed of two unique individuals; a sculptor might be able to make perfect copy of another man’s work. She might even be able to mass produce copies of a work, but no person can make a child that is identical to yours. When you make a child, unlike producing goods by mixing your labor with inanimate materials, you are mixing yourself with another person.

In the age of cloning, it might be possible to create a clone of a child made by you and and your wife (or you and your husband) but that would still involve either taking genetic material from both of you or the child to produce the clone.

Making a child is unique in nature as an act of creation inextricably linked to the individual and his natural rights. This is why the principle of ownership can be logically applied to children, with the special exceptions that arise from self ownership and being a human being, meaning that a child owns herself when she reaches her majority, and also has the right to life even without self ownership whilst being the property of the parent.

Making a child does not involve any party other than the two people who choose to do it. It does not involve the application of any technology. You do not have to buy clay or anything else to facilitate it. It is as close to creation by an act of will that it is possible for man to achieve.

The mother nurtures the child with her own body, that is her absolute property. Nowhere in this is the state involved or any other person or even material, other than the man who donated his half of the process, and the woman who does her part.

The way that children are tied to their parents, the intimacy of it, the inextricable link to your child forged by biology is different to any other type of creation that man makes with his mind and his hands. You may design an aircraft on paper; it will be your design, but it will not have a physical part of you contained in it. It may reflect your personality, your genius and insight, but it will not directly express your being as a child does. The sculptor may use his hands to make a work, but his essence does not become mixed in the work. A child is the very essence of the parents in a way that no inanimate man made object can be.

Once again, as Rothbard says there are three logical alternatives to who owns children:

1. Either the parents, or creators of the child have the property right in the child
2. Another man or set of men have the right in that child, i.e., have the right to appropriate it by force without the parent’s consent
3. Every individual in the world has an equal, quotal share in the ownership of the child — the “communal” (Führer/UN/State as father) solution.

Now in the case of 2 above, the right to appropriate the child by force means, for example, the German Nazi SS state aparatchicks ‘appropriating’ children to force them to attend schools in Germany when they are legally resident and Home Educating in France. It means Ed Balls attempting to introduce the licensing of families who care for their own children and their education.

If someone else has the ability to control a thing or a person, that someone owns that thing or person.

Any decent, reasonable and logical person can see that the proposition in 2, and the actions of the Nazis and Ed Balls are illegitimate on their face. Only the completely delusional believe that 3 is in any way reasonable, but in fact there are some people who think that 3 is in fact something to strive for.

The true nature and purpose of the proposed outlawing of Home Education in the UK is explained in the following paragraphs. It is a well established fact that the state school system (apart from it being an immoral construct in the first place) fails to produce literate and numerate students whose numbers are measured in millions. Logically, any government that had the best interests of ‘it’s citizens’ at heart would work tirelessly to perfect the schools that it had responsibility for.

Instead, we get a ‘psychic satisfaction’ exercise, where a growing minority of dissatisfied parents, who remove their children from state schools to educate them at home are to be sacrificed for the benefit of the brainwashed majority:

[…]

Let us consider a stark example: Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the Devil and therefore to be executed whenever found. Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation — so few as to be statistically insignificant. The utilitarian-libertarian might well reason: “While the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, the executions are small in number; the vast majority of the public, as non-redheads, achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from the public execution of redheads. The social cost is negligible, the social, psychic benefit to the rest of society is great; therefore, it is right and proper for society to execute the redheads.” The natural-rights libertarian, overwhelmingly concerned as he is for the justice of the act, will react in horror and staunchly and unequivocally oppose the executions as totally unjustified murder and aggression upon nonaggressive persons. The consequence of stopping the murders — depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure — would not influence such a libertarian, the “absolutist” libertarian, in the slightest. Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural-rights libertarian cheerfully admits to being “doctrinaire,” to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p23

We all know that Home Education is not a ‘child safety’ issue; in fact, the lie that it is, is analogous to thinking that redheads are agents of the Devil. There is no evidence that Home Education is in any way a problem for anyone. Certainly in the UK, because the total number of Home Educators is not known, no meaningful statistics can be created, and if we take statistics from the USA as a guide, we can see that Home Educated children outperform state educated children by a very wide margin, in all metrics.

Home Education and the parents who do it are to be sacrificed for the psychic benefit of ‘society’, most of whom are, ignorant, schooled, brainwashed and who send their children to school.

This psychic sacrifice will cool the following thoughts:

• “How can Home Educators afford not to send their children to school… I hate the rich.”
• “Why do I have to work and not be with my beautiful children? I am a bad mother… I hate these people for showing me up.”
• “I do not believe that our children should be educated at home. It should be banned.”
• “The government should do something to find these children and make them safe.”
• “I am safe with my children, but you never know what other parents are doing. We need to ban this.”
• “School is the proper place for learning. Our children should learn in groups. We have to crack down on this.”
• “Without the rough and tumble of the playground, our children will be disadvantaged. We should ban this.”
• “It’s just not normal. The government should step in.”
• “Why would anyone want to do this? I would go mad if I had my children at home all day. They must be bonkers.”

