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.

The demise of the dollar
In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

This action is NOT the ‘New World Order’. These states are acting to protect their wealth from being wiped out by the dollar bubble. All of their currencies used to be backed by gold, indirectly via the Federal Reserve dollar. Nixon removed the gold to dollar link, and the Federal Reserve kept printing dollars, while all currencies were backed by those dollars. It is a fraudulent pyramid scheme and nothing less.

Now that the people in charge of these countries have finally woken up to what all of this really means, i.e., that their money is worthless because it is backed by dollars which are backed by nothing, they are scrambling around to set up a new fiat system where THEY control the printing presses, and not the Federal Reserve.

They have to design a new fiat money system before the bubble bursts; it has to be one that everyone will trust, and it needs to be transitioned to in such a way that their currencies that are in circulation do not have to be replaced.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

This system will fail, just as all fiat currency systems have failed. The only real money is gold, and the sooner they wake up to this fact, the sooner they will have stable currencies and long term prosperity.

We see that they are going half way at least:

and Robert Fisk is wrong about the timescale it seems.

All ‘third world’ oil producing countries should stop accepting ANY fiat currency in exchange for oil. They should only accept gold or silver.

Once they start receiving gold and silver for oil, they should mint this metal into coins the size of a US Dime (in the case of gold for example), and these coins should replace all fiat paper money incrementally.

When this happens, the country that adopts gold coins for all transactions will have a monetary system that cannot be inflated, since the government cannot produce gold out of thin air.

But you know this!

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China’s former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. “Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable,” he told the Asia and Africa Review. “We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security.”

[…]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html

This now explains why american administrations have been trying to take over the countries that supply oil. They knew that the dollar was going to die, and that they would not be able to pay for oil in the future, since all the gold in Fort Knox is gone. Once they owned all the countries that produce oil, they would have been able to steal the oil without paying for it (i.e. pay in Federal Reserve Notes until the end of time).

They have FAILED.

The elephant in the middle of the room in this Robert Fisk article is the lack of the word ‘Sterling’.

I wonder if there has been a prohibition of discussing the state and true nature of the pound in any national newspaper… it would make sense; any article that could potentially trigger a sterling sell off would want to be avoided by Neu Liebour.

Note that Britain is not in the list of countries that attended these secret meetings.

Note also that Nigeria was not invited. Mr Obama refused to visit Nigeria on his first official visit to the African continent. That was a mistake, if he wanted to keep Nigeria accepting worthless dollars in exchange for oil.

Now you see that she was spot on yet again:

Drinkers’ Licences: A radical new way to curb drinking excess?

By John Cowan

Down in Brighton for Labour Party Conference one thing that was noticeable was the large amounts of alcohol consumed over the weekend – and not just by the conference delegates.

Most people are responsible users and are able to have a few drinks and enjoy themselves without causing damage to either others or the local environment.

However, not all drinkers and users of other substances are able to handle their use of booze in such a responsible manner. At weekends, most A&E departments house those suffering from alcohol poisoning, assaults and drink related accidents. It takes much needed resources from the NHS which could be used for other purposes.

Prohibition of alcohol, like any other drug, does not work. It was tried in the 1920s in the US and resulted in making the likes of Al Capone rich men.

One possible solution could be an entitlement card that people would carry and swipe when every time they buy Alcohol or Tobacco and record their usage. Is that too radical? I don’t think so. For a long time the Government have controlled motorists with a system of licences where people enjoy the right and freedom to drive – as long as they conform to certain rules.

With the card, people who got into trouble for, say, minor crimes or drunk and disorderly conduct in public would receive a fixed penalty notice and 3 points on their entitlement card with points disappearing over time for in the same way works on driving licences.

More serious offences would result in endorsements on the entitlement card and the cardholder would not be able to purchase alcohol, tobacco or other drugs available for sale through the entitlement card scheme.

The main benefits of the policy would be reduction in the health care and crime costs associated with use of substances hopefully leading for more better functioning society.

[…]

http://www.labourlist.org/drinkers-licences-a-radical-new-way-to-curb-excess-cowan

Thanks to Old Holborn for enduring the stench of that website to bring us these priceless examples of complete, edge to edge insanity.