Etcetera etcetera.

The psychic sacrifice banning balm will put all of these ill feelings to rest in a single step; and of course, the newspapers do all they can to enrage, add to and enflame these feelings so that when the balm is released the satisfaction is maximised.

The fact of the matter is that this is not about education nor is it about a concern for the safety of children. The education aspect is widely known to be a non issue, and the safety non issue is illogical.

If the state is to assert property rights on Home Educated children and are to license parents to be Home Educators, then they must licence all parents.

Children go home from school every night and sleep in the family home; in the sick and perverted logic of Ed Balls and Graham Badman this is an opportunity for abuse.

The three months where all the children in the country who attend school are left alone with their parents, who sometimes take them to other countries where they are not under supervision constitutes another opportunity for abuse. Logically, all parents must be licensed to care for their own children, if we are to make all children safe.

It is nonsense on stilts obviously.

Believe me, if they had a technology that would make this practical, they would legislate for it.

And for the record, all talk of ‘the rights of the child’ is nothing more than a pretext to foster the creation of new legislation that will replace the parent with the state as the owner of all children.

Children do not have rights on top of the rights that every human being is born with. There is no such thing as ‘a child’s right to education’. Education is a good, not a right.

Finally, it should be amply clear to you that your children are your property. They can only be your property, until they reach their majority or you give them up for someone else to look after under some contractual arrangement. If they are not your property, then they are someone else’s property, since that someone else will have control over them while they are not owners of themselves.

It should also be clear to you that many of the mandates, regulations and laws concerning children are illegitimate, since they immorally and wrongly confer ownership of a child to the state.

The proposed Home Education legislation is also illegitimate by its nature. There should be:

• No registration of families as Home Educators
• No duty placed upon Local Authorities to manage Home Educators in any way
• No new power of the state to define what education is or is not

The question you have to ask yourself is, what are you going to do about this direct attack on you and your family, should you be confronted by someone who wants to claim your child as their property?

UPDATE!

A lurker points us to this essay by Murray Rothbard which deals precisely with this topic, and I quote:

The Parent or the State?

The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully developed he cannot act completely for himself as a responsible individual. He must be under tutelage. This tutelage is a complex and difficult task. From an infancy of complete dependence and subjection to adults, the child must grow up gradually to the status of an independent adult. The question is under whose guidance, and virtual “ownership” the child should be: his parents’ or the State’s? There is no third, or middle, ground in this issue. Some party must control, and no one suggests that some individual third party have authority to seize the child and rear it.

It is obvious that the natural state of affairs is for the parents to have charge of the child. The parents are the literal producers of the child, and the child is in the most intimate relationship to them that any people can be to one another. The parents have ties of family affection to the child. The parents are interested in the child as an individual, and are the most likely to be interested and familiar with his requirements and personality. Finally, if one believes at all in a free society, where each one owns himself and his own products, it is obvious that his own child, one of his most precious products, also comes under his charge.

The only logical alternative to parental “ownership” of the child is for the State to seize the infant from the parents and to rear it completely itself. To any believer in freedom this must seem a monstrous step indeed. In the first place, the rights of the parents are completely violated, their own loving product seized from them to be subjected to the will of strangers. In the second place, the rights of the child are violated, for he grows up in subjection to the unloving hands of the State, with little regard for his individual personality. Furthermore — and this is a most important consideration — for each person to be “educated,” to develop his faculties to the fullest, he needs freedom for this development. We have seen above that freedom from violence is essential to the development of a man’s reason and personality. But the State! The State’s very being rests on violence, on compulsion. As a matter of fact, the very feature that distinguishes the State from other individuals and groups is that the State has the only (legal) power to use violence. In contrast to all other individuals and organizations, the State issues decrees which must be obeyed at the risk of suffering prison or the electric chair. The child would have to grow up under the wings of an institution resting on violence and restriction. What sort of peaceful development could take place under such auspices?

[…]

http://mises.org/story/2226

And there you have it. Children ARE your property, and if you do not believe so and act accordingly, the end result is that the state becomes the owner of your children and from that transfer of ownership, all manner of tragic consequences will flow .

We now have a story that will be of great concern to those Home Educators that believe they will be able to ‘move to New Zealand’ so that they can be free of fascist Britain:

French police grab 4 kids on German orders
Homeschool family’s children accused of ‘being alone’

By Bob Unruh

Four children of a family that fled Germany to avoid further fines for homeschooling have been snatched from their home in France by police and accused of “being alone,” according to a report today on the ongoing war against home education across the continent.

The word comes from the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has been involved in a long list of cases of persecution of homeschooling families across Europe, especially in Germany.

The report said two French social workers and two police officers appeared without notice at the home of Dominique Chanal in St. Leonard, France, where Dirk and Angela Wunderlich and their children have lived since July.

“The four officials told a stunned Mrs. Wunderlich that they had come at the request of German authorities and that they had to take the family’s four young children because they were ‘in grave danger,'” the HSLDA report confirmed.

“A copy of the report justifying immediate seizure of the children was obtained by HSLDA. The reasons given for the seizure were that the children were ‘socially isolated, not in school and that there was a ‘flight risk,’ – none of which appear to be true,” the report said.

The family fled Germany because of a series of fines imposed for homeschooling and the concern that German authorities inside Germany would take custody of the children.

After the children were seized by French authorities, the Wunderlichs contacted their lawyers in Germany, and they now are being represented by a local attorney in France.

Armin Eckermann, chief of a German group involved in defending homeschoolers, told the HSLDA that when he contacted Germany authorities, they denied asking French police to get involved.

The children were taken into custody Sept. 28, and it was three days before the parents were allowed to see them again.

“The social workers told us that the reason they took our children was because they ‘have no contact with other children, that school education is guaranteed and that you are a risk of escape.’ But this is nonsense, as anyone who knows our family can tell,” the parents said in a statement.

Michael Donnelly, a staff attorney with the HSDLA who is familiar with a number of egregious persecution cases coming out of Germany, said the development is alarming.

“We are concerned about the increase in negative treatment of homeschoolers in Europe. This apparent trend is counter to all the evidence that shows that homeschooling is effective both academically and socially. Because homeschoolers in Europe are relatively few, it is important that homeschoolers in America encourage and support them,” he said.

The HSLDA noted that another family, Uwe and Hannalore Romeike, now has a political asylum request pending in the U.S. because of the potential for persecution should they be forced to return to Germany.

Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman has scheduled a hearing on the case Dec. 16 in Memphis, Tenn.

The landlady for the Wunderlich family said she was shocked.

“This is a wonderful family,” Chanal told HSLDA. “There are always children coming to the home to play with the children and my daughter. It is like a school in our house.

“These are very good parents who protect their children from dangers. They are better parents than most parents in France, because they do not let the children wander the streets or get involved in other bad behavior,” she said.

“I believe that this was an illegal act by the German Youth Welfare Office. We are no longer residents of Germany,” Dirk Wunderlich said. “As citizens of the European Union we have the right to free mobility, and we are complying [with] French education laws. The Germans should leave us alone.”

Donnelly reported another family, still in Germany, has been assigned a new trial date of Nov. 16. Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek of Archfeldt, Germany, previously were sentenced to 90 days in prison for homeschooling their own children.

The penalty earlier was overturned on technical grounds, and they have been ordered to a new trial.

The HSLDA warned that the behavior of German authorities is a foreshadowing of what American parents should expect if the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child ever is ratified in the U.S. Its concerns are detailed at Parental Rights.

WND reported recently on a similar situation in Sweden in whichi authorities snatched a 7-year-old child from an airplane on which he and his parents were moving to India.

The HSLDA has dispatched a formal letter to a local Swedish social services unit involved in the case in which Dominic Johansson, of Gottland, was forcibly taken into custody minutes before he and his parents, Christer and Annie Johansson, were due to take off to start a new life in India, Annie’s home country.

“This kind of gross disregard for family integrity and simple human decency is becoming the hallmark of countries like Germany, and now apparently Sweden,” Donnelly said at the time, “where the state is more interested in coerced uniformity than in protecting fundamental human rights and fostering pluralism.”

WND has reported on multiple cases of persecution of homeschooling families in Germany, including situations in which jail terms were ordered for parents of homeschooled children, a family sought political asylum because of the persecution, and a teen was taken into German state custody and ordered into a psychiatric ward for the crime of being homeschooled.

[…]

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=112106

So, if you think that you are going to be able to escape to New Zealand, think again. Your children will either be snatched off of the plane before it takes off, or when you get there, the New Zealand police will kidnap your children and put them into care right there in ‘your’ new home.

Lets make something absolutely clear: the German people still love Adolph Hitler and the Nazi philosophy of National Socialism. In their heart of hearts they worship Hitler and they demonstrate their love for him by executing his laws in his honour. That is exactly what the ‘social workers’ who arranged the kidnapping of these children in France are doing; expressing their love for the long dead Führer.

The morality of the German people is once again in question.

They can either say that they ‘did not know‘ that Hitler’s laws on Home Education were being executed today, OR they can say that they AGREE with them, and that ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. Either way, they are guilty of the same crimes that the Germans of WW2 are.

The social workers who did this should be named. The French officials who collaborated with these Nazis and Nazi law should also be named. Part of the reason they get away with outrages like this is that no one is ever made to account for and explain their actions personally.