Of course, Frances Stonor Saunders, author of the anonymous email warning Britain about ID Cards gave this example of extreme abuse should the ID Card come into being:

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal, (very much like the Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be ‘swiped’ to check your identity. Each time this happens, a record is made at the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented. This means for example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw more than £99 at your branch of NatWest, who now demand ID for these transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR. Restaurants and off licenses will demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.

[…]

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207

It would be a very simple matter to add another field to your NIR record that records the number of ‘points’ for this imaginary and diabolical scheme.

The comments say it all:

This is hilarious, I haven’t laughed so much in years. You are truly, madly, deeply stark-staring bonkers. Are you all taking hallucinogenic drugs to come up with this utter ordure?

John,
Can’t really add to the comments against this already made, but clearly this is a case of devising policy whilst off your trolley on booze, with your mates down the pub.

You just don’t learn do you? It is precisely this type of sticking your noses in to people’s lives that make you so detested.

Unfortunately, this article has earned you a 3 point endorsement on your idiocy licence.

We have had to introduce this system to counter the damage done by the myopic, arrogant and just plain mental ideas that are foisted upon the public daily.

This article has made us all collectively dumber.

ROTFLBBQBYOB

Strike the BYOB if you are John Cowan!!

A great and insightful blogger Renegade Parent has just received her order of books from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The books she has on display will educate anyone on what is really happening with the dollar crisis, what money really is, the true nature of liberty and what needs to be done to restore and preserve it.

Happy reading!

Now on to Max Keiser. For ages I have been saying that demonstrating is pointless. All those G20 protesting morons should listen to Max, because he has just delivered the sort of 21st century tool they need to completely outflank and destroy their enemy, whilst liberating themselves in a single move. In chess it looks like this:

[Event "Human versus Crafty"]
[Date "2009.10.02"]
[Round "?"]
[White "White"]
[Black "Crafty"]
[Result "1-0"]
[BlackAI "Crafty"]
1. e4 c5
2. Nc3 d6
3. Nd5 Be6
4. Nf4 Qd7
5. Nxe6 Qxe6
6. Qe2 Nc6
7. Qe3 O-O-O
8. b3 Nd4
9. Bd3 Nf6
10. c3 Ng4
11. Qg5 h6
12. Qh5 g6
13. Qh3 Nc6
14. f3 Nge5
15. Qg3 Nxd3+
16. Kf1 Bg7
17. Ba3 Nce5
18. Ne2 f5
19. Nd4 cxd4
20. cxd4 f4
21. Qh4 g5
22. Qh5 Nc6
23. d5 Qe5
24. Rb1 Nd4
25. Bb2 Rd7
26. Qg6 Rc7
27. Qf7 h5
28. Bc3 g4
29. a3 gxf3
30. gxf3 Kb8
31. a4 Ka8
32. a5 h4
33. Rg1 Bf6
34. Rg6 Rhc8
35. Rg8 Rxg8
36. Qxg8+ Rc8
37. Qxc8# 1-0

Here is his brilliant piece of thinking:

“If everyone did buy gold, if every activist in the world who was protesting against a centralised world government or a centralised banking system in the US or the UK; if every single one of those people bought just one ounce of gold bullion, the price of gold would double and it would put these banksters out of business!”

That means for $1000 each, all the G20 protesters, instead of being kidnapped by military police, getting sprayed with pepper gas, deafened by LRAD sound weapons and held like an animal for a trophy shoot by police, they could bring down the countries of the G20 by simply using money as the the tool.

Of course, these demonstrating idiots are of the type that think ‘Capitalism is evil’ and other brainwash induced nonsense like ‘free $insert_lie’ and ‘everyone should have the right to/of $insert_non_natural_right_that_is_actually_a_good’ etc etc.

The fact of the matter is that the G20 and all the people in ‘authority’ are scared shitless. What Max suggests is the kind of thing that we have been talking about:

[…]

That would be a revolution, an amorphous, nebulous, static swarm of disobedience, which could not be countered, any more than a truncheon wielder can batter a cloud to sweep it away. Without the compliance of everyone, the state would simply cease to exist; the monsters who control it would scream and shout hysterically at first, but would very quickly want to associate with the static mass as they desperately try to reposition themselves for a role in the new disorder. Those creatures are very good at sensing the right time to jump ship – when its about to do down – they are after all ‘political animals’ (rats).