If you are a Home Educating family and you think you can run to New Zealand to escape the new laws that may be enacted in the UK, think again; This is the true face of Graham Badman and Ed Balls’ Final Solution to the Home Education problem.

You had better make your stand here and now, because if you do not, there will be nowhere for you to run.

Americans, you are next.

Obama wants children to spend more time in school. Once this happens, he will see to it that all US Home Schoolers are registered. Then, he will mandate a state curriculum, and if you do not accept, you will be forced to send your children to school to be brainwashed.

This is the reality you are facing. This is the fight of your life. There is nowhere for you to run. You are compelled to stand and fight or give up your children.

While we are at it, lets look at what you are giving your children up to:

More than half of primary teachers ‘are unable to name three poets’

More than half of primary school teachers cannot name more than two poets, a study has shown.

Research found 58 per cent could name either one, two or none at all.

The study, by academics at the Open University, Cambridge and Reading, warned that teachers’ ‘very limited’ knowledge of poetry is damaging children’s reading skills.

They found 22 per cent of 1,200 teachers quizzed could name no poets at all. Just 10 per cent were able to mention six – the number they were asked to name by researchers.

The findings emerged after a separate study revealed how comics and magazines have overtaken story books and poems as children’s favourite reading matter.

Both reports will deepen concern over ‘dumbing down’ following a damning world league table which exposed falling reading standards among England’s ten-year-olds.

In just five years, our schools fell from third to 19th in a table of reading achievement.

Research commissioned by the UK Literacy Association showed many teachers when asked to name poets, found it not an ‘easy task’.

Most mentioned authors whose verse ‘might be seen as light-hearted or humorous’, such as Spike Milligan.

Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, told the BBC: ‘There are obviously an awful lot of young people writing and reading poetry, with teachers encouraging them.

‘However, there are also a lot of teachers who do not know and understand poetry and can’t then communicate it.’

Research commissioned by the UK Literacy Association found that while teachers enjoy reading for pleasure, they have a ‘relatively restricted repertoire’.

They were found to rely on a ‘limited range of authors when it comes to classroom practice and are not therefore in a strong position to recommend texts to young readers’.

A report by Ofsted has warned that classic poems are disappearing from schools in favour of nonsense verse and rhymes that are easy for children to imitate.

It said ‘too few’ poems were ‘genuinely challenging’ and only a small minority use poems such as Daffodils by William Wordsworth or Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, has warned that poetry is being squeezed out of primary schools by the demands of testing and Ofsted inspections.

He demanded a curriculum for poetry because it was currently being ‘frozen’ in the ‘ice’ of Government literacy policies.

Teachers covered it superficially by using poetry collections which ticked the required boxes in the National Literacy Strategy, he said.

[…]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1219130/More-half-primary-teachers-unable-poets.html#ixzz0TWenK1VR

Astonishing.

As I said before, children are a special form of property. You need to accept this principle as one of absolute truth. They are either your property, or the property of the state.

The Germans clearly adhere to this principle; they arrived in France to retrieve their property.

All the specious arguments the German SS give for their actions are irrelevant. This is about who owns children, and if you do not accept that children are property and you as the parent are the absolute owner of that property, then you are declaring that the state is the absolute owner of your children. There are no in-between positions on this, and you should not complain when the state confiscates your property if you, in the first place, do not assert your rights and claim it.

The Nazis that went to France to kidnap those children should be made to explain how it is that they do not come to the UK to kidnap Home Educated children here, so that they may attend German schools.

They can argue that these particular children, being blonde haired and blue eyed Aryan types, belong to the Reich as a form of property; this is the only argument they can offer, otherwise, these Nazis would be running all over the world kidnapping ‘kinder’ to attend their schools.

This is the key to the whole affair; German children have the ‘right’ to German culture, not ‘non Germans’.

German children therefore, can be kidnapped from foreign countries where Home Education is legal, so that they can grow up immersed in the Nazi training programme.

Just what is it that makes these particular children the property of the German state?

Part of the problem is that the German SS have no fear of Home Educating parents. THey are literally like wolves chasing and devouring chickens. If the German SS knew that it potentially meant the end of their careers or their lives if they tried to kidnap children, they would think long and hard before going on a raiding party. It is clear that they have some fear, otherwise they would not turn up with police to enforce their violence.

The Germans really are the most absurd nation in Europe. They have a plethora of laws forbidding the singing of Nazi songs, forbidding the selling of Nazi memorabilia:

It is illegal to trade in Nazi memorabilia in Germany, France, Austria and Poland.

In Germany, the maximum penalty for dealing in Nazi items is a three-year prison sentence.

[…]

germanmilitariacollectibles.com

And as you can see from that link, it is illegal to trade Nazi memorabilia in France.

And yet…

In Germany, they ban all the symbols and ephemera connected to Hitler and the Nazis, yet they follow the laws laid down by them, and the French OBEY Germans making requests based on those Nazi laws! How is it that France can allow Nazi laws to be enforced in their country, after everything they suffered during the war?

It beggars belief.

FURTHERMORE

If you think that the British do not have the national character of the Germans, and that you will be able to leave and that will be that, take a look at this. No facts, but it sounds true given everything that is going on.

EVEN MORE

This story is interesting, but not for the reasons many of the comment droids think:

Mother is refused wine at Morrisons – in case daughter, 17, drinks it

Morrisons supermarket condemned for ‘absurd’ interpretation of rules on alcohol sales to young people

Management consultant Jackie Slater thought she was completing a normal shopping trip to Morrisons until the checkout assistant demanded to see her ID before scanning two bottles of wine.

“I told her I was really flattered, but I was the wrong side of 50,” she said. But the assistant pointed to her 17-year-old daughter, Emily, and her 18-year-old niece, Annice, who were standing at the end of the checkout chatting.

“She asked: ‘Are they with you?’ I said they’d come to help me carry the bags back to the car. The assistant said: ‘You could be buying the wine for them. It’s the policy – I have to see everyone’s ID to make sure they are all over 18′.”

In vain, Mrs Slater insisted that the wine was for herself and her husband, Peter. But the assistant and then the store manager refused to budge.

Nor was their decision deemed an over-enthusiastic interpretation of company rules. Morrisons’ head office last week backed the store – a move that suggests new guidelines, introduced to limit access to alcohol among youngsters, could soon cause chaos if other shops follow Morrisons’ lead.

“Under current licensing laws, stores are unable to sell an alcoholic product to a customer they believe could be buying for a minor or for someone who is unable to prove their age,” said a spokesman for Morrisons, citing the Think 25 scheme that has been put in place by major retailers to prevent the sale of prohibited items to under-age shoppers.

Morrisons does not contest Mrs Slater’s version of events. The assistant even agreed that she would have sold the wine to a mother who had younger children with her because “no one would buy wine for a 12-year-old”. However she still refused to scan the wine without seeing Mrs Slater’s daughter’s ID – which she did not have with her.

[…]

Morrisons is unrepentant about its Leeds store’s decision. “We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously.” said the spokesman. “The rules are in place to protect our customers and their families, as well as local communities who, in the majority of cases, appreciate our vigilance in the sale of age-restricted products.”

Mrs Slater’s MP, Greg Mulholland, a health spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said: “Whoever thinks this policy will do anything to stop antisocial drinking by kids is in cloud-cuckoo-land.

“This is simply absurd and Morrisons should be ashamed of themselves.

“We need a more mature and sensible approach to alcohol in general – and refusing a mum a bottle of wine with the weekly shop because she has her 17-year-old daughter with her is ridiculous. Morrisons need to think again and this time do so with just a little common sense.”

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/11/morrisons-wine-ban-mother

This story is the symptom of the disease that is taking over Britian; The Cancer That is Killing Britain.

What this story demonstrates is the push to remove responsibility for children from the parent. It is not, by the way, illegal for children to drink alcohol that is given to them by their parents.

This is also an example of the state rolling out their trust-less society model, where they are the absolute mediators of trust via the ID Card system, run by proxy through the business community.

Absolutely nauseating.

I know some people who, whenever this happens to them, respond in a uniform manner.

What they do is, ‘abandon the cart’.

They buy all their shopping, including the alcohol that they want. they check through everything except the alcohol, which they leave till last. If the check out robot asks for ID, they say they do not have ID. If she refuses to scan the bottles, they immediately say, “Ill be right back”, and abandon the cart. They then leave the store and do not return. They call the manager of the store and explain what they did, why they did it, and then they call the head office and explain the same thing.

If you are not willing to do this, then you must accept the abuse you are given.

All of these stores must be forced, by the power of the money in your pocket, to ether stop selling alcohol altogether so that the ‘problem’ cannot arise, OR they must return to normal business practices.

Period.

And now MOAR

Thanks to ChangingChops for this heads up:

Revealed: The secret report that shows how the Nazis planned a Fourth Reich …in the EU

The paper is aged and fragile, the typewritten letters slowly fading. But US Military Intelligence report EW-Pa 128 is as chilling now as the day it was written in November 1944.

The document, also known as the Red House Report, is a detailed account of a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg on August 10, 1944. There, Nazi officials ordered an elite group of German industrialists to plan for Germany’s post-war recovery, prepare for the Nazis’ return to power and work for a ‘strong German empire’. In other words: the Fourth Reich.

The three-page, closely typed report, marked ‘Secret’, copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany’s economy by sending money through Switzerland.
They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.

The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire – but not just German.

The Red House Report, which was unearthed from US intelligence files, was the inspiration for my thriller The Budapest Protocol.