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1694

The tools to do this are available, and all the soldiers who will participate are constantly connected to them. All the people could be mobilised and activated without any of them even leaving their bedrooms or interrupting their routines. The call would go out on Twitter to ‘buy one ounce of gold on any day in November’… for great justice. Once the effect starts to take hold, everyone everywhere would start to chip in. In a very short amount of time it would reach critical mass.

Not a shot would have been fired. When South Africa was under Apartheid, there was a call to boycott Kruggerands. Now its the opposite call that will bring down the bad guys.

What a life!

From a lurker…

The old:

Interesting Medications from the past

Bayer’s Heroin

A bottle of Bayer’s heroin. Between 1890 and 1910 heroin was sold as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. It was also used to treat children with strong cough.

Coca Wine

Metcalf Coca Wine was one of a huge variety of wines with cocaine on the market. Everybody used to say that it would make you happy and it would also work as a medicinal treatment.

Mariani wine

Mariani wine (1875) was the most famous Coca wine of its time. Pope Leo XIII used to carry one bottle with him all the time. He awarded Angelo Mariani (the producer) with a Vatican gold medal.

Maltine

Produced by Maltine Manufacturing Company of New York . It was suggested that you should take a full glass with or after every meal. Children should take half a glass.

A paper weight

A paper weight promoting C.F. Boehringer & Soehne ( Mannheim , Germany ). They were proud of being the biggest producers in the world of products containing Quinine and Cocaine.

Opium for Asthma

Cocaine tablets (1900)

All stage actors, singers teachers and preachers had to have them for a maximum performance. Great to “smooth” the voice.

Cocaine drops for toothache

Very popular for children in 1885. Not only they relieved the pain, they made the children happy!

Opium for new-borns

I’m sure this would make them sleep well (not only the Opium, but 46% alcohol!!!!!)

and now for the new medicine:

Ill take the Yeyo, the A-Bomb and the booze thanks.

Moving pages.

Physical pages.

Ali P pumps her foot on the grindstone with her cutlass oiled and becoming more sharp by the second:

Tories consider splitting DCSF
“Sector leaders” have expressed alarm at the potential break-up of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) under a Tory government after it emerged the shadow children’s secretary was in favour of an independent education department.

Michael Gove said “schools have lost their principal purpose and been saddled with a host of supplementary roles since the creation of the DCSF”. He added: “What we do not have – and what we desperately need – is a department at the heart of government championing the cause of education.”

Schools, he claimed, have become “less places of learning and more community hubs from which a host of services can be delivered”.

Naturally the vultures don’t like it as they’ve got fat on failed Labour policies. But the money is running out, thanks to that nasty big economic crisis, and cuts glorious cuts are coming.

But Kim Bromley-Derry, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, warned that central government must reflect councils’ integrated approach to children’s services. He said joined-up policy-making is vital to improving outcomes for children. “Services will always have the greatest impact when they are delivered coherently, consistently and through the pursuit of shared priorities identified at the highest level,” he said.

Some of us don’t share these “priorities”, of course.

Andrew Cozens, strategic adviser for children, adults and health services at the Improvement and Development Agency, said dismantling the DCSF would be a “backward step”. “There is interplay between so many aspects of children’s lives,” he said. “It’s very difficult to separate their needs at school from their wider family life.”

Children’s most basic needs at school (if parents send them there) are secondary to keeping the big monster machine running for its own benefit. Bullying us endemic and so is denial. And we all managed incredibly well without an Improvement and Development Agency in the past. Who needs it?

And wait up, here’s our very own Select Committee chairman, Labour MP Barry Sheerman, with a predictable view on the matter

“The principle behind the DCSF is a good one. I would just like to see a government that doesn’t change departments or ministers so often.”

Deferred gratification is overrated. I’d like to see Gordon’s anti family army thrown out now and not have to wait until May.

http://www.home-education.biz/forum/media/8822-tories-consider-splitting-dcsf.html

“I would just like to see a government that doesn’t change departments or ministers so often.” You mean like a one party state, with a ‘president’ for life?

What a telling statement.

It is not the proper role of government to provide schools for people. Period. When ‘Kim Bromley-Derry’ talks about an ‘integrated approach’ to ‘children’s services’ what he is talking about is the replacement of the parent by the state and nothing less.

All of the quangos, departments and apparatus swarming around the provision of ‘services’ to children should be abolished. Lets just look at two:

The ‘Improvement and Development Agency’ does this:

The IDeA supports improvement and innovation in local government, focusing on the issues that are important to councils and using tried and tested ways of working.