The book opens in 1944 as the Red Army advances on the besieged city, then jumps to the present day, during the election campaign for the first president of Europe. The European Union superstate is revealed as a front for a sinister conspiracy, one rooted in the last days of the Second World War.

But as I researched and wrote the novel, I realised that some of the Red House Report had become fact.

Nazi Germany did export massive amounts of capital through neutral countries. German businesses did set up a network of front companies abroad. The German economy did soon recover after 1945.

The Third Reich was defeated militarily, but powerful Nazi-era bankers, industrialists and civil servants, reborn as democrats, soon prospered in the new West Germany. There they worked for a new cause: European economic and political integration.

Is it possible that the Fourth Reich those Nazi industrialists foresaw has, in some part at least, come to pass?

[…]

Daily Mail

Anyone who has been paying attention to the painstakingly thorough and accurate Alex Jones knows that all of this is true and that furthermore, the USA is being dismantled by design as a part of this nefarious plan, via a deliberate destruction of their dollar.

By all means, watch Endgame so that as the spectacle unfolds before your eyes, you, at least, will know what is happening as it happens from your ringside seat.

“Stitch up” has been the overwhelming reaction of home educators to the Children, Schools and Families Committee’s announcement of its oral evidence schedule for the allegedly “independent” inquiry into the Badman review of elective home education in England, due to be held next week.

A controversial line up of witnesses has been announced, which calls into question the independence of the selection process, and complaints are already being dispatched to the committee querying the choice of home education “representatives” who are anything but representative.

England’s most active home education group AHEd has been snubbed in favour of undemocratic home education organisations, while two male (probably both white) “home educating parents” have been invited, one of whom has mounted personal attacks on (mainly) female home educators and has been banned from at least one online home education network.This does not inspire confidence in the process.

One home educator commented: “It is difficult to imagine a more skewed line up. The only good thing about it is that it can now easily be denounced as a farce.” Another remarked: “Scotland it is, then. No point in hanging around in this unpleasant land.”

Bloggers have been equally unforgiving. Freedom in Education under Threat is “mad as hell” and posts a video reminding us that we should all be yelling ot loud about the injustices being wrought upon the home education community in England by state sponsored bullies. Watch the video and get mad!

Live Otherwise writes, “If you haven’t seen the list of witnesses for the select committee the phrase read it and weep comes to mind”, and suggests sticking a flea in a few MPs’ ears. Meanwhile, in an aptly titled Are we F****d? post, Maire observes, “If I wanted to make it look like the views of the 80% of home educators who voted for no change in the current arrangements had been ignored the list might look like this.”

We await the mighty Blogdial’s comments with trepidation, but he is not known for mincing words which are likely to include “illegitimate”, “corrupt”, “f*ck” and “off”. Let’s hope there are no (so called) public servants of a sensitive disposition who might feel vilified or harassed by fair comment.

Both the UK Government and Parliament have now lost all credibility with home educating families who have been disenfranchised not only by the DCSF but also by parliamentarians and home education organisations which erroneously claim representative status. It just will not do.

Enough is enough. Just Say No. Watch that video again, and yell.

http://www.home-education.biz/news/16/15/Selective-committee-stitch-up/

Home Educators are not thinking about the attacks on their liberty in the correct way.

The fact of this matter is that none of these politicians or civil servants can ever be trusted. If you put your faith in them, your way of life will be destroyed, your family broken up, your children kidnapped and you will end up in chains or dead.

They have made their minds up that you will no longer be allowed to Home Educate. What you are seeing now is a pacification operation, designed to wear you down and force you to become resigned to the fact that you will have to accept some form of the end of your way of life.

Think about this committee; what power does it have to stop any new legislation from being enacted? Does it have any power to throw the Badman report out as a fundamentally flawed, biased and poorly constructed piece of fiction? Even if all the witnesses were exactly who you want them to be, and the committee had the power to quash this illiberal, fascist, perverted, anti family, anti education, deeply sinister and suspicious nonsense, do you REALLY think that they would do it? Would you risk your life that they would get it right?

All of the Home Education consultation results were overwhelmingly in favour of the law being sufficient to protect everyone’s interests. The beasts ignored everyone’s facts and opinions and even deliberately concealed and continue to conceal any fact or opinion that is in opposition to their sick desires.

This committee will sit and hear evidence on a report that contains cherry picked parts of submissions that are being kept secret on the most flimsy of pretexts. Until all the information that was used to construct this absurd report is released, this committee is negligent in taking any evidence on it, because no one has a complete picture of what the TRUE nature of the submissions were. Clearly some of the members have a sense that something is not quite right with this report; a careful, thorough investigation cannot be done without ALL of the evidence.

If it is to be taken seriously in any way, the process should be suspended until all the submissions have been released and the concerned parties have had at least 90 days to pour over them. That is what reasonable people who were working in your interests would do.

How many times do you have to be trodden upon before you finally understand that these people are not reasonable? These people are not guided by reason, logic, decency or anything that guides normal people. A perfect example of this is Bridget Prentice, who when confronted by a group of Home Educating children on a visit to Parliament, imperiously intoned that:

children belong in school because learning in groups is best for children”.

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=675

This is the level of ignorance, nonsense, illogic and pure insanity that you are dealing with.

Only someone who is actively hostile to Home Education would dare suggest that Simon Webb should provide evidence to this committee. Putting aside the legitimacy of a committee sitting to determine wether or not you have any rights, and that they will be examining a report where the submissions that contributed to it are now being kept secret, any competent, fair minded, and thorough committee would ensure that the holders of different opinions would be summoned to provide evidence.

It is widely known that Simon Webb is actively hostile to Autonomous Learners, and that he is a journalist that has used his column in The Independent to attack them and Home Education in general. This should mean, if the committee was acting in a fair manner, that this particular individual is INSTANTLY DISQUALIFIED, since he is overtly for the report’s nauseating recommendations.

In fact, the only person who should be there to defend this scandalous report is the author himself; but even that should be challenged, since the report is finished, has been submitted and accepted and should now either be re-accepted or rejected on what is already in it.

It is completely wrong that more evidence should be submitted to bolster this outrageous paedophile’s charter; how was it that the report was accepted in full, instantly, without this extra evidence in the first place? And for the record, I call this report a paedophile’s charter because it has a provision in it that gives social workers the power to interview children alone in the family home, without the parents consent. Training to be a ‘Home Education Inspector’ is now the dream of every monster in the land; it would be a perfect cover for those who prey on children, and this report opens the door to them. We have all read the stories of fat smiling nursery workers and teachers who were in fact perverts, all CRB checked, that abused nursery children and students. I will leave it to you to imagine the character and motives of people who would make, endorse and agree with such a recommendation.

On the other hand, it has been speculated that the unthinkable parts of this report were inserted as bargaining chips designed to be discarded, leaving Home Educators with a feeling that they have ‘salvaged something’ by getting them removed, whilst the core of the report’s recommendations, that Home Education be licensed, remain intact.

Who knows?

All I know is that a committee of fourteen people cannot decide what your rights are or are not. Your rights are given to you by your creator; they are not bestowed upon you by government or a committee.

This committee cannot sit and say you have no right to educate your children as you see fit, or practice your religion as you see fit, or that you should live or die, simply because they have a vote in a wooden chamber or produce a report. The representativeness of the people giving evidence is also irrelevant. Putting aside all of that, if this committee is powerless to completely destroy this bad thing that is about to happen, then they should not be sitting at all. Ed Balls is simply going to disagree with the findings of this committee in his written response if they in any way question the Badman report, and carry on with the legislative programme unchanged. In any case, the only acceptable result would be the total rubbishing of the report, guaranteed maintenance of the status quo and a further guarantee of no further discriminatory, predatory attacks or harassment.

In other words it is either illegitimate or it is irrelevant. I put it to you that it is both, since no matter what they say, Home Educators have almost universally vowed not to obey any new regulations of any kind.

AHED have not been invited to submit evidence because they HAVE evidence that this report is fundamentally flawed, and if they were given access to everything that they have requested but have been refused, there is no doubt that they would uncover even more evidence that this report is utterly worthless in every way that something can be worthless.

The charities that have been invited to present evidence have no business being there. Phillip Noyes of the NSPCC was actually forced to apologise for an unwarranted, ignorant and purely hostile attack on Home Education and the families that do it:

Vijay Patel, a policy adviser at the NSPCC, had told the Independent: “Some people use home education to hide. Look at the Victoria Climbié case. No one asked where she was at school.”

This is the sort of brainless nonsense that these people trade in. The newspapers (in this case, the same one that Simon Webb writes for) pick it up and repeat it without question, and now, the very organization that produced this lunacy is being called AGAIN to present evidence on a report that it has already submitted evidence to. If they have already submitted evidence to the report, that should be sufficient input. If their submission has not been released, it should be released, otherwise, when they speak to the committee, they will be talking about a submission no one has seen in full. If their submission was incomplete, they should have been more thorough in the first instance. The whole point of this exercise should be to determine the veracity, thoroughness and true motives behind this report as a fait accompli, it should not be an opportunity to scramble around and tidy up and make excuses for shoddy work.

Home Education is not a child protection issue. The swarms of charities (fake or not) whose concern is the welfare of children should have nothing to say about Home Education, since Home Educated children are in the most safe, stable families in the UK.

The very fact that a family is Home Educating demonstrates a greater than average devotion to the duty of child rearing. As usual, the perverted and twisted imaginations of the people behind this report, the charities and the government departments that are hell bent on outlawing Home Education completely reverse the true meaning of this act of selflessness and sacrifice. It is they who are the ones that are a danger to the welfare of children, not Home Educators.