We work with councils in developing good practice, supporting them in their partnerships. We do this through networks, online communities of practice and web resources, and through the support and challenge provided by councillor and officer peers.

We also help develop councillors in key positions through our leadership programmes. Regional Associates work closely with councils in their areas and support the regional improvement and efficiency partnerships (RIEPs).

Unbelievable. I wonder what the budget of this department is? Whatever it is, the money for it was stolen.

Now for ‘The Department for Children, Schools and Families’.

There is no need for a government department that deals specifically with children. Children are the responsibility of parents, not the state. Even if it were the responsibility of the state in some dystopian parallel universe, it would be far more efficient to distribute the responsibility (it’s called DELEGATION) to all the people who are the ‘biological initiators of the nation’s youth’. But that is another story.

There is no need for a government department responsible for families. The family is an entirely private arrangement between individuals who are either married or not, who decide to have children or not and none of it, how they are married, under what terms or how they breed, is the business of the state. Mormons choose polygamy. Others monogamy. Some people share their children, others do not. There are as many ways to organise a family as there are people, but they all have one aspect in common; they are PRIVATE associations that have nothing to do with the state.

There is no need for a government department that is responsible for schools. Parents who pool resources to provide an education for their children in a single place (a school) are not the concern of the state. And that is how schools should be provided for. The state should not be in the business of setting curricula, or any standard of any kind when it comes to education. Education is not a right, it is a good, and it is not the business of government.

Those are only two of the many absurdly named and money sapping state feeders that bleed the public dry whilst violating their rights and literally destroying the country by unleashing an army of uneducated monsters on the land, brainwashing the unfortunate children trapped in state schools with their state mandated pseudo religious programming…. and actually poisoning and killing them with noxious, needless ‘medicines’.

But you know this.

Once the Tories split the DCSF, it will be easier to close its broken down parts… if that is even an issue in the future.

Ali P is correct about the economic crisis. A perfect storm is brewing; you can feel the low pressure and the winds picking up. Several elements are going to combine to wipe out this totalitarian state. People are beyond the end of their tolerance and any single outrage could trigger a significant event; the expenses ‘scandal’ is a good example, and if it were not for the widely anticipated and expected total death of Labour, the streets would already have been taken. The Tories are for sure coming in at the next election and will completely wipe out Labour. The biggest driver of this cataclysmic storm however, will be the destruction of the dollar and the death of the pound (which is backed by the dollar).

As this slow motion train wreck starts to happen, all of these arguments and positions will cease to be the important things. Everyone will be scrambling around to preserve their savings and to keep food on the table.

This is the best possible thing that could happen. There will be a wiping out of the system; a cleaning of the slate. It will take them decades to return to this level of police statism, if at all.

The question will then be who controls the money, and this is absolutely crucial to our liberty. If the replacement for the pound is anything other than a 100% gold sterling standard, where the population holds the physical coins, then future governments will be able to print the new money and finance a new legion of departments, quangos and vendor driven police state apparatus to enslave everyone.

By all means, read about it yourself.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It is also a once in a generation event, like the Bolshevik revolution, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or the… $insert_world_changing_event.

Whether it is by choice or by force, the Tories are going to be at the helm dismantling the apparatus very shortly.

In light of the death of a teenage girl in the UK following HPV vaccination* and the outrageously rapid PR campaign to take blame away from the vaccine [“The postmortem examination was carried out with unprecedented speed. That and the unusual step taken by Grainger in making a public announcement of the early results, not much more than a day after Natalie’s death, are a clear indication of the anxiety among public health officials over the potential threat to the national teenage vaccination programme.“], and the ongoing push towards H1N1 mass vaccinations, the following article is now essential reading. Before posting selected excerpts, please note that with regard to HPV vaccines –

1. There is no evidence that HPV vaccination protects against cervical cancer.
2. There is no evidence that the protection against HPV infection from vaccination lasts more than 6 years
3. There is concern that mass vaccination costing billions per annum will have no effect on cervical cancer rates or mortality
4. There is concern that women will reduce their Papanicolaou (smear) testing frequency once vaccinated, possibly increasing cancer rates
5. Vaccinating against HPV16 and HPV18 may leave a pathological niche which will be rapidly filled by other HPV strains to unknown effect.