If all of this had been happening in a vacuum you could give these cretins the benefit of the doubt, but we are in the age of the internets and in America, Home Education is exploding and the misguided laws regulating it (where there are any) are being repealed. If these hostile charity workers, quangonoids and apratchiks do not know about Home Education in the USA they should. That they do not speaks volumes on their level of competence.

Charities should focus their work and submission making on subjects that are their expertise. The fact that this committee is looking to the NSPCC and the National Children’s Bureau (another charity) for evidence demonstrates that they have no understanding of what Home Education is and its true context between the state the family and children. Home Educated children are the OPPOSITE of neglected children, and as for the education aspect, we note that this reports call for licensing does not hinge on the academic results Home Educators achieve, because Home Educated children perform so well.

That they have called a representative from a county council’s Children Missing Education team says alot about the ignorance of the people organising this. Children who are Home Educated are NOT missing education, in fact it is the opposite that is true. Imagine the logic of sending a ‘child poverty inspector’ to a country pile, simply because a family with children live there. This is the level of ‘thinking’ you are dealing with.

Home Educated children outperform state schooled children in every metric both academically and socially, but it is important to remember, Home Educators should not be forced to prove this, or demonstrate this to anyone.

Home Educating families and their children are not the property of the state. This is the fundamental objection decent people have to all of this constant harassment, discrimination and buffoonery. Talk of ‘The Five Outcomes’ is nonsense. The state has no business setting the goals for families and children, and even if we were to concede that they do have this duty, Home Educated children outperform state educated children in these aspects, and the services provided by the state are failing on a massive scale.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, they cannot win the argument. It is an argument that should not have been started in the first place.

I would not discourage a Home Educator from submitting evidence to this committee; knock yourself out. There might even be a few people on this committee who are decent, genuinely sympathetic, horrified by this government and its outrages and who understand both Home Education and their role as public servants. That doesn’t change the vicious nature of this attack on Home Educators, an neither should it weaken your response to it.

What I will say, is that if you put your faith in these people to defend your natural rights, if you put your faith in the democratic process, you are a COMPLETE FOOL, especially after having been kicked in the teeth again and again and again.

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, SHAME ON YOU.

So, I hear you cry, WHAT SHOULD WE DO THEN?!

Refuse, point blank, to obey in any way, anything that comes out of this report.

For certain, nothing you do will stop these monsters from creating new legislation. They are deaf to reason, inherently immoral and violent. And if any of you do not believe that these people are violent, think hard about what they are advocating.

If you are an Autonomous Learner and you do not want to break your child’s education, these people are advocating that violence be used against you so that your child attends school. That is the bottom line in all of this; these people are violent and they are willing to use violence to make you conform to their sick philosophies.

Finally, and perhaps most upsetting and galling to you will be the fact that anyone who is wealthy will be virtually exempt from these regulations. We already know that the rich (and these very MPs deciding on your fate) are to be excluded from ContactPoint, the database (which is going to be scrapped) they planned to use to track down all Home Educators.

The rich can travel wherever they like, whenever they like, and can live wherever they like. Because one of you (if you are living with a husband, wife or partner) gave up working to Home Educate, you are now poorer than you would have been had you sent your child to school and went out to work. By showing the proper devotion to your family, you have found yourself not only viciously demonised but also financially penalised.

What should you do? You should firstly be INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE, and secondly ABSOLUTELY steadfast in your determination that no one will abuse you or your children by way of any new regulation on Home Education.

No matter what they say, no matter what procedural shenanigans they pull out of their hats, this is a step TOO FAR, beyond which THERE ARE NO MORE RULES and NO GUARANTEES OF ANY KIND.

FURTHERMORE

This toothless committee has been rebuffed by Ed Balls over an appointment:

Sheerman, said night: “The committee believes this should be a campaigning role … and it didn’t seem to the committee that Maggie saw it in the same way.” He added that if Balls rejected the committee’s decision, it could be fatal to the process. “Every select committee in the house will say what’s the point if the first one not accepted is over-ridden?” he said.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/18/ed-balls-maggie-atkinson-childrens-commissioner

That is exactly my point. These Select Committees are window dressing, a charade, a pointless waste of time and an exersise to make everyone feel that they are participating in government, when in fact, they are doing no such thing and the decisions are all finalised in advance.

Now get this:

Ed Balls branded ‘a bit of a bully’
Barry Sheeman, chairman of the Commons children’s committee, criticises Balls after schools secretary ignores panel’s advice on appointment of next children’s commissioner.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/19/eb-balls-bully-claim

What a joke. This is a man who sits on a committee that deliberated on the merits of violating people’s homes and changing relationship between the state and the individual, and he has the GALL to call Ed Balls a ‘bully’ for ignoring HIS wishes?

Now that my friends, really does beggar belief.