These are not my opinions, they are those of the highest qualified physicians writing in the editorials of the best jourmals about HPV vaccine.

In this context, read the full article “Marketing HPV Vaccine: Implications for adolescent health and Medical Professionalism” at JAMA, one of the very highest rated medical journals in the world.  Here are some highlights:

This HPV vaccine was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2006,² and worldwide sales in 2008 were $1.4 billion.³ In the United States, 25% of girls aged 13 to17 years have received at least 1 of 3 recommended doses.⁴ […] This HPV vaccine […] was identified by a trade name, Gardasil, and promoted primarily to “guard” not against HPV viruses or sexually transmitted diseases but against cervical cancer.⁵ The marketing campaign that followed, according to Merck’s chief executive officer, proceeded “flawlessly.”⁶ In 2006, Gardasil was named the pharmaceutical “brand of the year” for building “a market out of thin air.”⁶

Merck developed and tested an HPV-16 vaccine […]. Because of “ethical and scientific” concerns,⁵ investigators did not make cervical cancer their end point, substituting, as a “reasonable surrogate,”⁵ persistent HPV infection. Still, they concluded that “[i]mmunizing HPV-16-negative women may reduce their risk of cervical cancer.”⁵

Accompanying editorials were more circumspect. The vaccine appeared most effective against the least dangerous cellular changes and not protective or therapeutic for women with prior infections. Although HPV-16 and HPV-18 were most frequently associated with cellular changes, “the contribution of non-vaccine HPV types . . . was sizeable.”¹⁶ Another editorial suggested that “[t]he new treatment raises many scientific, medical, economic, and sociological questions.”¹⁷

“We still lack sufficient evidence of an effective vaccine against cervical cancer.”²¹ No data were available to establish the duration of efficacy, possible adverse effects on natural immunity, whether vaccinated women will forgo Papanicolaou tests, and whether after suppressing HPV-16 and HPV-18, “other strains may emerge as significant oncogenic serotypes.”²¹ Accordingly, the editorial concluded, “With so many essential questions still unanswered, there is good reason to be cautious about introducing large-scale vaccination programs.”²¹

The manufacturer’s marketing strategy […]: avoid limiting the vaccine to high-risk populations, promote it for all women, and secure government reimbursement and mandates. To these ends, Merck funded established PMAs including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and smaller groups, including the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology (ASCCP), the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists (SGO), and the American College Health Association (ACHA).

The [Merck-provided] Speaker Lecture Kit encourages speakers and their audiences to help in “convincing states and federal agencies to pay for the vaccine, convincing insurance to pay for it [and] encouraging state mandates for use” (slide 131).¹⁰ “All of us who are involved with cervical disease are going to need [to] work at the state and local levels to assure that the HPV vaccines are funded” (notes, slide 128).¹⁰

Society of Gynecologic Oncologists. […] Determined to increase industry funding, the SGO in 2006 established what was in effect an HPV vaccine speakers’ bureau.³⁹ Funded by Merck, along with GlaxoSmithKline, Cytyc, and Myriad, […]. Panel members, some with financial ties to Merck, composed the curriculum and, initially, delivered the talks (34 speakers in 16 states).^41–42

The SGO teaching materials omitted cautionary qualifications. The frequently asked questions section, for example, opened with “Why is this vaccine important?” The answer repeated the manufacturer’s explanation: “This is the first vaccine directed against a cancer.”⁴³ […] It did not include data on disparities in cervical cancer incidence and outcomes. This section also failed to include questions such as “Do I still need Papanicolaou tests?” “How long will efficacy last?” “How long has the vaccine been used?” and “Might risks outweigh benefits?”

American College Health Association. […] With funding from this vaccine manufacturer, the ACHA created an HPV Vaccine Toolkit for clinicians, including talking points, sample e-mail messages to students and parents, sample press releases, and public service announcements.⁴⁶ If a female student responded “no” when asked if she was sexually active, clinicians were supposed to explain that the HPV vaccine is most effective for her.⁴⁶ If she was sexually active, clinicians were instructed to say that she probably had not been infected with all 4 viruses.⁴⁶

A sample letter/e-mail to students announced a new vaccine “that protects against HPV—and it could help save your life.”⁴⁶ It listed college students’ everyday worries—dates, examinations, roommates—and declared, “Well now there’s something you don’t have to worry about anymore. And this worry is a big one. Why worry about cervical cancer?”⁴⁶ Sample public service announcements reiterated the message: “Hey ladies. You worry about tests. . . . You worry about your next date. Well now there’s something you don’t have to worry about any more—and it could help save your life.”⁴⁶ Sample letters to parents included the following: “Will she get good grades? Will she call home often? The last thing you want her to worry about is cervical cancer. . . . Encourage your daughter to ‘Be Smarter and Get Vaccinated’ at the Student Health Service—it could help save her life.”⁴⁶ In none of these cases was Merck funding mentioned.

As marketing of this HPV vaccine demonstrates, pharmaceutical company campaigns can undercut the most cost-effective and appropriate use of new agents to the detriment of adolescent health. By making this vaccine’s target disease cervical cancer, the sexual transmission of HPV was minimized, the threat of cervical cancer to all adolescents maximized, and the subpopulations most at risk practically ignored.

My emphasis at end. This is a beautiful piece of well-considered, fully-referenced writing that has undergone the peer-review process and whose authors fully declare their competing interests (none) and funding sources (charity). Next time you read about HPV, chickenpox, MMR, HBV, swine flu or any other new and ‘essential’ vaccine, this article provides the context in which it should be evaluated.

*Addendum: It is worth noting that dying from a ‘serious underlying medical condition’ post-vaccination is now considered an excuse for having no concern about HPV vaccine. In the case of swine flu, the vast majority of the (relatively few) deaths were in indiviuals with ‘serious underlying medical conditions’, yet each death was treated as yet another warning as to how deadly and vicious this virus was/is to the general population. Horses for vaccination courses, n’est pas?

The Liberal Democrats have proposed what is now being called ‘The Mansion Tax’, where each household that is valued at one million pounds or over will be taxed at .5% annually.

As is true with all taxes, there will be unintended consequences to this idea. Lets go through some of them.

This tax, should it ever be passed, will create a virtual city of limbo houses that no one wants to buy, no one wants to repair and which will fall into dilapidation.

Anyone who is going to buy a house and has a budget of one million will opt for a house that is less than that amount. Any owner of a house with a value of one million will find that property harder to sell. Even though one million pounds is ‘alot of money’, most people do not lay out cash, but instead, get a mortgage. The .5% tax will be enough of a disincentive to getting one of these houses; why go for a house that costs 1M when you can get one for .950k and avoid an annual bill of £5,000?

Anyone owning a house that is worth almost 1M will have no incentive to do any sort of repair or improvement on it. Anything they do that might increase the value of the property will immediately put it in the new category, which will mean that not only will they instantly be liable for this new tax, but the prospects of selling the house in the future will be significantly decreased.

Anyone owning a house that is currently worth 1M will have an incentive to devalue the property. They will demolish a garage, remove a glass extension, pull out insulation – do anything they can that will reduce the value of the house whilst not making it uninhabitable.

The building trade will be affected by this tax. All work to improve houses that have the potential to approach 1M in value should repairs or improvements be done on them will be cancelled permanently. This lost work will probably offset the money that the LibDems want to raise with this tax.

No architect will design a house believing that its price will fall on or near 1M. Houses that are much bigger than 1M will continue to built, houses that cannot by improvement ever reach 1M will continue to be built, but that ‘sour spot’ (as opposed to sweet spot) will not be built in. This tax will exert an aesthetic pressure that will distort the building and architecture trades. There will be more sub 1M houses, more ‘big’ houses, and a gap where all the 1M houses used to be.

These are just a few of the unintended consequences of this idea. It is a bad idea. It has been put forward by people who have clearly never read or heard about the parable of the broken window. The money that they raise from this will simply be diverted and not ‘raised’, while causing widespread destruction as people deliberately destroy their property in order to get in under the wire.

There are many properties in London that bear the scars of this sort of ‘thinking’. In the 1680s a ‘window tax’ was imposed on all properties. To get away from it, property owners bricked up windows on their homes to lessen the tax burden. They had to have light and air, and so they could not brick them all up; look at all of these properties, and imagine the amount of light that would have entered at each place a window is lost.

The Liberal Democrats have a limitless capacity to drink from the well of stupidity. They consistently propose policies that are out of line with reality, economic laws and the public mood (no matter what the polls say), and in the case of this millionaire tax, they demonstrate once again that they do not know anything about economics.